Upward Mobility is Now a Myth in America

For many Americans it has been taken as gospel that upward mobility is the norm in America and that each generation can expect to achieve a higher status than that of their parents.  Perhaps that was true once upon at time, but it is no longer the case except in increasingly rare instances.  Indeed, a number of studies have found that Europe - derided as "Old Europe" by many "conservatives" - offers younger generations more chances at upward mobility than can now be anticipated in America. Now, downward mobility is what terrifies even middle class and upper middle class families. What happened?  A number of things, not the least of which has been decades of Republican warfare against labor unions, state right to work laws, and policies that enable big corporations to reap huge profits while workers are treated as disposable and easily replaceable trash.  Wages have stagnated even as the cost of living has soared.  Hardest impacted are Milennials who even with college degrees often cannot secure high paying jobs.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the growing myth of upward social mobility in today's America.  Here are some highlights:

It’s an axiom among many Americans that each future generation will live better than its predecessor. New technologies, greater efficiencies and a can-do spirit will reward us with higher living standards. There might be periodic stumbles, but the long-term trajectory is up. And the people most guaranteed to enjoy this bountiful future are the children of today’s upper-middle class.

That’s the conventional wisdom. Ditch it.

If you are an upper-middle-class parent, as I am, you must have noticed that the real world isn’t playing according to script. Among many young Americans, there is downward mobility. The children aren’t achieving what they (and their parents) expected. Even when they have (and many have), the gains could be eroded in the future. The trajectory is not inevitably up. Parents worry about their children’s fate.

Partly, this reflects the memory of the 2007-2009 Great Recession and its huge job losses. But it’s more than that. Compared with their elders, many younger Americans are doing worse. Despite today’s strong economy, they’re falling behind.

 

We know this from an important study by Raj Chetty and fellow economists from Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley.  . . . .

 

What they reported is fascinating. About 90 percent of children born in 1940 ultimately exceeded their parents’ incomes. That is, almost everybody. . . . . However, for children born in 1970, only 61 percent earned more than their parents, and for those born in 1980, only 50 percent did.

 

That’s a sea change. It suggests that we’re already at the point where many in the present and next generations of younger Americans won’t live as well as their predecessors. If current trends continue, that certainly will be true.

You can see the consequences among millennials, those born from 1981 to 1996. Their squeezed incomes have forced them to rearrange their lives. They’re marrying later, buying homes later, having children later and — to save money — living longer with their parents. What’s also surprising is that the biggest losers seem to be the children of the middle and upper-middle classes, precisely those who are supposedly most protected against adverse changes, . . . .

“This seems to have become steadily harder to achieve for those born into middle-class families in particular from 1950 onward.”

Their explanation is simple. Those in middle and upper-middle classes have more to lose than, say, the poor. The incomes of the poor can’t drop much lower; indeed, with small gains, they can pass their parents’.

The result: The higher the parents’ incomes, the less likely that their children will match them. This is even true for the richest 1 percent of families, says economist Aparna Mathur of the American Enterprise Institute.

Just what has caused the slowdown in incomes is a tangled tale with the usual suspects: poor schools that produce poor workers; income inequality that stifles consumption spending; weak housing construction; inadequate innovation;  . . . .

[T]he broad trends seem reliable. The paradox is apparent. Today’s strong economy notwithstanding, there’s an underlying worry about the future.

Economic anxiety is increasingly an equal-opportunity affliction. No one can escape it. The poor worry about staying poor. The lower-middle class worries about paying bills or losing jobs. Now upper-middle class parents have joined the crowd, because their own well-being is often judged by how well their children are doing. That is the stubborn source of their angst.

America is Heading Full Speed Back to the 19th Century

I've made the argument a number of times that the Republican Party is trying to reestablish the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th century when robber barons enjoyed incredible wealth and power while the rest of us, including laborers and workers, got what few scraps were left over.  In a column in Salon, former secretary of labor Robert Reich echo's my concerns.  What's amazing is how the cretins the GOP courts through religion, racism, and anti-modernity are too stupid to understand that they are supporting politicians working directly against their best interests and the futures of their families.  Here are column highlights:

My recent column about the growth of on-demand jobs like Uber making life less predictable and secure for workers unleashed a small barrage of criticism that workers get what they’re worth in the market.

A Forbes Magazine contributor, for example, writes that jobs exist only  “when both employer and employee are happy with the deal being made.” So if the new jobs are low-paying and irregular, too bad.

Much the same argument was voiced in the late nineteenth century over alleged “freedom of contract.” Any deal between employers and workers was assumed to be fine if both sides voluntarily agreed to it.

It was an era when many workers were “happy” to toil twelve-hour days in sweat shops for lack of any better alternative.

It was also a time of great wealth for a few and squalor for many. And of corruption, as the lackeys of robber barons deposited sacks of cash on the desks of pliant legislators.

Finally, after decades of labor strife and political tumult, the twentieth century brought an understanding that capitalism requires minimum standards of decency and fairness – workplace safety, a minimum wage, maximum hours (and time-and-a-half for overtime), and a ban on child labor.

We achieved that through antitrust laws that reduced the capacity of giant corporations to impose their will, and labor laws that allowed workers to organize and bargain collectively. . . . . But now we seem to be heading back to nineteenth century.

Corporations are shifting full-time work onto temps, free-lancers, and contract workers who fall outside the labor protections established decades ago.  The nation’s biggest corporations and Wall Street banks are larger and more potent than ever.

And labor union membership has shrunk to less than 6 percent of the private-sector workforce.

So it’s not surprising we’re once again hearing that workers are worth no more than what they can get in the market.

[A]s we should have learned a century ago, markets don’t exist in nature. They’re created by human beings. The real question is how they’re organized and for whose benefit.  In the late nineteenth century they were organized for the benefit of a few at the top.   But by the middle of the twentieth century they were organized for the vast majority.

Yet since around 1980, even though the economy has doubled once again (the Great Recession notwithstanding), the wages most Americans have stagnated. And their benefits and working conditions have deteriorated.

This isn’t because most Americans are worth less. In fact, worker productivity is higher than ever.  It’s because big corporations, Wall Street, and some enormously rich individuals have gained political power to organize the market in ways that have enhanced their wealth while leaving most Americans behind.

Antitrust leniency toward a vast swathe of American industry – including Big Cable (Comcast, AT&T, Time-Warner), Big Tech (Amazon, Google), Big Pharma, the largest Wall Street banks, and giant retailers (Walmart).

But less tolerance toward labor unions — as workers trying to form unions are fired with impunity, and more states adopt so-called “right-to-work” laws that undermine unions.

We seem to be heading full speed back to the late nineteenth century.

Martin Luther King’s Still Unfulfilled Dream Is Still

It has been nearly almost 46 years since Martin Luther King was murdered.   Yet significant aspects of his dream remain unfulfilled.  Some of the unfulfilled aspects tie directly to the decades long program of sabotage implemented by the Republican Party both at the state and federal level.  And if anything, the GOP sabotage effort has accelerated in recent years. Meanwhile, the GOP gives lip service to supposedly wanting more minority participation in the GOP's fictional "big tent."  For one who is a member of a minority demographic to be a supporter of today's GOP is akin to a Jew supporting Hitler's Nazi Party in the 1930's.  Think Progress highlights four initiative that King supported which are subject to consistent GOP sabotage.  Here are excerpts:

While the civil rights leader changed the conversation around race and justice in the U.S., many of his goals never came to fruition.   Here’s a look at four of the things King demanded but never saw completed:

1. A living wage. One of the demands protesters listed for the March on Washington was a minimum wage. “Anything less than $2.00 an hour,” King and his compatriots argued, fails to “give all Americans a decent standard of living.” In 2014 dollars, a $2 an hour wage would work out to about $15.27. But minimum wage is actually much, much lower — less than half of that — today. Forty-two percent of those earning minimum wage are people of color.

2. Desegregation. King hoped to see the end not just of legal segregation in the South, but also of the de facto segregation that existed in Northern businesses, housing, and schools. He even toured Chicago advocating for the end of this kind of segregation, saying civil rights leaders needed to “eradicate a vicious system which seeks to further colonize thousands of Negroes within a slum environment.’’ But today, public schools are more segregated than they were 40 years ago. The unemployment rate for black Americans has remained above 10 percent for most of the last half a century, and black workers earn on average $22,000 less a year than their white counterparts. Black homebuyers are shown significantly fewer homes than their white counterparts when shopping for a house. Ethnic identity is still the key factor in where people reside.

3. Fair voting. King campaigned extensively for legislation like the Voting Rights Act. And he lived to see it passed. But legislators, largely Republicans, have been working to roll back the rights protected under the VRA since its inception. Those efforts have become even more acute recently. More than half the states introduced restrictive voting legislation in 2013 alone, according to a review by the Brennan Center, at a total of 92 separate bills in 33 states. The Supreme Court also struck down a major portion of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, allowing states previously subject to the VRA to put voting laws on the books without federal oversight. Now a group of members of congress — including Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who incidentally established the first official Martin Luther King Day — is working to undo the damage of that decision.

4. Unfettered unionization. King spoke out specifically about anti-union “Right to Work” laws. “[W]e must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work,’” he said in 1961. “Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us.” Over 50 years later, right to work laws are still on the books. In fact, Michigan passed its own right to work law in 2012. But King’s assessment was right: No matter their unionized status, workers in “right to work” states today earn $1,500 less a year than their counterparts, and are less likely to receive other benefits like health care and pensions.

When I accuse today's GOP of being a de facto white supremacist party, I catch a lot of flack.   But, actions speak louder that words and a review of GOP actions and positions make it painfully clear that today's GOP is working incessantly to undermine Martin Luther Kings dream.