U.S.A., Land of Limitations?

I have said this to so-called progressives until I am out of breath. Class and economic inequality is the most pervasive and dangerous form of inequality facing us today in the rich world. We dwell on forms of inequality that are broadly ostracised and largely eliminated, while the elephant in the room is economic inequality that our business and political leaders endorse as enthusiastically as Confederate leaders embraced slavery.<p>Many people today believe that the poor deserve their lot in life, just as people would have said about African-Americans a century ago. Presidential candidates and senators say it openly and without rebuke. Both houses of Congress are controlled by people who talk euphemistically of the super-rich (who increasingly derive their wealth from inheritance not ingenuity) as &quot;job creators&quot;. Meanwhile anywhere from a quarter to a third of our population is languishing with no jobs or shitty jobs, poor health, broken families and is always one parking ticket away from financial ruin.<p>This is the greatest challenge of our generation. We have to fix this.

&gt; &quot;We like to boast of America as a land of opportunity, and historically there is truth to that&quot;<p>I keep hearing this, but where is the evidence? Was there any objective research done to figure out whether at any point there was <i>really</i> some sort of magnificent economic mobility in the U.S.? There&#x27;s lots of anecdotal evidence, sure -- stories of people who immigrated here with nothing and made it big, movies, novels, etc... but how do we know we&#x27;re not just hearing about the exceptions, and that in the vast majority of cases, which do not capture people&#x27;s imaginations, the poor stayed poor and the rich stayed rich?

Aside: I met Rick Goff when I was in high school. My dad lived in Yamhill and was friends with him. One day we drove out to his place, turning off the gravel road toward a barn. Stepping inside the barn was a surreal experience. There, out in the middle of nowhere, in a fucking barn, was a freshly painted 1950&#x27;s Rolls Royce. It was beautiful.<p>I don&#x27;t know if he&#x27;s a good example of the economic class divide, though. I understand Kristof&#x27;s larger point and that he&#x27;s writing from his own life experiences, but I think Goff&#x27;s situation is more demonstrative of the rural-urban economic divide than a class divide.<p>He had a skill that people were willing to pay him for, but he chose to restore cars out in the country, in his barn. I can&#x27;t speak for Goff&#x27;s life choices, but during my summers in Yamhill and having relatives that lived in rural areas, I met a lot of people who would rather eke out a meagre existence in the countryside than move to where the jobs are. Part of economic mobility is just plain mobility.

<p><pre><code> Rick acknowledged that he had made bad choices. He drank, took drugs and was arrested about 30 times. But he also found the strength to give up alcohol when he felt he was turning into his father. What distinguished Rick wasn’t primarily bad choices, but intelligence, hard work and lack of opportunity. </code></pre> If you were arrested 30 times, I&#x27;m going to guess that bad choices are, in fact, one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of your life. There are a lot of poor people with backgrounds ranging from unexceptional to tragic who haven&#x27;t been arrested once.<p>This doesn&#x27;t invalidate Kristof&#x27;s larger point, of course, but it does mean he&#x27;s not very good at picking reasonable, actionable examples. Short of taking away Rick&#x27;s free will, <i>Clockwork Orange</i>-style, there may not be much we could have done for him. I disagree that Rick&#x27;s life story invalidates the &quot;American Dream,&quot; or even calls it into question.

My wife was listening to Dale Carnegie&#x27;s &quot;How to Win Friends and Influence People,&quot; a book written in 1936 aimed at sales and business people. One thing that struck me was a chapter where he talks about empathizing with people. He gives the example of Al Capone. If we had been born with Al Cappne&#x27;s body and mind and his circumstances, we would have been him. Therefore, people deserve very little credit for what they&#x27;ve accomplished and conversely very little discredit for what they&#x27;ve not. He ends the section with the saying &quot;there but for the grace of God go I.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s interesting because the intended audience of the book was not social progressives. It seems like a concept that wouldn&#x27;t have been controversial at the time. It rings very differently in today&#x27;s culture, where we like to talk about choices more than circumstances.

It&#x27;s very hard to get even not particularly wealthy middle class people to see this. People have very aggressive in debates with me about how hard they worked and how they should be allowed to pass their advantages on to their kids. There&#x27;s also an oft repeated trope about how it&#x27;s about values and character, which isn&#x27;t entirely false, but besides the point.<p>It seems to be a basic human bias; we think everything positive that happens to us is due to our own merit, and everything bad is due to circumstance. In a country like the US, where I&#x27;m guessing people don&#x27;t really mingle, you end up getting some very bitter people who either think they are being pulled down by the rabble or they are being held down by the aristocrats.

On the other hand, it&#x27;s never been easier to:<p>1. get educated 2. start a business 3. access the global marketplace 4. invest

This was also true when i took Economics of Inequality at university in 1997. Western Euro countries and Canada were ahead of America back then. From an outsider&#x27;s perspective, if you&#x27;re gonna make it rich, do it in the USA to make it crazy rich, but you&#x27;re going to have a hard time making it from the bottom 10th to the top 10th.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;social-mobility-is-a-myth-in-the-us-2013-3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;social-mobility-is-a-myth-in-...</a>

Why didn&#x27;t Kristof help this guy? It&#x27;s not a systemic failure when a congenital alcoholic ruins his life, it&#x27;s a human one.

I&#x27;d be interested in the stats in the other direction - how low of a chance of someone born in the upper quintile ending up in the lower quintile. The u.s. seems to be disproportionally high in mediocre people being at the top, being there through famil money.<p>Basically britain&#x27;s upper class twits satirized by Monty Python.

Basic Income.

<p><pre><code> ?smprod=nytcore-iphone&amp;smid=nytcore-iphone-share </code></pre> Please, don&#x27;t do that.<p>As for the article itself, I thought it&#x27;s common knowledge that in most civilized world, social mobility is decreasing and income gap is increasing.