My RSS Feeds
StatCounter
The American dream and the world out there
America may still think of itself as the land of opportunity, but the chances of living a rags-to-riches life are a lot lower than elsewhere in the world, according to a new study published on Wednesday.
The likelihood that a child born into a poor family will make it into the top five percent is just one percent, according to "Understanding Mobility in America", a study by economist Tom Hertz from American University.
By contrast, a child born rich had a 22 percent chance of being rich as an adult, he said.
"In other words, the chances of getting rich are about 20 times higher if you are born rich than if you are born in a low-income family," he told an audience at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank sponsoring the work.
He also found the United States had one of the lowest levels of inter-generational mobility in the wealthy world, on a par with Britain but way behind most of Europe.
"Consider a rich and poor family in the United States and a similar pair of families in Denmark, and ask how much of the difference in the parents' incomes would be transmitted, on average, to their grandchildren," Hertz said.
"In the United States this would be 22 percent; in Denmark it would be two percent," he said.
America's rags-to-riches dream an illusion: study
Alister Bull, Reuters, April 27, 2006
This pretty much corresponds to my observations. It must be noted, in all fairness, that those who got a start in life - those who, for instance, did get a chance to go to college, even if they did not hail from a rich family - normally, until recent years, had a fair chance of at least being able to afford a reasonably comfortable lifestyle in the US. Now with the dissolution of the middle class that is becoming harder and harder. The indebted generation of college graduates today is, in the words of Nicholas von Hoffman, literally being pressed into childlessness. This is how he describes it in "Student Debts, Stunted Lives" (The Nation, March 23, 2006):
The paper wrote, "Margo Alpert is on the 30-year plan. Every month between $500 and $600 is automatically deducted from her salary to pay off college loans. By the time the 29-year-old Chicago public-interest lawyer is in her mid-50s and thinking seriously about retirement, she will finally be free of college debt."
...
Whenever the subject of the high and ever mounting cost of tuitions and the student loans needed to pay for them comes up, the focus falls on individual financial hardship. We're invited to pity or empathize with Margo Alpert, and she certainly deserves it, but our attention is not drawn to the consequences of these arrangements. Nor is the discussion ever couched in terms of the social control implicit in high tuition and high student-loan interest rates.
The most important consequence of the financial hole the Margo Alperts are in, thanks to their education, is that many of them are going to be childless. Many others will have one child at most. How can a young couple, each with $40,000 or $50,000 of debt, think of having three or four kids? They will have to wait until they are in their late 30s to have a family and by then, when they think of college costs, they will feel compelled to limit themselves to one child.
But regardless of how those who are fortunate enough to be able to afford college are faring it is quite clear that those born into true poverty often have even less of a chance of advancement in today's America. Never mind that they are likely to live in dangerous neighborhoods where crime is part of the daily life, where the "war on drugs" sometimes does feel like a real war - never mind all that. Never mind all that - the danger, the lack of money, the peer pressure a child is likely to experience in that sort of environment. It is most likely the case that a child growing up in a neighborhood like that has a snowball's chance in hell of attending a school that would give him enough knowledge to ever make it into college.
You still believe in the American dream? Well, dream on.