The Bygone American Dream? by Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, Eduardo Martins

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Globalist Bookshelf > Global Development The Bygone American Dream?
By Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, Eduardo Martins \| Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Authors of the first-ever human development rankings for the United States have found that the classic American Dream of social mobility may be on the wane. Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis and Eduardo Borges Martins discuss their findings in "The Measure of America."

he foundation of the American Dream is an idealized vision of America as a level playing field, a land rich with possibilities for anyone willing to dream big, work hard and "just do it."

Despite the variety of personal meanings invested in the American Dream, it connotes widely shared ideals such as mobility, freedom, security and dignity.

Belief in opportunity

Americans have

The American meritocracy, the foundation of the American Dream, is at risk.
long accepted profound inequality of outcomes — in part because of their steadfast belief in equality of opportunity. They generally believe responsibility for seizing opportunities lies with the individual.

These intertwined beliefs in equal opportunity and individual responsibility are reinforced in textbooks and popular culture and widely shared across ethnic groups and income levels — though they are not universal.

(Even reality television programming promotes the ideal. American Idol is a popular exponent of the American Dream, in which raw talent and moxie earn a meteoric, meritocratic rise to fame and fortune.)

Past landmarks

The history of the twentieth century broadly supports the notion that the United States is a land of expanding opportunity. Women won the right to vote. Workers won landmark rights, including the eight-hour day, weekends off and pensions.

Committed civil rights activists won important legislation to prohibit discrimination in education, employment, housing and all walks of public life. Businesses in a number of sectors have come to see the value of a diverse workforce.

Of the poorest one-fifth of families in the 1980s, half were still poor in the 1990s.

Significant investment in the construction and operation of schools and libraries brought free public education to everyone. The GI Bill helped to educate a generation of veterans.

Taxpayers brought financial security and health to the vulnerable elderly with Social Security, Supplemental Security Income and Medicare, dramatically reducing the number of older Americans living in poverty.

However, Americans are well aware that everyone does not share the same starting line.

Diminishing opportunity?

Many minorities, people with disabilities, older workers and gay men and lesbians, for example, are especially aware of the ways in which discrimination and disadvantage keep the dreams of many out of reach.

In a recent survey, only 33% of Americans said that everyone has the opportunity to succeed; 38% of respondents agreed that "most" have that opportunity; and 27% believed "only some" have it.

But to most Americans, unequal beginnings are not the end of the story. The same poll also revealed that about 80% of Americans agree that hard work and perseverance can usually overcome disadvantage.

These somewhat contradictory findings highlight the gap between the promise and practice of the American Dream.

Moving up the economic ladder

Social mobility — the ability to move up the economic ladder — is a central tenet of the American Dream.

Americans have long accepted profound inequality of outcomes — in part because of their steadfast belief in equality of opportunity.
But recent evidence suggests that, in some critical areas, social mobility has slowed or even reversed.

Some groups have greater income and employment security than ever before. But for many others, realizing the American Dream — or even hanging on to it — is more difficult today than it was thirty years ago.

For instance, a recent study found that nearly half of African Americans born to middle-class parents in the 1960s ended up among the bottom 20% of earners as adults.

Changing data

In 1987, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker wrote, "Almost all the earnings advantages or disadvantages of ancestors are wiped out in three generations."

However, improved methodologies and data are increasingly telling a different tale. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for example, found that income mobility in the United Stales was higher in the 1970s than it has been since.

For many others, realizing the American Dream—or even hanging on to it—is more difficult today than it was thirty years ago.

Of the poorest one-fifth of families in the 1980s, half were still poor in the 1990s.

Moreover, intergenerational mobility is on the wane. Researchers at the Chicago Federal Reserve and the University of California-Berkeley found that brothers born in the l960s were more likely to have similar incomes than brothers born in the 1940s.

Today, fully half of poor children in the United States grow up to be poor adults.

A dream at risk

Parents who have done well in life are more likely to foster in their children the attitudes and values that society rewards, to make the investments and decisions that help children obtain competitive advantages, and to have the connections to help their children get into top schools and workplaces.

The American meritocracy, the foundation of the American Dream, is at risk.

Social mobility is now less fluid in the United States than in other affluent nations. Indeed, a poor child born in Germany, France, Canada, or one of the Nordic countries has a better chance to join the middle class in adulthood than an American child born into similar circumstances.

Excerpted from "The Measure of America" by Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, Eduardo Borges Martins. Copyright © 2008 by Columbia University Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Here is a sample of what our readers are saying:

Veronica Bates , Glasgow , United Kingdom
(Thursday, December 18, 2008, 11:59:29 AM ):

With Barak & Michelle Obama about to move into the White House, perhaps one should ask how much the data refered to indicates a reduction in opportunity and how much a change in what is acceptable and financially possible… For example, serial single motherhood would not have been socially or financially possible in the 1960s. Well-intended policies have altered this but, as all the evidence suggests, not to the children's, or indeed society's, long-term advantage.

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