America’s exceptionally low social mobility
Paul Krugman gives himself a break from thinking about Trump to think about the Trump Princess.
You see, recently she said something that would have been remarkable coming from any Republican, but was truly awesome coming from the Daughter in Chief.
The subject under discussion was the proposal, part of the Green New Deal, that the government offer a jobs guarantee. Ms. Trump trashed the notion, claiming that Americans “want to work for what they get,” that they want to live in a country “where there is the potential for upward mobility.”
O.K., this was world-class lack of self-awareness: It doesn’t get much better than being lectured on self-reliance by an heiress whose business strategy involves trading on her father’s name.
Right? What real work has Princess Ivanka ever done? Mincing around the landscape looking like a Barbie doll doesn’t count.
But Krugman’s point is that the upward mobility thing is bullshit; we have less of it than the other developed countries, not more. This comes as zero surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the ever-growing gulf between rich and poor here.
America’s exceptionally low social mobility is distinct from its exceptionally high income inequality, although these are almost surely related. Among advanced countries, there is a strong negative correlation between inequality and mobility, sometimes referred to as the “Great Gatsby curve.” This makes sense. After all, huge disparities in parents’ income tend to translate into large disparities in children’s opportunities.
Witness the Trump and Kushner offspring, talentless dweebs to a person.
Where do people from poor or modest backgrounds have the best chance of getting ahead? The answer is that Scandinavia leads the rankings, although Canada also does well. And here’s the thing: The Nordic countries don’t just have low inequality, they also have much bigger governments, much more extensive social safety nets, than we do. In other words, they have what Republicans denounce as “socialism” (it really isn’t, but never mind).
What does that translate to? Universal health care, better schools, more public housing. What does that help foster? New generations who get decent schooling and a safe place to do homework and get enough sleep. You do the math.
I’d say ‘free decent schooling’. When I first attended university here in Australia there were no tuition fees. I can’t think of any factor more effective in eroding upward social mobility than the cost of a college education.
Unfortunately the neo liberal scourge reached my country and students now pay for tuition the, implications for social mobility are obvious.
Fair point. I hesitated over how to word it. We have free public schools through high school (generally age 18) but higher education has become a grotesque racket and burden and the public schools are not always good, to put it mildly.
And instructors in higher education are now being pressured to have more butts in more seats, to keep them there, and to “increase completion rates and retention rates”. We are multiplying the awards we give students, giving them certificates, then diplomas, then degrees, so that we can point to the increase in our number of awards even as we have decreases in enrollment. It’s all to pad the numbers, to pad the money, to pad the statistics.
And we have to keep the ‘customers’ happy. What does that do for education? It isn’t pretty, I promise.
One of the most striking differences I noticed when I moved from the US to the UK was how many people I met in professional/work circles who had literally ‘worked their way up’–the country/sector director of the large company I worked for in my first job here had started as an apprentice in the ’70s. I don’t think I ever knew anyone in the US who’d done this (I thought I had, but when I mentioned this years ago a catty friend revealed the advantages this person, whose persona was that of someone from an underprivileged background who’d ‘made good’, had actually started with). I’ve met dozens of people here (almost all women–but that might just be because I spend more time talking with women) in my generation and younger who were the first in their families to get university degrees and professional jobs. It’s not always easy for them–I was actually talking with one the other night, a woman from a ‘deprived’ background who has a PhD from Oxford, who (like plenty of others) pointed out that while it’s certainly a positive thing for Oxbridge to work to get ‘diverse’ students into their programs they’re not so good at acknowledging and making explicit the tacit assumptions and behaviour norms that can make the experience a minefield for an outsider, which can lead to retention problems, and potentially psychological/emotional damage.
On kind of a tangent, I’m realising that my father was actually the first in his family to get a degree and professional job (my mother finished high school, and was a SAHM)–I’ve thought before (and perhaps have even commented to this effect on this blog) that while it meant that although he earned enough to provide us with a ‘nice’ house in the suburbs and plenty of money, and we never went without, physically, my parents had no idea how to support their children into professional careers themselves, or that they even should or had to, and may not have been able to do anything about it (re informal networking, positioning, etc) even if they had.
I’ve just been reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming. There are a couple of parts I meant to quote and discuss here but it was due back at the library before I got to it – but they were about 1) the myriad ways black people were systematically barred from all the good jobs in Chicago and 2) the way her entire path depended on the fact that her mother knew enough and was assertive enough to get her out of a dead-end class in second grade and into a better one. She says it’s not that she was cleverer than all the other kids in that class, it was solely that her mother was on it.
There’s also a lot about what her parents sacrificed so that she and Craig would be able to rise. Upward mobility is like an insult here, because it’s made so very very difficult.
(I’ll get it again and do the quote-discuss thing.)
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I’m comparing Obama’s parents’ attitude to that of my parents, and wondering whether because upward mobility was so easy for my dad (and for my mom, who just needed to be attached to him), it didn’t occur to them that it was something that a) could be precarious and b) was usually the result of a lot of thought and effort, and that c) they would have to help their kids if they wanted us to follow in their tracks. I’m sure Obama’s parents were never allowed to forget this.
My dad happened to be a bright, presentable, un-emotionally-attached man who was in the right place at the right time–he got a good useful degree on the government’s dime (not a vet–went to a well thought of free state school), immediately landed a well-paying job with a lot of potential for promotion right out of school, and moved across the country to start the bright new life lots of people in the early ’60s thought was within everyone’s reach. I don’t think he ever realised that his entire life trajectory was the result of a combination of luck, social, economic and political circumstances, and the privilege of being a ‘normal’ white man (I actually don’t know, though, now that I think of it, how much (if at all) his religion, or his wife’s religion, restricted his opportunities or caused any friction).