THE END OF THE AMERICAN DREAM?

Mandel, Michael (2005) The end of upward mobility? BUSINESS WEEK, 6/20 132-133

The WALLSTREET JOURNAL has run 4 articles and the NEW YORK TIMES have produced 10 essays on the end of upper mobility. To be more precise, moving up the economic ladder has dramatically slowed since the early Reagan years. From about 1983 onward, folks who start out poor stay there. For the middle class and the wealthy this also applies.

Stories of the very poor in Horatio Algiers scenarios rising to the top are sparse. If they do make it, you know it because they get print and electronic media coverage. Those fast rising are now rarities. The statistical analysis is based on intragenerational mobility. That means if you started early in your life in one station of life, you pretty much remain there till death.

BUSINESS WEEK objects and states that one should use intergenerational mobility. That means how are you doing compared with your mom and dad at the same age? If one uses that measure then there is a great deal of fluidity in the social stratification of Americans. BUSINESS WEEK’s main premise is that this secondary measure is superior and the American dream is alive.

However, the problem with the second method is that we have moved from one type of society (industrial) to (globalization) in 35 years. This makes the second measure a bit more suspect.

Let me give you an example relative to the second method. For purposes of this paper, we will use father and son. Father was a steel worker all of his life. He made in today’s economy $60,000, had a 10^th grade education, and an excellent health, life insurance, and pension.  The son is manager of a pizza restaurant. He makes $29,000, has a high school diploma and significant co-pays on health and life insurance. He has a 401k pension.

Thus son is more successful than the father because he is in management. Thus, there is upward mobility. However, stratification is generally based on occupation, education, and income. The son has a better occupation, 2 more years of school and half the income and benefits of the father.

In the larger scheme of things, the father is in a little better shape than the son and so to make up for this discrepancy, everyone works in the son’s family. That was not true in the father’s family.

When you make considerable changes in society from agriculture to industrial or industrial to service-global the second method has troubles.

In other words, the second method is more difficult to use when great societal changes occur and it affects one’s station in life. It would appear that social mobility at the moment is not as dramatic as it was in the past. One would put one’s money on the analysis of the WALL STREET JOURNAL and THE NEW YORK TIMES. It is a better measure at this time.