Moving On Up and Hitting a Wall: Social Mobility in the U.S. and Europe

America: land of opportunity... if you're lucky enough to be born into
one. The crumbling of the American Dream is in plain view across the
country, especially in the urban centers and desolate ghost towns that
have long been hollowed of their economic promise. A new comparative
study shows just how far America's mythology has slipped on a global
scale.

According a report on social mobility published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], the United States ranks pretty poorly among industrialized nations on intergenerational advancement--that
is, the ability to transcend the socioeconomic class, income level, and
educational attainment of your family. So that whole bootstraps thing?
It looks like that quintessential self-made man is more at home in Norway than Our Town.

In patterns of socioeconomic gains across generations, the United
States ranked on par with France, Italy and the United Kingdom on some
measures. Some trends were generally constant throughout the countries
studied, such as the correlation between educational attainment and
fathers' and sons' wages. And some socioeconomic barriers that are
uniquely, and shamefully, American:

Mobility
in earnings across pairs of fathers and sons is particularly low in
France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, while mobility
is higher in the Nordic countries, Australia and Canada....

The influence of parental socio-economic status on
students' achievement in secondary education is particularly strong in
Belgium, France and the United States, while it is weaker in some
Nordic countries, as well as in Canada and Korea. Moreover, in many
OECD countries, including all the large continental European ones,
students' achievement is strongly influenced by their school
environment....

in the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States and France... at
least 40% of the economic advantage that high-earnings fathers have
over low-earnings fathers is transmitted to their sons.

The findings expose the entrenchment of a class hierarchy even in
supposedly modern, diverse democracies. It seems inheritance is still a
major driver of opportunity, even in the land of the free. America does
stand out among our more regressive European brethren, however, in that
we utterly lack the social safety nets that have served as a buffer
against structural inequality. While class divisions in France or
England may be frustrating in terms of individual opportunity,
lower-class status for the French and British is far less likely to
result in a family death sentence due to lack of health care.

Perhaps because of the countries studied vary widely in their
demographic mix, the study does not explore in detail how race and
ethnicity track socioeconomic status and by extension,
intergenerational mobility. As a singularly American institution,
institutional racism intersects with and sometimes trumps class
divides. A 2009 Pew study on economic mobility
found links between racial and economic segregation that dictate the
fate of whole generations of Black children. Over time, their
individual prospects were directly tied to the advancement, or
regression, of their communities:

* Four in five black children who
started in the top three quintiles experienced downward mobility,
compared with just two in five white children. Three in five white
children who started in the bottom two quintiles experienced upward
mobility, versus just one in four black children.

* If black and white children had grown up in neighborhoods with similar poverty
rates (i.e., if whites had grown up where blacks did or blacks had grown up where
whites did), the gap in downward mobility between them would be smaller by
one-fourth to one-third.

* Neighborhood poverty alone accounts for a greater portion of the black-white
downward mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation,
labor force participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined.

But the OECD study parses the impact of social policy in shaping, or
reversing, some of the legacy of inequality. Mobility can be promoted
through investing quality schools and early childhood education,
encouraging socioeconomic integration, progressive welfare policies
that even out wealth inequality, and financial aid to broaden higher
education opportunities for students of disadvantaged backgrounds. But
redistribution of material resources can only go so far in a society
where opportunity often hangs on the color line--as
race can't be erased through education or tax policy. And in a
democratic society, racial identity and community ties should be
allowed to continue across generations, even as poverty and hardship
are overcome.

The American myth of opportunity isn't necessarily obsolete, but in the face of systemic discrimination, pursuing the Dream means waking up from delusions of colorblindness.