URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/180041
The End of Upward Mobility?
American society is based on the idea that 'anyone' can reach the top.
But the gap between rich and poor is growing, and the ladder seems to be
disappearing.
Joel Kotkin
Barack Obama's ascension to the presidency won't end racism, but it does
mean race is no longer the dominant issue in American politics. Instead,
over the coming decades, class will likely constitute the major dividing
line in our society—and the greatest threat to America's historic
aspirations. This is a fundamental shift from the last century. Writing
in the early 1900s, W.E.B. DuBois observed, "The problem of the 20th
century is the problem of the color line." Developments in the ensuing
years bore out this assertion. Indeed, before the 1960s, the decade of
Barack Obama's birth, even the most talented people of color faced often
insurmountable barriers to reaching their full potential. Today in a
multiracial America, the path to success has opened up to an extent
unimaginable in DuBois's time.
Obama's ascent reflects in particular the rise of the black bourgeoisie
from tokens to a force at the heart of the meritocracy. Since the late
1960s, the proportion of African-American households living in poverty
has shrunk from 70 percent to 46 percent, while the black middle class
has grown from 27 percent to 37 percent. Perhaps more remarkable, the
percentage who are considered prosperous—earning more than $107,000 a
year in 2007 dollars—expanded from 3 percent to 17 percent.
Yet as racial equity has improved, class disparities between rich and
poor, between the ultra-affluent and the middle class, have widened.
This gap transcends race. African-Americans and Latinos may tend, on
average, to be poorer than whites or Asians, but stagnant or even
diminishing incomes affect all ethnic groups. (Most housecleaners are
white, for instance—and the same goes for other low-wage professions.)
Divisions may not be as visible as during the Gilded Age.
As Irving Kristol once noted, "Who doesn't wear blue jeans these days?"
You can walk into a film studio or software firm and have trouble
distinguishing upper management from midlevel employees.
But from the 1940s to the 1970s, the American middle class enjoyed
steadily increasing incomes that stayed on a par with those in the upper
classes. Since then, wages for most workers have lagged behind. As a
result, the relatively small number of Americans with incomes seven
times or more above the poverty level have achieved almost all the
recent gains in wealth. Most disturbingly, the rate of upward mobility
has stagnated overall, which means it is no easier for the poor to move
up today than it was in the 1970s.
This disparity is strikingly evident in income data compiled by
Citigroup, which shows that the top 1 percent of U.S. households now
account for as much of the nation's total wealth—7 percent—as they did
in 1913, when monopolistic business practices were the order of the day.
Their net worth is now greater than that of the bottom 90 percent of the
nation's households combined. The top 20 percent of taxpayers realized
nearly three quarters of all income gains from 1979 to 2000.
Even getting a college degree no longer guarantees upward mobility. The
implicit American contract has always been that with education and hard
work, anyone can get ahead. But since 2000, young people with college
educations—except those who go to elite colleges and graduate
schools—have seen their wages decline. The deepening recession will make
this worse. According to a 2008 survey by the National Association of
Colleges and Employers, half of all companies plan to cut the number of
new graduates they hire this year, compared with last. But the problem
goes well beyond the current crisis. For one thing, the growing number
of graduates has flooded the job market at a time when many financially
pressed boomers are postponing retirement. And college-educated workers
today face unprecedented competition from skilled labor in other
countries, particularly in the developing world.
The greatest challenge for Obama will be to change this trajectory for
Americans under 30, who supported him by two to one. The promise that
"anyone" can reach the highest levels of society is the basis of both
our historic optimism and the stability of our political system. Yet
even before the recession, growing inequality was undermining Americans'
optimism about the future. In a 2006 Zogby poll, for example, nearly two
thirds of adults did not think life would be better for their children.
However inspirational the story of his ascent, Barack Obama will be
judged largely by whether he can rebuild a ladder of upward mobility for
the rest of America, too.
Kotkin is presidential fellow at Chapman University and author of “The
City: A Global History.” He is executive editor of NewGeography.com.
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