“Despite the fact that most Americans believe our country is still The Land of Opportunity, the greatest meritocracy in the world, the United States is actually a terrible place for fortune-seekers. Chris Hayes, author of the new book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, notes that when citizens of different countries are polled about their perception of how easy it is to start off poor and work their way up to wealth, "the U.S. is near or at the top in terms of people who say 'yes.' And yet it is also near the bottom in terms of actual social mobility." In other words, as Hayes argues in his book, America isn't truly a meritocracy. Sure, the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and equal opportunity laws have helped to remove many of the barriers to success -- but people at the top tend to stay at the top, from clique to clique, and generation after generation. "Those who climb up the ladder will always find a way to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up," Hayes writes. The powerful are liable to game systems (like school admissions processes) designed to reward merit; they'll also go to great lengths to maintain their bank accounts and their positions (consider, for instance, just about everyone involved in creating the subprime mortgage crisis). And despite the fact that we are all supposedly born with the same legal rights, the elite are rarely punished for their misdeeds, particularly compared to those lower down on the socioeconomic chain. "The idea that we are a meritocracy is a vast oversimplification, a self-serving and self-justifying one," says Hayes. "If you believe that the model is that those who are smartest and hardest working end up with the most power or the most lucrative jobs, then ... one conclusion to draw from that [is] that the people currently occupying those positions must be meritorious, which I think is an insidious myth.”
—Trickle-Down Distress: How America’s Broken Meritocracy Drives Our National Anxiety EpidemicTim Wise on Social Mobility in the U.S.
“According to the available research, if your father’s wages rank in the top fifth of all income earners in the country, you’ll have nearly a 60 percent chance of surpassing your dad’s status over time. On the other hand, if your father’s earnings fall in the bottom fifth, the odds that you’ll do better than him one day plummet to less than 5 percent. And not only is mobility itself limited, it appears to be diminishing relative to previous generations. As a recent study for the Boston Federal Reserve Bank discovered, among the nation’s poorest families, the percentage that were able to climb simply to the next quintile (still far from well-off), fell from over half in the 1968-78 period, to only 46 percent in the period from 1993-2003. Additionally, the study found that poor families are 10 times more likely to remain poor than to move into the highest income quintile, while those who started out rich are 5 times more likely to remain there, as to fall into either of the lower two quintiles of earners.”
http://www.timwise.org/2011/09/getting-what-we-deserve-wealth-race-and-entitlement-in-america/
“if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity. The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education. Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college — and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school — than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, “Tier 1” schools, 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest “socioeconomic status”; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter. And if children from our society’s lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents — loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.”
—America’s Unlevel Field - NYTimes.com
One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents — loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.
No Vacation Nation
cnn.comBesides a handful of national holidays, the typical American worker bee gets two or three precious weeks off out of a whole year to relax and see the world — much less than what people in many other countries receive.
And even that amount of vacation often comes with strings attached.
Some U.S. companies don’t like employees taking off more than one week at a time. Others expect them to be on call or check their e-mail even when they’re lounging on the beach or taking a hike in the mountains…
A big reason for the difference is that paid time off is mandated by law in many parts of the world.
Germany is among more than two dozen industrialized countries — from Australia to Slovenia to Japan — that require employers to offer four weeks or more of paid vacation to their workers, according to a 2009 study by the human resources consulting company Mercer.
Finland, Brazil and France are the champs, guaranteeing six weeks of time off.
But employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don’t have access to it, government figures show.
That makes the U.S. the only advanced nation in the world that doesn’t guarantee its workers annual leave, according to a report titled “No-Vacation Nation” by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group…
“There is simply no evidence that working people to death gives you a competitive advantage,” said John de Graaf, the national coordinator for Take Back Your Time, a group that researches the effects of overwork.
He noted that the United States came in fourth in the World Economic Forum’s 2010-2011 rankings of the most competitive economies, but Sweden — a country that by law offers workers five weeks of paid vacation — came in second.
De Graaf drafted the first version of the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, which would have required larger companies to provide at least one week of paid annual leave to employees. But the bill, introduced by then-Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, in May of 2009, got little traction.
America is not a very friendly place for people who want to work for a living. Not only do we not get significantly less vacation time, we also have a lower minimum wage (despite evidence that raising the minimum wage is good for employment) and overall less social and economic mobility than many other first world countries. Meanwhile, we’re continuing to give more tax breaks to the wealthy and cutting social services to increase economic mobility for the poor.
“Nevertheless, studies published during the 1960s and 1970s reported that skin tone within the Black community continued to be an issue and continues to have an impact on stratification outcomes. Even studies published during the last decade continued to suggest that skin tone does matter among African Americans. For example, Keith and Herring (1991) explored the effects of skin color on stratification outcomes such as education, occupation and income. The study include controls for factors such as parental socioeconomic status, sex, age, urbanization, marital status and region of residence. The results suggested that skin tone had significant effects on education, occupation and income; in fact, skin tone was a better predictor of stratification outcomes than such factors as parental socioeconomic status.”
—Cedric Herring
Just leaving this here for the next fellow light-skinned person who says “but why are you bringing this up? it’s so divisiveeee!”
Understanding Mobility in America (pdf)
americanprogress.orgThis is a good report and resource on social mobility in the US, which I’m sure you are aware is largely a myth.
Highlights (taken from the summary) include:
- Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.
- Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent.
- Education, race, health and state of residence are four key channels by which economic status is transmitted from parent to child.
- African American children who are born in the bottom quartile are nearly twice as likely to remain there as adults than are white children whose parents had identical incomes, and are four times less likely to attain the top quartile.
- The difference in mobility for Blacks and whites persists even after controlling for a host of parental background factors, children’s education and health, as well as whether the household was female-headed or receiving public assistance.
- After controlling for a host of parental background variables, upward mobility varied by region of origin, and is highest (in percentage terms) for those who grew up in the South Atlantic and East South Central regions, and lowest for those raised in the West South Central and Mountain regions.
- By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.
Is college education really expanding?
crookedtimber.orgWe are learning two things.
1. Since the 50s, we know the main reason the majority of citizens seek a degree from a college or university is to become more upwardly mobile. Nevertheless, the evidence shows social mobility is becoming more limited. So, the ideological composition of the populace as individuals in a free market with the freedom to work and spend their way to success is much more fantastic, much more a known fiction, than it ever has been before. In other words, people are kidding themselves.
2. The wealthiest people are finding it easier to educate themselves at the best schools and the poorest people are finding it more difficult to afford education at all, while the middle classes are attending whatever schools they can find to attend.
I taught at a city college and two universities. One university was a state school; the other cost more than $30,000/year. The city college, which used to be a school for non-traditional students and poor students, is becoming more and more a school for the middle classes of Denver. Tuition is not as cheap as it used to be.
I found the linked Crooked Timber post engaging because so many people seem willing to uncritically accept the myth that college and university are a path to upward mobility and that more students are attending. It’s not necessarily so, and for important reasons. In my mind, this is more evidence that the middle class is populated with people who have more faith in ideology than they do in what we like to call reality. Their stubbornness is rather hard to explain. In a society that insists they only be happy with accumulating possessions, land, and money, they are getting less and less and doing nothing about it.
Highly recommended. Both the blog, the links, and the comments.
(I’m posting this with the recent insipid posts from one blogger in my mind—posts about how students need to choose appropriate degrees and shut up about about their debts while bragging about himself and his social mobility. He knows who he is and is quite smug about it. I’m still fuming about his arrogant, naive posts, which almost daily grow more self-involved and childish. Student bloggers often couch bragging in scolding fellow students for complaining, illustrating a rather depressing acceptance of ideological composition as individualists and consumers.)
Independent fee paying schools educate just 7% of all pupils yet according to a government report published by Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn they account for 59% of cabinet ministers, 35% of MPs, 45% of senior civil servants, 15 of the 17 supreme court judges and heads of division, 43% of barristers and 54% of leading journalists.
Source: New Statesman
“Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America's highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions' minimum admissions standards. Five years ago, two researchers working for the Educational Testing Service, Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, took the academic profiles of students admitted into 146 colleges in the top two tiers of Barron's college guide and matched them up against the institutions' advertised requirements in terms of high school grade point average, SAT or ACT scores, letters of recommendation, and records of involvement in extracurricular activities. White students who failed to make the grade on all counts were nearly twice as prevalent on such campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their ethnicity or race. Who are these mediocre white students getting into institutions such as Harvard, Wellesley, Notre Dame, Duke, and the University of Virginia? A sizable number are recruited athletes who, research has shown, will perform worse on average than other students with similar academic profiles, mainly as a result of the demands their coaches will place on them. A larger share, however, are students who gained admission through their ties to people the institution wanted to keep happy, with alumni, donors, faculty members, administrators, and politicians topping the list.”
—Peter Schmidt, from At the elite colleges - dim white kids [Boston Globe]
What you had, before, was a weird kind of socialism — exclusive rights for a mass aristocracy. Better neighborhoods, better schools, better water fountains, better rest-rooms, better pools, better everything.
And now you don’t. And look — There are the Muslims in Congress. And there are the Latinos in the Unions. And there are gays shooting guns in Iraq. And there are women dying in Iraq. And there are black ladies marrying white men. And there are black men marrying white ladies. And their children are Muslims. And their children are in the White House.
And for the first time in American history, it appears that you will have to fight to not end up on the bottom.
