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Briefing Social mobility in America
Stuck in place
WASHINGTO N, DC
The social-spending package that Democrats are agonising over is not grand enough to repair the American Dream
I
n the 1940s Joseph Biden senior fell from early wealth to neardestitution. He moved his young family in with his in laws as he scrabbled for work in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before reestablishing mid dleclass ease as a usedcar salesman in Delaware. For all the weight that his son, President Joe Biden, places on the well being of the middle class he also cares deeply about the opportunity to join it, or rejoin it, and to rise through its ranks. The president’s personal story chimes with something his country sorely needs: increased social mobility. Addressing the essence of his “Build Back Better” series of bills, originally pitched as a $4trn package over ten years but now being haggled over in Congress at half that level of spending, Mr Biden has said it lies in providing peo ple “a fair chance to build a decent, middle class life to succeed and thrive, instead of just hanging on by their fi ngernails.” If his administration has a signal achievement to date, it is the expanded childtax credits in the American Rescue
Plan (arp), the stimulus package which was passed in March. They appear to have reduced child poverty by more than 25% since they went into eff ect in July. The president’s camp sees helping the disadvantaged as a way to boost the econ omy as a whole. Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, argued that the plans would “support families and enable greater inclu sion in the workforce and social mobility— helping the disadvantaged and boosting economic growth”. Cecilia Rouse, the chair of the president’s Council of Economic Ad visors, put it plainly in an interview with The Economist: “Most would agree that our current rates of social mobility are too low. There is not equality of opportunity. Kids are not starting at the same place.” Data show that to be inarguable. Ameri ca, the avowed land of opportunity, now appears a harder place in which to make it than Canada or western Europe, and this is a fundamental fl aw in its economy and society. Ameliorating this through public spending is possible, if exceedingly diffi
The Economist November 6th 2021
cult. And, for Mr Biden, the opportunity to do so is coming to an end. The idea that social and economic sta tus should be conferred according to eff ort rather than hereditary privilege was long seen as quintessentially American. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville commended the “continual movement which agitates a democratic community”, arguing that it stabilised democracy. Karl Marx remarked that America’s po tential for class consciousness was sadly limited because “though classes, indeed, already exist, they have not yet become fi xed, but continually change and inter change their elements.” The country’s so cial and economic mobility was only really accessible to white men—AfricanAmeri cans and women of all colours would have to endure much longer before the Ameri can Dream could be theirs, too. But the dream was still there. A runaway American Dream Today, however, it is receding. What econ omists call absolute mobility—the proba bility that a child will grow up to earn more than their parents—has dropped precipi tously. In a paper published in 2016, enti tled “The fading American Dream”, a team of social scientists found that Americans born in the 1940s had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents had earned at the age of 30; for those born in the 1980s, the chance of that had dropped
