The American Dream

For those who don't have eyes to see, here is a report to bring you out of your ideological slumbers...

Education and Equal Opportunity

by Brad DeLong

He [John Lloyd] writes, in the FT [Financial Times]:

The mobile society stalls at the gates of academe: Making it has been the American dream for two centuries. Horatio Alger, who died 110 years ago this month, wrote dozens of hugely popular novels (Struggling Upward, Strive and Succeed) that imprinted the aspiration on millions of minds. In their pages boys would rise from poverty to the middle class, often through the kindly intercession of older men but always with a display of grit. The theme spanned the 19th-century Atlantic: Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) promoted the theme of social advancement through individual striving in Self Help (1859) and other works. The career of his fellow Scot Andrew Carnegie, moving from real childhood rags to world-beating riches in early middle age, gave foundation to such exhortations.

But where the myth had reality, it now has less. Recent studies show that the US is near the top, and the UK in the upper levels, of the league of developed states in which the poor do not or cannot help themselves to rise. One much quoted study notes that “the idea of the US as ‘the land of opportunity’ persists; and clearly seems misplaced”.

Why? Education is at the root. In the land of opportunity, the immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century could rise – or at least their families could – with the burgeoning industrial economy. In 1914, Ford’s workers were three-quarters foreign-born, and their jobs did become as solid and middle-class as Alger imagined – if more through militant unions than kindly benefactors. Now, the good jobs need at least one college degree: a PhD is no longer synonymous with genteel scholarly shabbiness but can be leveraged into great wealth, personal and corporate. ...

For those who think that virtue is rewarded, that hard work will get you ahead, that working hard will make you rich one day, go read the whole of this post. Beyond the bit above, DeLong includes material from the academic economist George Borjas who has spent a lifetime gathering data on immigrants and economic "success".

There are lots of little bits to pause over and to ponder, for example:

Third, Borjas's findings about income across the generations are mostly due to the stagnation society-wide of all incomes in America save those of the very top of the income distribution; I have seen no evidence that little-educated Mexican-Americans are following any different a path from the one that little-educated Slovak-Americans or Polish-Americans or Greek-Americans or Italian-Americans or Chinese-Americans of a century ago--and the incomes of little-educated Mexican-Americans today are definitely converging to the English-speaking norm much faster than did the incomes of little-educated ex-slave African-Americans of a century and a half ago.

And this:

I am still not sure whether my beliefs that in a good society higher education--indeed, all education--is free to the students and that elementary-school teaching is a very high-status profession reflect my own biases produced by my own position within this society or whether my beliefs are a rational assessment of reality, but it is worth thinking about...