Forget about the American dream.
To our modern patriots ““ those you see on Fox with cute little flags pinned to their lapels ““ such an appeal is probably heresy.
Nonetheless, it’s a good idea, one that Americans have begun to respect.
The American dream embodies the distinctly American optimism that one day, no matter our current station, we will be prosperous. While it’s a good motif for a cartoon about a Russian mouse named Fievel, our enduring belief in it is hurting the nation ““ especially those who believe it most.
The dream, coined by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book, “The Epic of America,” was once a reality.
During the 19th century, astute observers of our country marveled at the tremendous social mobility available to folks here compared to Europe.
Alexis de Tocqueville, that French voyeur who famously traveled around the country peering into our democracy, wrote, “Among aristocratic nations … families remain for centuries in the same condition. … Among democratic nations,” (referring, of course, to the United States) “new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition.”
To de Tocqueville, it was easier to move up in America because your prosperity here depended less on the family into which you were born and more on the pluck and perseverance you brought to your work. Work hard, and you too could make it big.
Beginning in the 1930s though, something changed. It became harder to climb the ladder.
A recent paper by Joseph Ferrie, an economist at Northwestern University, uses old census data to chart this decline in mobility up to today, and the results show a far different picture from what de Tocqueville saw.
Most economists today agree that social mobility in the U.S. is significantly lower than in many European countries.
Take for instance, Scandinavia. There, only 25 percent of men born into the poorest fifth of the population stay there. In the U.S. it’s 40 percent.
So, sorry to break it to you, fellow patriot, but your chances of actually living the American dream are now better in Copenhagen than they are in Hollywood.
Ironically, however, surveys show that Americans still cling to their dream. A paper by Harvard economist Alberto Alesina and two collaborators shows that Americans ““ apparently out of touch with reality ““ still believe that social mobility in America is relatively high. The consequences of this false faith have been disastrous.
With such an enduring hope that some day we will be rich, Alesina argues, we are loathe to support government programs such as, say, welfare or the estate tax, which redistribute wealth from the rich and actually support social mobility.
In contrast, Europeans perceive their society to be less mobile, so they favor more redistribution.
Alesina is right. Until last November, Americans rich and poor have been voting for Republicans who’ve campaigned on “American values” such as entrepreneurship while simultaneously advocating the destruction of social safety nets.
They’ve been tricking us with rhetoric of the American dream, and the notion that it’s easy to get ahead with just a little work.
Americans, though, are beginning to remember that that’s not true. With the Democratic sweep of Congress last year, people remembered that in order to prosper, you need good health care to support you when you can’t work and good schools to teach your children how to work in the new economy.
They remembered that we need government to do those things.
It’s a good thing, too. Once we reject the rhetoric of a false dream, we start voting for candidates who will actually make it a reality.
E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.