The United States: The most class bound society in the world?

Well the developed world anyway.

As almost everyone who pays attention now knows the US has one of, if not the lowest levels of socio-economic class mobility in the developed world. Lower than the UK, lower than France, and definitely lower than the Scandinavian countries.

What does that mean? Well it means that if you are born into a certain class in the US you are exceedingly likely to die in that same class and the chance of you climbing a significant way out of it is even slimmer.

Despite that it is still common to people in the US saying that it is a classless society. At a guess I'd say they see America through the founding myth of pioneering frontiersman standing proudly in opposition to the hidebound hierarchy of a Victorian England. However both those eras are long past.

Here is a couple of recent articles discussing the issue:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/17/want-to-get-ahead-move-to-denmark

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/17/us-election-money-class-race

So, to those of you who live in america, do you feel like you live in a classless society? Do you feel socio-economically imobile? Do you think this is even a problem?

Who says this? I have never heard anyone say this.

Well, this much is partly true. We've done an extremely good job here of getting people to believe that, in America more than any other country, hard work is all it takes to acheive anything, and you can do and be anything you want if you just put enough effort in. The reality is super far from that, of course, but a huge amount of people here buy it completely. That's why the US, a country which as you say has an extraordinarily low level of class mobility relative to the rest of the developed world, also does such an extraordinarily bad job of taking care of its poor relative to the rest of the developed world.

The American Dream is dead, news at 11.

The first thing you need to do is to shut up about race. As long as the public face of poverty is a poor black woman, you're going to get the issue of class hijacked by those with a racial agenda. Second, you'll need to come to terms with your own "liberal" ideology, which is just as condescending towards the poor as your conservatives are. Falling back on hoary Marxist notions is also not helping. Intellectuals painting themselves into a corner is always a riveting spectacle, but you'll need a new social contract that won't conveniently disregard the negative side of its previous implementations.

Consider the Occupy movement. Mad as hell and not taking it anymore. Who went there? Oh, I'm sure I'll be told that it was a wide spectrum ranging from libertarians opposing bank bail-outs to anarchists who don't care what is being brought down as long as it is. But ordinary blokes, did you see them there? No, naturally, it's the Guy Fawkes masks and Zizek groupies. The blue-collar demographic, that's the one you need to politicize, but no one seems to want to discuss with them anymore, except for Tea Party politicians who only care about votes.

It's at least implied by this:

Those would be the people claiming that America is a classless society.

Oh, but the United States is a society completely lacking in class.

Income inequality has a profound impact on mobility among other things.

Not exactly a premium source but it happened recently:

From here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...te-transcript/2012/01/07/gIQAk2AAiP_blog.html

I've heard it from Conservative friends. The same guys who think the US has the best education, the best healthcare, the best opportunities, etc.

Not that they've made any objective comparison, it's taken as a sort of article of faith that the US is the best, so obviously it has the best economic mobility. As proof they'll point to exceptional rags-to-riches cases, which do still exist of course.

More accurately, I think it stems from a weakness in understanding things that haven't happened to them directly, or at least friends of theirs. They're relatively well off, only know people who are relatively well off, and simply have a narrow perspective.

Who are you directing this spiel towards?

In my experience, those aren't people who claim that American doesn't have classes, they're just people who believe that, with a little elbow grease, you can pretty much always change your class if you really want to.

Wow, that's amazing, even coming from him. Based on that quote, I don't think Rick Santorum actually knows what the word "class" even means.

Well I think that meaning confusion might be part of why some people can seem to hold the idea that america is a classless society, and the idea that it has huge divisions by income and very low mobility between these divisions simultaneously. I think these people hear the word 'class' and think; 'well we don't drink tea or bow before the Queen' and then proceed to go back to their job as a limo driver or shoe shiner for Donald Trump.


As long as he's not actually called Lord Trump he can live in a palace made out of gold and have a team of a hundred servants and absolutely nothing is amiss.

My sense from the people I know who believe it is that it's more than that. They essentially believe that the mobility exists, that The Dream is alive, and if you don't take advantage of it it's because you're lazy.

They go to great effort to rationalize away the decreased economic prosperity of the vast majority in the US since the 70s, and don't have anything more concrete to base it upon than wishful thinking.

And it's not a black and white area either -- to an extent they are right! Mostly wrong though, I think.

If we are quoting Santorum for a take on your typical American, this thread is already doomed.

America's decline is really about our military industrial complex being taken over by the banks in the 1960's. The banks don't really care about individual country and infrastructure... America's class system is stagnant and probably declining because our jobs are gone and they are not coming back. How can a man or woman rise when there is no ladder to climb?

I dislike post #16.

Would you kindly.

I think the issue is too complex to point to any one cause.

Okay, there's a little bit of hyperbole here. What they don't mention is that the "most people mostly staying in the top two fifths" part is pretty much identical to social mobility in other developed countries (Denmark, for example). In fact, if you look at that chart, our social mobility is almost identical to Denmark's except in the bottom fifth. So while that article seems to be saying "OMG social mobility in America sux0rs!", in reality, it's about the same as everywhere else for 80% of the population*.

The main difference is that we apparently are a lot less good than other developed countries at providing opportunities for the poor. I doubt that will really come as a surprise to anyone here, though.

*(And actually, it's more than that, because only a portion of the bottom 20% are more likely to stay there. So it would probably be more accurate to say that 90-95% of the people in the US have roughly the same social mobility as people in Denmark).

Look at it again; the top 40% has way less chance of ending up in the bottom 20% than Denmark. Which combined with the bottom 20% is 60% of the population. Also note the 40% and 60% have big same-income gaps.


From the abstract:

The absolute numbers aren't as significant as much as the incredible gap with US conventional wisdom.

Since few people in either Denmark or the US's top fifth end up in the bottom fifth, "way more" in the US is a relatively tiny percentage. And it's not "60% of the population," the vast majority of the people in the top four categories are identical to the Denmark figures, so you can't just push everyone in each of those 20% chunk to the "worse social mobility" side of the equation.

Eyeballing it looks like the delta is:

0-20%: 42%
20-40%: 10%
40%-60%: 10%
60-80%: 10%
80-100%: 10%

So you're right; for the top 80% of the income distribution the outcome differences are subtle. It certainly demonstrates a good case for us having a permanent underclass though.

It does. In the lower fifth, the differences are quite pronounced. It's not quite the "AMERICAN DREAM OVER" scenario that the original article was trying to pitch, but I think having that level of endemic poverty is a pretty big problem in its own right.

Yeah, that's a good point. It's really more of a problem with endemic poverty than anything else.

There are lots of intrinsic cultural problems with America but all developed countries are facing an issue of relative stagnant opportunities for advancement in the post-industrial world. In the US, which has far weaker social institutions and a bias (implicit or not) toward building wealth through familial inheritance, it's not terribly surprising that social mobility is rather bad, especially for the lower classes. But, as you can see in many other political discussions, the lower classes in the US are all but broken, and it's not clear how to bring them out of it, especially considering the schizophrenic nature of the division of political jurisdictions here. Much of the state and local levels of government are far, by a substantial degree, less able to generate the revenue needed to create the social supports, but are also more likely to be even more outright corrupt, inefficient by less capable individuals, and who follow even more severely whatever ideology they cling to.

There are lots of other socio-political trends, such as transforming or "Consumerization" of the middle class, which happens not through conjunction of economic and political forces. But the truth, like global warming, is that things don't change unless people perceive it to be a problem, and (as yet) people don't perceive it to be a problem. The "hardworking" lower classes are still given relatively decent pay in exchange for signing their lives over to working extremely long hours and having no outside lives whatsoever, but those that take up this exchange are glad for the opportunity nonethless; the wealthy are still able to find new ways of exchanging that wealth into economic and social opportunity - the growth of these private elementary and secondary schools that charge all but full college tuition is one clear example, pushing the Private+Yale education cost to something close to a million dollars over 20 education years today. And the middle classes are, like in the rest of the developed world, finding themselves in an increasingly bizarre place, unwanted but indisposable, with decreasing prospects for employment, but whose spending power fuels the global economy.

My pet theory that's politically completely impossible is enormous government direct employment in high-poverty areas for the 20 to 50 years it takes to fix it.

I could go for that. Government funded healthcare and high education wouldn't hurt either. The cost would be minor relative to the money we blow on military adventurism, and the ease with which he find trillions of dollars to bail out investment banks.

Its absolutely amazing how some of you think the government somehow has unlimited money to spend on things.

As brettmcd rightly points out, if the government started spending money on things soon it would be left penniless and unable to accomplish its core functions (poker raids and blowing up brown people). Do we really want to live in a world in which Americans have access to public healthcare and brown people aren't blowing up, not even when they play poker? Is that what we want for our children?

We only blow up brown people when they have the potential to get between us and fossil fuels. We fear them. We really should fear them. Look around you. I mean literally look around you. From your tighty whitties to your child's Measles vaccination, it's all dependent on fossil fuels. All of it. And we are running out of cheap crude oil.

You could directly employ the entire bottom 20% of American income-earners (including the unemployed), at a salary of $40K per year, for the cost of the Iraq war. It almost certainly would have been a better use of that money, in terms of return on American prosperity.

That's for one year, of course. Still, it puts into perspective how much money we really do blow on useless things.

What if those people were creating the infrastructure we need, everything from nuclear power plants, alternative energy sources, high speed rail, a new interstate highway system, new potable and waste water systems for every major city and town, and new power grids...

Imagining that there are better ways to parcel out our limited resources does not imply one thinks resources are unlimited; quite the reverse. It's the people who believe the "magic of markets" will "make the pie higher" and thereby eliminate all material constraints that are in a fantasy world.

I completely agree we need to spend our money differently then we do, we can't keep having trillion dollar deficits each year. But to think that the government can afford to provide health care for everyone, employ everyone who is poor or unemployed and some of the other stuff people have mentioned here is implying that the government can just spend any amount it wants to, as long as the money is spent on something that person supports.

1. Deficits can be paid for by raising taxes.
2. The US has the lowest taxes of all the first world democracies.

With something like health care, it's not so much a question of what the government can afford as what the society can afford; given that a national health service is far cheaper and more efficient than private health cover, then having governments provide health care is a net gain for everyone - even if they have to pay more tax. Employing the poor is more complex but has some related dimensions; whatever money they pay to their employees re-enters the economy, as does everything that is produced by their labour. An increase in the total productivity of the society means that the total amount of consumption can increase too; some redistribution is probably involved, but since it's progressive, that's a good thing in itself.

Or we could just think that we shouldn't have gone into Iraq. Hence the direct comparison in costs.

Also, the government could provide health insurance to everyone, add the cost of doing so onto everyone's tax bills, and everyone would pay less in the end, which is the hilarious part. If the government taxed you and paid for your health insurance, you would wind up with more money and better health care.

But apparently government is always the wrong answer, even though it's clearly a better answer for every other first-world country than what we have.

Not sure that we'd find enough nuclear, civil, electrical, and chemical engineers among the poorest 20% to meet this lofty goal.