2023年7月27日发(作者：)

EVER HIGHER SOCIETY, EVER HARDER TO ASCEND

Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend

Whatever happened to the belief that any American could get to the

top?

, Dec 29th 2004| washington, dc |From the print edition

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THE United States likes to think of itself as the very embodiment of

meritocracy: a country where people are judged on their individual

abilities rather than their family connections. The original colonies

were settled by refugees from a Europe in which the restrictions on

social mobility were woven into the fabric of the state, and the

American revolution was partly a revolt against feudalism. From the

outset, Americans believed that equality of opportunity gave them an

edge over the Old World, freeing them from debilitating snobberies and

at the same time enabling everyone to benefit from the abilities of the

entire population. They still do.

To be sure, America has often betrayed its fine ideals. The Founding

Fathers did not admit women or blacks to their meritocratic republic.

The country's elites have repeatedly flirted with the aristocratic

principle, whether among the brahmins of Boston or, more flagrantly, the

rural ruling class in the South. Yet America has repeatedly succeeded in

living up to its best self, and today most Americans believe that their

country still does a reasonable job of providing opportunities for everybody,

including blacks and women. In Europe, majorities of people in every

country except Britain, the Czech Republic and Slovakia believe that

forces beyond their personal control determine their success. In America

only 32% take such a fatalistic view.

But are they right? A growing body of evidence suggests that the

meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is

growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But

social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches,

while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at

the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a

European-style class-based society.

The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in inequality

in America. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank,

argues that between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the

lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of

households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family income of the top 1%

grew by 184%—and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster. Back

in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the

bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that

of the bottom fifth.

Thirty years ago the average real annual compensation of the top 100

chief executives was $1.3m: 39 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is $37.5m: over 1,000 times the pay of the average worker. In

2001 the top 1% of households earned 20% of all income and held 33.4% of

all net worth. Not since pre-Depression days has the top 1% taken such a

big whack.

More dynastic than dynamic

Most Americans see nothing wrong with inequality of income so long

as it comes with plenty of social mobility: it is simply the price paid

for a dynamic economy. But the new rise in inequality does not seem to

have come with a commensurate rise in mobility. There may even have been

a fall.

The most vivid evidence of social sclerosis comes from politics. A

country where every child is supposed to be able to dream of becoming

president is beginning to produce a self-perpetuating political elite.

George Bush is the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and

the sprig of America's business aristocracy. John Kerry, thanks to a

rich wife, is the richest man in a Senate full of plutocrats. He is also

a Boston brahmin, educated at St Paul's, a posh private school, and

Yale—where,

like the Bushes, he belonged to the ultra-select Skull and Bones

society. Mr Kerry's predecessor as the Democrats' presidential nominee,

Al Gore, was the son of a senator. Mr Gore, too, was educated at a posh

private

school, St Albans, and then at Harvard. And Mr Kerry's main

challenger from the left of his party? Howard Brush Dean was the product of the same blue-blooded world of private schools and unchanging middle

names as Mr Bush (one of Mr Bush's grandmothers was even a bridesmaid to

one of Mr Dean's). Mr Dean grew up in the Hamptons and on New York's

Park Avenue.

The most remarkable feature of the continuing power of America's

elite—and its growing grip on the political system—is how little

comment it arouses. Britain would be in high dudgeon if its party

leaders all came from Eton and Harrow. Perhaps one reason why the rise

of caste politics raises so little comment is that something similar is

happening throughout American society. Everywhere you look in modern

America—in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the

Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge,

Massachusetts—you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating

themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain,

with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking,

mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening and a gap widening between

the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast

majority of ordinary working stiffs.

It's sticky out there

All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence

from social scientists suggests that American society is much

“stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that

social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978

found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into

the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues

recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749

father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved

up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either

at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The

biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with

affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They

found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made

it to the top quarter. The Economic Policy Institute also argues that

social mobility has declined since the 1970s. In the 1990s 36% of those

who started in the second-poorest 20% stayed put, compared with 28% in

the 1970s and 32% in the 1980s. In the 1970s 12% of the population moved

from the bottom fifth to either the fourth or the top fifth. In the

1980s and 1990s the figures shrank to below 11% for both decades. The

figure for those who stayed in the top fifth increased slightly but

steadily over the three decades, reinforcing the sense of diminished

social mobility.

Liz, meet the royalsCorbis Not all social scientists accept the conclusion that mobility is

declining. Gary Solon, of the University of Michigan, argues that there

is no evidence of any change in social-mobility rates, down or up. But,

at the least, most people agree that the dramatic increase in income

inequality over the past two decades has not been accompanied by an

equally dramatic increase in social mobility.

Take the study carried out by Thomas Hertz, an economist at American

University in Washington, DC, who studied a representative sample of

6,273 American families (both black and white) over 32 years or two

generations. He found that 42% of those born into the poorest fifth

ended up where they started—at the bottom. Another 24% moved up

slightly to

the next-to-bottom group. Only 6% made it to the top fifth. Upward

mobility was particularly low for black families. On the other hand, 37%

of those born into the top fifth remained there, whereas barely 7% of

those born into the top 20% ended up in the bottom fifth. A person born

into the top fifth is over five times as likely to end up at the top as

a person born into the bottom fifth.

Jonathan Fisher and David Johnson, two economists at the Bureau of

Labour Statistics, looked at inequality and social mobility using

measures of both income and consumption. They found that mobility

“slightly

decreased” in the 1990s. In 1984-90, 56% and 54% of households changed their rankings in terms of income and consumption

respectively. In 1994-99, only 52% and 49% changed their rankings.

Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysed family

incomes over three decades. They found that 40% of families remained

stuck in the same income bracket in the 1990s, compared with 37% of

families in the 1980s and 36% in the 1970s. Aaron Bernstein of Business

Week points out that, even though the 1990s boom lifted pay rates

for low-earners, it did not help them to get better jobs.

There is also growing evidence that America is less socially mobile

than many other rich countries. Mr Solon finds that the correlation

between the incomes of fathers and sons is higher in the United States

than in Germany, Sweden, Finland or Canada. Such cross-national

comparisons are rife with problems: different studies use different

methods and different definitions of social status. But Americans are

clearly mistaken if they believe they live in the world's most mobile

society. Back to the 1880s

This is not the first time that America has looked as if it was

about to succumb to what might be termed the British temptation. America

witnessed a similar widening of the income gap in the Gilded Age. It

also witnessed the formation of a British-style ruling class. The robber

barons of the late 19th century sent their children to private boarding

schools and made sure that they married the daughters of the old elite,

preferably from across the Atlantic. Politics fell into the hands of the

members of a limited circle—so much so that the Senate was known as the millionaires' club. Yet the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a

concerted attempt to prevent America from degenerating into a class-based society. Progressive politicians improved state education.

Philanthropists—many

of them the robber barons reborn in new guise—tried to provide

ladders

to help the lads-o'-parts (Andrew Carnegie poured millions into free

libraries). Such reforms were motivated partly out of a desire to do

good works and partly out of a real fear of the implications of class-based society. Teddy Roosevelt advocated an inheritance tax because he

thought that huge inherited fortunes would ruin the character of the

republic. James Conant, the president of Harvard in 1933-53, advocated

radical educational reform—particularly the transformation of his own

university into a meritocracy—in order to prevent America from

producing an

aristocracy.

Pushy parents, driven brats

The evils that Roosevelt and Conant worried about are clearly

beginning to reappear. But so far there are few signs of a reform

movement. Why

not?

The main reason may be a paradoxical one: because the meritocratic

revolution of the first half of the 20th century has been at least half

successful. Members of the American elite live in an intensely competitive universe. As children, they are ferried from piano lessons

to ballet lessons to early-reading classes. As adolescents, they cram in

as much after-school coaching as possible. As students, they compete to

get into the best graduate schools. As young professionals, they burn

the midnight oil for their employers. And, as parents, they agonise

about getting their children into the best universities. It is hard for

such people to imagine that America is anything but a meritocracy: their

lives are a perpetual competition. Yet it is a competition among people

very much like themselves—the offspring of a tiny sliver of society—rather than

among the full range of talents that the country has to offer. The

second reason is that America's engines of upward mobility are no longer

working as effectively as they once were. The most obvious example lies

in the education system. Upward mobility is increasingly determined by

education. The income of people with just a high-school diploma was flat

in 1975-99, whereas that of people with a bachelor's degree rose

substantially, and that of people with advanced degrees rocketed. Roosevelt's warnings go unheededCorbis

The education system is increasingly stratified by social class, and

poor children have a double disadvantage. They attend schools with fewer

resources than those of their richer contemporaries (school finances are

largely determined by local property taxes). And they have to deal with

the legacy of what Michael Barone, a conservative commentator, has

labelled “soft America”. Soft America is allergic to introducing

accountability and measurement in education, particularly if it

takes the form of merit pay for successful teachers or rewards for

outstanding pupils. Dumbed-down schools are particularly harmful to poor

children, who are unlikely to be able to compensate for them at home.

America's great universities are increasingly reinforcing rather than

reducing these educational inequalities. Poorer students are at a huge

disadvantage, both when they try to get in and, if they are successful,

in their ability to make the most of what is on offer. This disadvantage

is most marked in the elite colleges that hold the keys to the best jobs. Three-quarters of the students at the country's top 146 colleges

come from the richest socio-economic fourth, compared with just 3% who

come from the poorest fourth (the median family income at Harvard, for

example, is $150,000). This means that, at an elite university, you are

25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one.

One reason for this is government money. The main federal programme

supporting poorer students is the Pell grant: 90% of such grants go to

families with incomes below $41,000. But the federal government has been

shifting resources from Pell grants to other forms of aid to higher

education. Student loans are unrelated to family resources. Federal tax

breaks for higher education benefit the rich. State subsidies for higher

education benefit rich and poor alike. At the same time, colleges are

increasingly using financial aid to attract talented students away from

competitors rather than to help the poor.

Another reason may be “affirmative action”—programmes designed to

help members of racial minorities. These are increasingly used by

elite universities, in the belief that race is a reasonable proxy for

social disadvantage, which it may not be. Flawed as it may be, however,

this kind of affirmative action is much less pernicious than another

practised by many universities: “legacy preferences”, a programme for

the children of alumni—as if privileged children were not already doing

well enough out of the education system.

In most Ivy League institutions, the eight supposedly most select

universities of the north-east, “legacies” make up between 10% and 15% of every class. At Harvard they are over three times more likely to

be admitted than others. The students in America's places of higher

education are increasingly becoming an oligarchy tempered by racial

preferences. This is sad in itself, but even sadder when you consider

the extraordinary role that the same universities—particularly Conant's

Harvard—played in promoting meritocracy in the first half of the

20th century.

All snakes, no ladders

America's great companies are also becoming less successful agents

of upward mobility. The years from 1880 to 1960 were a period of great

corporate behemoths. These produced a new class of

Americans—professional managers. They built elaborate internal

hierarchies, and also accepted their responsibilities to both their

workers and their local communities. But since the 1970s the pressure of

competition has forced these behemoths to become much leaner—to

reduce their layers, contract out some activities, and shift from

full-time to part-time employees. It has became harder for people to

start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard

work and self-improvement. And it has also become harder for managers to

keep their jobs in a single company.

There are a few shafts of sun on the horizon. George Bush's No Child

Left Behind Act tries to use a mixture of tests and punishments for

lousy schools to improve the performance of minority children. Senator

Edward Kennedy bangs the drum against legacy preferences. But the bad news outdoes the good. The Republicans, by getting rid of inheritance

tax, seem hell-bent on ignoring Teddy Roosevelt's warnings about the

dangers of a hereditary aristocracy. The Democrats are more interested

in preferment for minorities than building ladders of opportunity for

all. In his classic “The Promise of American Life”, Herbert Croly

noted that

“a democracy, not less than a monarchy or an aristocracy, must

recognise political, economic, and social distinctions, but it must also

withdraw its consent whenever these discriminations show any tendency to

excessive endurance.” So far Americans have been fairly tolerant of

economic

distinctions. But that tolerance may not last for ever, if the

current trend towards “excessive endurance” is not reversed.