It’s a deeply-held belief – now mostly a myth – that, in America, all you have to do is apply yourself, get a good education, stick to the rules, work hard, and you can succeed, build some economic security for yourself and create a platform for your heirs to go even higher.
After years of growing income inequality and shrinking real wages (despite longer hours worked and greater productivity), this is no longer reality for most Americans.
The Economic Mobility Project is a joint venture of the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute, the New America Foundation, and Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute aimed at analyzing data and presenting economic facts about how easy – or not – it is for Americans to move up the economic ladder. One of the most recent reports comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts report that finds that a quarter of all children in middle class families will be downwardly mobile, and that jumps to 40 percent for African-American males.
Clearly, something’s terribly wrong when the basic assumptions about our economy – and, by extension, our democracy – is no longer valid for millions of Americans.
Later,
