Rags to rags, Riches to riches
Maybe it’s time to stop calling America the “land of opportunity.”
Opportunity is the crux of the American idea. Opportunity is what the New World has always reprented: struggle, risk, lf-determination, and the hope of spiritual and material progress. Even now, to new immigrants, that or something like it is the pull – and for them at least, it is no fal promi. If you move to America, you move up, and this is true whether you are rafting across the Rio Grande or negotiating the hazards of the HIB visa program. British emigrants (I am one) are fond of Spain and the United States. They go to Spain to retire; they come here to ri to new challenges. This lure, barely diminished after more than three centuries, has ever been an incalculable source of national strength.
But is America any longer a land of opportunity for the people born here? The evidence, such as it is, points to a surprising and 校园安全问题dispiriting answer: no, not especially.
The idea that America is exceptional in its material opportunities is deeply lodged in the cult
xin开头的成语ure. For as long as the country had a western frontier with territory beyond, internal migration was just as bold a venture as crossing the ocean had been for the first ttlers, and just as promising for the ambitious and lf-reliant. The late-19th and early-20th centuries brought extraordinarily rapid industrial development, which nourished the American idea in a new way. Rising incomes made each succeeding generation more prosperous – and they ro so fast that people even felt more prosperous. But that pha, too, has ended. Incomes are now rising more slowly from generation to generation (and for a variety of reasons, the flattening feels wor than it is). Fewer adults today, it ems, expect their children to do better than they did. Pessimism vies with vitality for command of the national consciousness.
Much of this, no doubt, is a natural conquence of growing old. New immigrants notwithstanding, America is a middle-aged country, and striving is not a trait of the middle-aged. Still, an accumulating body of rearch suggests that the stiffening of America's socioeconomic sinews is more advanced than the culture, even now, ems willing to admit; wor than the scholars who monitor it had hitherto understood; and -- ho
英文名著w shaming is this? -- wor than in many older, wearier countries.
The American model has been regarded as proposing a kind of bargain. This is not Europe: Here, 男女性欲idleness and incompetence are sternly punished -- but merit gets rewarded. Much more than elwhere, your class background will neither prop you up or hold you back. If you derve to succeed, you will.
It is an inspiring, energizing offer -- and still a profoundly influential one. It colors the national debate about taxes, health care, and other aspects of economic policy. But it is fal advertising.
Most rearchers now give America much lower marks than they ud to for intergenerational economic mobility -- the ea with which successive generations move up or down relative to their parents. As flaws in early postwar studies have been addresd, estimates of mobility have fallen. Before the 1990s, rearchers tended to put the correlation between parents' incomes and their children's at around 20 percent, implying a high degree of mobility between generations. (Zero would imply no connection
at all; a correlation of 100 percent would imply that parents' incomes entirely determined the incomes of their children.) In the 1990s, using better data and techniques, experts tended to put that figure at about 40 percent. Recent estimates run as high as 60 percent. The finding is not that mobility has fallen since World War II -- the studies point to no clear trend. It is that as methods of measuring mobility have improved, the result, across a span of recent decades, has gotten wor. The earlier view that postwar America was an economically mobile society is less and less borne out. Perhaps it was once (before data became available to track such things accurately); but it isn't now.
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More telling, maybe, is the international comparison. America stands lower in the ranking of income mobility than most of the countries who data allow the comparison, scoring wor than Canada, all of the Scandinavian countries, and possibly even Germany and Britain (the data are imperfect, and different studies give slightly different results).
Strikingly, the rearch suggests that mobility within America's middle-income bands is similar to that in many other countries. The stickiness is at the top and the bottom. Accord
ing to one much-cited study, for instance, more than 40 percent of American boys born into the poorest fifth of the population stay there; the figure for Britain is 30 percent, for Denmark just 25 percent. In America, more than in other advanced economies, poor children stay poor. Other data show that in America, more than in, say, Britain, rich children stay rich as well.
我的校园生活作文The findings are still tentative, and the caus complicated -- hardly a firm basis for prescription. Still, if the government needed another reason to retain the estate tax (aside from the fact that it is one of the most economically efficient taxes), this might rve. In general, a little less tolerance of inherited privilege would not em amiss (hard for Americans to hear from a Brit, I understand, but look at the facts). Would it hurt, for instance, if the admissions preferences granted by America's most prestigious universities to the children of benefactors and alumni aroud more disgust, or maybe just some mild disapproval? Or if the richest Americans bequeathed西红柿黄瓜汤 less of their wealth to universities that patently have no need of it (Harvard's endowment is more than $30 billion), and more to tho that do?
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