Professor Gregory Clark
Credit: KVOR
California economics professor says he’s crunched the numbers, and he has concluded that the American Dream is dead.
Gregory Clark, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, found that social mobility had diminished significantly in the past 100 years, reported KOVR-TV.
“America has no higher rate of social mobility than medieval England or pre-industrial Sweden,” Clark said. “That’s the most difficult part of talking about social mobility, is because it is shattering people’s dreams.”
He said social mobility is little different in the United States than in other countries, where ancestry strongly predicts adult social status.
“The status of your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, (and) your great-great grandchildren will be quite closely related to your average status now,” Clark said.
That’s upsetting to many of his students, Clark said.
“My students always argue with me, but I think the thing they find very hard to accept is the idea that much of their lives can be predicted from their lineage and their ancestry,” he said.
Clark’s findings, which […]
Upward mobility has never interested me that much. I think it’s a false value to begin with, and I’ve never believed in the American Dream of doing better than my parents. Why are we so fixated as a nation–perhaps as a race–on wealth accumulation and what amounts to a materialistic thrust displacing so much else in our lives? Isn’t that more at the heart of all our woes than most anything else–the notion that an essential of life is wrapped up in economic status? I reject that. I don’t care if some CEO makes a thousand times more than I make. The complications of his/her life, traded for all that cash, is punishment enough for the desire to be rich beyond measure. We all have our burdens, and I suspect great wealth is one of the heaviest.
For those of us at or close to the bottom of the “social ladder” his story hits us as a truth we cannot escape. It is, to us a matter of wether we survive or do not survive. That is not a craving for more, just a craving for justice, when the rich could help out the disadvantaged by simply recognizing that a major role of government in general is to provide a method of keeping everyone alive and well, which our system does not seem to be able to come to grips with. Someone once said “taxes are the price of civilization”, and taxation could create equality in the USA, and then everyone could at least survive.