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http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200706/land-of-opportunity
The Atlantic
June 2007Maybe it’s time to stop calling America the “land of opportunity.”
by Clive CrookRags to Rags, Riches to Riches
Opportunity is the crux of the American idea. Opportunity is what the New World has always represented: struggle, risk, self-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 false promise. 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 H1B 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 rise 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 dispiriting answer: no, not especially.
[...]
Most researchers now give America much lower marks than they used to for intergenerational economic mobility—the ease with which successive generations move up or down relative to their parents.
[...]
More telling, maybe, is the international comparison. America stands lower in the ranking of income mobility than most of the countries whose data allow the comparison, scoring worse 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 research 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.
[...]
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.
[...]
In general, a little less tolerance of inherited privilege would not seem 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 aroused more disgust, or maybe just some mild disapproval?
[...]
- - Clive Crook is an Atlantic senior editor.
* * * * *
Maintaining inherited privilege doesn't just happen.
It's organized.
It's done via vast affirmative action programs.
But when the programs are done by and for the privileged, they aren't called "affirmative action".
