My parents are a great example of the American Dream. They were the first people in their families to attend college and to get post-grad degrees. They came from huge families (11 on Dad’s side, 13 on Mom’s) which guaranteed that they even with good jobs for their fathers they would be in dire economic straights.
They managed, with some help from programs like the G.I. bill and academic scholarships, to get the education they needed to go from working class to middle class. They were not alone in their achievements in the post WWII generation. The middle class blossomed and prosperity grew. Unfortunately for the kids of folks like my parents, holding on to middle class status is turning out to be nearly as hard as attaining it.
A new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts details how one third of people who grew up in a middle class household have now become ‘downwardly mobile’. For the purposes of the study the group from Pew defined the middle class as being between the 30th and 70th percentile in income.
The study sample was based on people who were between 14 and 17 in 1979 and lived in their parents house, in the income brackets described above. The study then looked at their income status between 2004 and 2006 and compared the numbers to the numbers in their parents generation.
Note that this was before our economic catastrophe and its ongoing affects. 1 in 3 of these children of the middle class had slipped below the 30th percentile in income. The study finds that the problems of those who did slip out the middle class were what you might expect. A lack of higher education is a strong signal, women who are divorced and, of course the numbers are much higher for minorities than for white citizens.
One of the big finding is the marriage makes a big difference in maintaining middle class status. This is hardly surprising since nearly every family these days is a two income family and losing that other income or never having it makes staying in the income bands twice as hard.
The thing that hits me the hardest is that this study shows a lack of opportunity. The idea of upward mobility, that your children will have a better life than you, has always been based on the premise of hard work, but hard work without an opportunity to advance just, at best, allows one to hold their place.
The pernicious meme of total self-reliance that the Right has been pushing since at least Regan is part of the problem. My parents were smart, focused people, but that on its own is not enough to pull one from poverty to comfortable middle class status. They achieved because there were opportunities for them, because there were programs that allowed them the chance to show that they had what it took to change their income status.
In the last decade those chances have become known as ‘big government’ and the idea that we should try to level to the playing field between the privileged rich and the rest of us has fallen out of favor in a big way.
Even those kids of the wealthy would have a hard time maintaining their wealth if they did not have the advantage of legacy admissions, of connections to business and industry. No one is an island, and no one .regardless of the Horatio Alger stories becomes a success alone. It is just not possible.
This 1 in 3 chance of being downwardly mobile should be a wake up call to anyone who has kids or just cares about the idea of a strong middle class in this nation. We have cannibalized the mechanisms that created the middle class. We have allowed or actively helped destroy the Labor movement. We have idolized a dream of wealth the most will never achieve at the cost of the idea that if most of us where in the middle, then all of us as going to be better off.
As the cost of education has skyrocketed, and the growth of for profit schools that care more about money than education have grown, we have cored out the other major indicator of economic stability. There was a time when someone could leave high school and find a good paying job in manufacturing, with no need of advanced education.
This is no longer true but the cost of a four year education for many, even in the middle classes, is either out of reach or guarantied to leave the recent graduate with a debt load that will take decades to pay off.
To me it all comes down to this; as a nation, like it or not, we succeed or fail together. We do not have the option of saying ‘every man for himself!’. We have seen what a generation of that kind of thinking has done to the United States and we can ill afford another.
It is time to recognize that the being wealthy should not be a goal in and of itself. My parents achieved their middle class lifestyle not by obsessively focusing on money but by focusing on how they could use their advanced degrees to make sure others had a fair shake. It gave them income to send their kids to college and to have the things that their parents only dreamed about having. Surely having more people in that place instead of a small elite with more money than they can ever hope to spend and the rest picking up the scraps is better.
The floor is yours.