Goodbye, Horatio Alger

The Democratic pragmatists in Congress
are so wedded to their middle-of-the-road
attitudes about government social programs,
which some of them insist won them victory
in November, that they seem incapable of
seeing the economic state of the nation for
what it has sadly become. To put it simply, the
Demo cratic majority that took control of Congress
in January is inheriting a class society.
Today in America, one’s birth largely determines
one’s future.
We may quibble about the exact threshold over which a
nation must pass to be described as a class society, but the latest
research on income mobility is startling. As economists Isabel
Sawhill and Sara McLanahan state in the fall volume of the
journal they edit, The Future of Children, the American ideal of
a classless society “is one in which all children have a roughly
equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of
the family into which they were born.” In sum, they write, “the
association between one’s parents’ income and one’s own should
be small.