America's Vanishing Ladder

 

Some Americans still boast of their country as the "land of opportunity."  The place where anyone with guts and a bit of willpower can make it, where prosperity can be had by all if they really want it.

In the wake of WW-II it sounded plausible. The US emerged with its industrial and production base, much of it just a few years old, intact, ready to switch back from guns to butter.  Former rivals in Europe and Asia stood devastated, their economies wrecked. 

It was an era that saw the broadest based middle class in history emerge in North America. It was an engine of social mobility that propelled the working class from factory floor to the trades to the professions, sometimes within just one generation. If you wanted it badly enough you just pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Unlike today, the hurdles were manageable. With that came a lot of political stability and belief in democracy and the "American way."

Then Reagan, Thatcher and, yes, Mulroney, brought down the crushing hammer of neoliberalism on the old order. The myths persisted as, quietly, that ladders of social mobility were pulled up and a new, more stratified society settled in.  More wealth accrued to few people, an elite, in a process that Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz reminds us was neither merit- nor market-based but almost entirely legislated by compliant politicians.  

Here's what social mobility in the US looks like today:

Not surprisingly it's the old Slave States of the southeast and the rust belt states - Michigan and Ohio - that have fared most poorly.  These are also the states we commonly associate with the worst degree of populism/white nationalism.

How far has social mobility declined in the United States? Back in 2017 an item appeared in Business Insider that "You're twice as likely to live the American dream in Canada." In 2020, visualcapitalist.com released a chart showing the US to be 27th out of 82 nations sampled. (Canada was rated 14th behind mainly western European countries).

I suppose most nations have areas of prosperity and those of relative poverty. America's rust belt was once a hive of manufacturing and quite prosperous. In the 50s, Detroit was considered to be the wealthiest city in the United States.  While the city appears to be stirring, much of Detroit remains abandoned, vacant. It's also thought that the climate migration now starting in the American south could see rust belt cities such as Detroit rebound economically.

The Deep South is a different story.  It's been on the ropes much longer, certainly since the Civil War.  Even with weak labour and environmental laws and industry-compliant governments it has struggled, in part due to its more poorly educated labour pool. 

Boeing rattled Washington state and aerospace unions when it announced the company would open a new manufacturing plant in North Charleston, a second 787 Dreamliner assembly plant.  It wasn't long before Boeing ran into customer resistance to the South Carolina-built jets, buyers demanding aircraft from the Renton and Everett plants instead.

A 2013 article from The New York Times captured America's dilemma:

Over the last decade or two, the American middle has been hollowed out, with an affluent, well-educated class growing on one side of the divide and a poor and working-class majority on the other, faced with limited opportunities to change their circumstances. 

One of the most eye-popping statistics reported by Mr. Rattner, is that 93 percent of all income growth in the U.S. in 2010 went to the top 1 percent of Americans. And 37 percent went to the top .01 percent. He writes:

Also astonishing: just 15,000 households received 37 percent of all of those income gains. In no other period in recent American history have economic gains been concentrated so disproportionately in an elite sliver. 

Trump's base, his blind followers, are riled up over getting the shit end of the stick. Yet they desperately cling to Trump and the Republicans as the right doles out trillion dollar, debt-funded, tax breaks to the very rich.

The America of Lincoln and the Roosevelts is just an artifact. Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt knew that it was government's duty to regulate the "constant struggle" between labour and capital which included putting a thumb on the scales as necessary to favour labour.  From Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the stage was set for progressive democracy, however flawed. In recent decades that progress was lost without so much as a fight.