American men have less income than their fathers’ generation did at the same age....The report only covered men and co-author Isabel Sawhill, a Senior Fellow at Brookings, noted that while male incomes have declined, "family incomes have risen slightly because more women have gone to work, adding a second earner to the family.” That's true enough but when it takes two earners to provide for a family at just about the same level as one did 30 years ago, it still leaves us in the same fix as Alice, running as much as we can to stay in the same place.
According to the report, men who were in their thirties in 1974 had median incomes of about $40,000, while men of the same age in 2004 had median incomes of about $35,000 (adjusted for inflation). Thus, as a group, income for this generation of men is, on average, 12 percent lower than those of their fathers’ generation. ...
“The expectation that each generation will do better than their parents has become a fundamental part of what we call ‘The American Dream’, but this new analysis suggests this bedrock belief may be shifting under our feet,” said [John] Morton. [Morton, who co-authored the report, is managing director of Pew’s Economic Policy Initiatives and director of the Economic Mobility Project.] “Income is not the only factor in overall economic mobility, but it is clearly a key component and today’s data suggest that during a thirty-year period of economic expansion, a rising tide did not lift all boats.”
However, what I wanted to point out was that Morton's definition of the American Dream, not as "having it all" or even as having more than you do but as your children being better off than you, is one I've used for some time now. Which in turns points up why the report is wrong to say that the "shifting" of that dream is something that "may" be happening. It is happening and it has been happening for some time.
Almost exactly 12 years ago, I wrote to a friend in the UK that
what’s happening to us is a loss of hope. Just a generation or two ago, we as a people had a certain native, even naïve, confidence that things would get better. Not necessarily any specific, identifiable thing, but, well, you know, things. More recently, that confidence has faded, to be replaced by the fallback position that “things” can get better. Now, even that limited faith has failed us.Three years later - right in the midst of the glory days of Bill Clinton to which we can only be so lucky as to return, if we're to believe the "lesser of the evil"ers - I responded to someone's denunciation of consumerism, in part, by saying that
And people feel - lost. ...
Perhaps never before in our history, certainly never before in this century, has such a large portion of our population (and not just those proverbial angry white guys, either) looked at their children and felt that those children will wind up worse off than they themselves are - felt, that is, like failures.
[her] rage at the system, valid as it is, simply doesn’t go far enough. The problem here isn’t overarching acquisitiveness or an advertising-driven consumer feeding frenzy, it’s more people working longer hours and still winding up worse off than they used to be and coming to believe that - directly contrary to what I would maintain is the real “American dream” - that their children will be even worse off than they are. For the poor, a future that had looked bleak but, arguably, not utterly hopeless is now cloaked in impenetrable darkness. ...Was that attitude I sensed reflected in election or poll results? Well, according to exit polls from the November 2006 election, only 30% of Americans expect life for the next generation to be better than life today. And that is a figure that actually hasn't changed all that much since 1992. And actually, why should it? Within the ellipsis in that 1995 quote, I referred to
Which means our response has to be far above “driv[ing] past the new car lot” and similar bromides that in any event are applicable only to a minority of families. More importantly, it means our anger should be directed away from those who are simply trying to protect their futures and those of their children from further shrinkage and towards the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, which has resulted in the US becoming the most economically-stratified nation in the industrialized world, with a greater gulf between rich and poor than that found in the most traditionally “class-ridden” societies, such as the UK. (In 1992, the most recent figures available, the richest 1% of American households owned 45% of the wealth; the richest 20% owned 92%. During the 1980s, all of the increase in wealth went to the richest 20%.)
an unremitting stagnation in personal income that’s coming to look as though it has no end, that this is no “slump” or “downturn” that will eventually reverse itself, that rather this is the way it is and is going to be, that it’s not going to change, that work gets you nowhere and more work gets you more nowhere. (Of the six primary ethnic-gender groupings in the US - black, white, and Hispanic men and women - only one of them, white women, has made a clear gain in real median income over the last 20 years. The others have either stagnated or declined.)Mr. Morton, Ms. Sawhill, I agree with your definition of the American Dream. But I must tell you, there is no "may" and there is no "shifting." That dream is collapsing into the cesspoll of increasing inequality. And it will take a hell of a lot more than "tut-tut"s and "oh-my"s to do anything about it. And one thing that will not do anything about it is electing another "lesser evil" corporatist Democrat.
Footnote: This is a link to the report.
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