Time was an industrious American with true grit and a little moxie could pull him or herself up by his or her bootstraps, starting off with nothing but ambition in the mailroom and advancing all the way to the F...B...I. There's considerable debate over when this was the norm, but we clearly remember seeing it documented in such motion pictures as The Talented Mr. Ripley. Well, sorry to disillusion you, but that was the oldAmerica, according to a number of troubling studies showing that the United States is now the least upwardly mobile of comparable nations like Canada. Well, isn't it high time we went up and And it isn't just liberals who are wagging their fingers at the American dream's dessicated corpse; conservatives like Rick Santorum have been warning that movement "up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America." Numerous studies, such as this one [pdf] by the Pew Charitable Trusts, show that 65 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths. And the same "stickiness" is seen at the top income levels, where 62 percent of Americans raised in the top fifth stay in the top two-fifths.
Meanwhile, up in Canada, an economist at the University of Ottawa found that just 16 percent of Canadian men who grew up in the bottom tenth of incomes stayed there as adults, compared with 22 percent of Americans. Reviewing 50 studies of nine countries, the economist ranked Canada, Norway, Finland and Denmark as the most mobile, while America and England were tied for least mobile. "The bottom fifth in the U.S. looks very different from the bottom fifth in other countries," Scott Winship, a researcher at the Brookings Institution,tells the Times. "Poor Americans have to work their way up from a lower floor."
And it's become increasingly difficult to get off of that floor, for a variety of reasons. Analysts point to a weaker social safety net in America than in other developed Western nations, resulting in children raised in more deleterious environments, and more often raised by single mothers than their foreign peers. The U.S. also has a longer history of what the Times describes as "racial stratification," as well as "uniquely high incarceration rates." On the bright side, the prison system is one of America's most lucrative growth industries!
Even more troubling, the Times reports that most of these studies use data from people born before 1970, which means the worst is yet to come, because "wage gaps, single motherhood and incarceration increased later." Of course, maybe all these "studies" are as bogus as those eggheads who are always scaremongering about "global warming." No need for alarm—those aren't barbarians at the gates, Muffie, just the landscaping crew. No, no, that's not a shotgun, it's a leafblower. After all, "if America is so poor in economic mobility, maybe someone should tell all these people who still want to come to the U.S.," says Stuart M. Butler, an assholeanalyst at the Heritage Foundation.