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May 18, 2005

America, Where Financial Class is Real But Social Class Isn't

Today, rags-to-riches stories are actually more comon in Germany, and far more common in Norway, than in America. Financial social mobility -- the odds that kids born to poor parents will wind up rich themselves -- is higher today in Europe than in America. Of all the leading democracies, America is not only the country where the rich are farthest removed from ordinary citizens in income, but also the country where inherited wealth matters most in determining whether you will become rich.

Yet for all that, America is still far less class-conscious than, say, Britain. In America, a millionaire from a family of millionaires, like our current President, can sincerely think of himself as an ordinary guy, and millions of American voters can accept him as ordinary too. In America, there are rich people who drive beat-up pickup trucks and wear blue jeans, and middle-class people with a sports car or a custom-tailored outfit. I've had British people explain to me how they can tell someone's family status background by the way they speak; here in America, I couldn't even tell my neighbors' current income by the clothes they wear. I suspect Britain and the rest of Europe are becoming a lot less class-conscious (and those Scandanavians, again, seem really egalitarian), but even if American money is increasingly inherited money, we all seem to do an awfully good job of ignoring money when it comes to how we treat each other.

Or do we? That's the trick about social class: how the heck do you measure it? The psychologist Cialdini once did a study where college students were observed in traffic as the car in front of them failed to move when the light changed. Students took much longer to honk at an expensive Cadillac than at a cheap Ford -- despite the fact that these same students, when polled, had declared that, if anything, it would be the cheap car's driver that they'd be more patient with. Consciously, we all hate the idea of treating people better because of their money -- especially because of their inherited money. But unconsciously, are we programmed to respect wealth? If America is becoming a society of more inherited wealth, is that going to make us a society of class-bound idiocies of the kind we've always mocked Old Europe for?

We cherish the image of America as the rags-to-riches country, where a man's father makes no difference to where he himself ends up. Up till about 1900 that was almost the literal truth: America spent its first century as the most opportunity-rich country that history had ever seen. Before industrialization, wealth meant land, and in America land was cheap. Anyone willing to move to the frontier and work themselves ragged could build up enough assets to make their family solidly middle-class by the time they died. While Europe was a land where a poor parent was cursed to pass on his poverty to his kids, America was a country where the poor were always moving up to become the average or the rich.

After 1900, industrialization made America less socially mobile than it had been, and Europe more so. But it's only in the last generation that Europeans have become impressively class-mobile, while America has started to get a little class-stratified.

A big part of the answer seems to be education. No matter how hard you work today, if you're a high school dropout you have to be awfully smart or lucky to make a good living. All the European countries seem to have much more commitment to their public school systems than we do. And those nearly class-free Scandanavian countries have made huge investments in guaranteed childcare and preschool for all their children. I don't necessarily buy Thomas Friedman's ranting of "The Chinese are coming! Quick, teach our kids math!" But it's probably not coincidence that our two most recent big ethnic success stories, Jewish Americans and Asian Americans, both come from cultures that put a fanatical emphasis on the value of education. If Americans today aren't moving up from poverty as much as Europeans are, maybe it reflects that today's wealth is not land, but education -- and while quality farmland in America is easily affordable, good education often isn't.

Of course, you could argue that it doesn't matter, because today being rich or poor means less than it ever has before. Poverty isn't what it used to be, in a world of cheap food, free emergency rooms, synthetic clothing and color television. For that matter, wealth isn't what it used to be. The very rich still have live-in cooks, but lots of people eat at restaurants; the very rich still have live-in maids, but most families have washing machines and dishwashers, not to mention microwave ovens. The number of hours of the day that a middle-class family has to spend on tasks that a rich family gets done for them is smaller than it's ever been in history. Your day-to-day life is just not as affected by your relative income as it was a hundred or even fifty years ago.

In fact, almost the only part of life where relative income is still hugely important is in government. For almost all the big domestic policy debates we have in this country right now -- education reform, tax cuts, Medicare, Social Security -- it makes a huge difference whether you're poor or rich. While the rest of our economy makes us all seem close to equal, our government still runs on the principle that the rich pay more and the middle class gets more.

So perhaps the class effect we should most worry about isn't a breakdown of our society, but a breakdown of our government. If no one from the middle class is going to get rich, sooner or later the middle class will vote for huge taxes. Or perhaps we should worry about the rich grabbing all the government offices, and working to sabotage all the expensive government programs that they and their friends pay for without getting any benefit from them.

Every society runs on a "social contract" of some kind; America's has been that it's okay to be rich because it's not too hard to become rich. If that stops being true, things are going to get very uncomfortable over the next few decades. Maybe Tom Friedman is right, and we need to throw massive amounts of money into public education after all -- not just for protection from the Chinese, but for protection from ourselves.

Posted by danielstarr at May 18, 2005 02:55 AM

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Comments

Why should American kids focus more on education when they see a pro basketball, baseball player, rapper, making multi-million or even a card dealer or waiter in Vegas making six figures?

If you look at the universities today, most post graduate master, doctorial students are foreign or from Asian, Indian or Jewish background.

Posted by: James at May 26, 2005 09:29 AM

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