Not since the Nixon recession anyway. It was about forty years ago, James Surowiecki writes in the New Yorker, that the social mobility Americans believe separates our nation from all the rest just began to disappear in all but Salt Lake City and San Jose. Since about 1974, we've fallen behind. Sweden (for example) is well ahead of us. and "mobility is lower here than in most European countries."
As the economist Joseph P. Ferrie has shown, in the late nineteenth century U.S. society was far more mobile than Great Britain’s—a child in the U.S. was much more likely to move into a higher-class profession than that of his father—and much more mobile than it became later. It was possible for Andrew Carnegie to start as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory at a dollar-twenty a week and end up one of the world’s richest men. This legacy left a deep imprint on American culture. The sociologist Werner Sombart noted in 1906 that the average American worker felt he had a good chance of rising out of his class. That feeling has persisted: Americans are less concerned than Europeans about inequality and more confident that society is meritocratic. The problem is that, over time, the American dream has become increasingly untethered from American reality. ...Surowiecki,NewYorker
What adds to our anxiety is that up until about the Reagan revolution, the standard of living rose for the middle class. The middle class was at least able to improve its lot even if its members couldn't "move on up." And anyway -- as Surowiecki writes -- "making it easier for some Americans to move up the economic ladder is no great triumph if most can barely hold on."
As for the guys on the lowest step of the ladder, well, they have little chance of climbing up. They "made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents," as one political scientist noted in the early '60's. Fewer than ten percent in that grouping have much hope of a significant change in their fortunes.
There's "America" and then there 's America.
