Christopher Jencks: Reinventing the American Dream
[Christopher Jencks is a professor of social policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. His books include Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass (Harvard University Press, 1992). This essay was adapted from a talk he gave at the most-recent meeting of the American Sociological Association.]
The American Dream sounds like apple pie and motherhood. Everyone is for it.
But when everyone endorses an ideal, whether it's the American Dream, equal opportunity, or justice, you can be pretty sure that they disagree about what the ideal means, and that the appearance of agreement is being achieved by talking past one another.
There are at least two competing versions of the American Dream, and they are not only different but mutually incompatible. Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that they will both need to be reinvented if our children and grandchildren are to inhabit a livable planet.
In one version, this country is the place where anyone who builds a better mousetrap can get rich. To do that, the mousetrap builder will need a lot of help: workers to make the mousetraps, salespeople to put them in the hands of consumers, and security guards to prevent the world from beating a path to the inventor's door and helping themselves. In order to get rich, mousetrap developers will also have to pay their workers far less than they make themselves. Otherwise there won't be enough money left over from mousetrap sales to make the inventor rich.
This version of the American Dream emphasizes individual talent and effort. It favors freedom and opposes government regulation. And it belongs to the Republican Party.
Democrats have another version of the American Dream: Everyone who works hard and behaves responsibly can achieve a decent standard of living. But the definition of a decent standard of living is a moving target. For those who came of age before 1950, it usually meant a steady job, owning a house in a safe neighborhood with decent schools, and believing that your children would have a chance to go to college even if you did not.
True, lots of people who worked hard and behaved responsibly didn't realize this dream. Blue-collar workers were laid off during recessions through no fault of their own, and their jobs often disappeared when technological progress allowed employers to produce more stuff with fewer workers. Still, more and more people achieved this dream between 1945 and 1970, so the Democratic version of the American Dream had broader appeal than the Republican version, in which a smaller number of people could get much richer.
Since the early 1970s, however, all that has changed.
The American economy has been under siege. Real per capita disposable income has continued to grow, but the average annual increase has fallen, from 2.7 percent between 1947 and 1973 to 1.8 percent between 1973 and 2005. Of course, even a 1.8-percent annual increase in purchasing power is far more than the human species achieved during most of its history, and it is also far more than we are likely to achieve in the future unless we do a lot of creative accounting.
What transformed the political landscape was not the slowdown in growth but the distributional change that accompanied it. From 1947 to 1973, the purchasing power of those in the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution rose at the same rate as per capita disposable income, about 2.7 percent a year. Among families in the top 5 percent, the growth rate was 2.2 percent. From 1973 to 2006, however, the average annual increase in the purchasing power of the bottom 95 percent was only .6 percent. The top 5 percent, in contrast, managed to maintain annual growth of 2.0 percent, which was almost the same as what they enjoyed before 1973.
That's a lot of numbers, but what my students at the Kennedy School call the "take-away" is pretty simple: After 1973, when economic growth slowed, America had a choice. We could have tried to share the pain equally by maintaining the social contract under which living standards had risen at roughly the same rate among families at all levels. Or we could have treated the slowdown in growth as evidence that the Democratic version of the American Dream didn't work, and that we should try the Republican version, in which we all look out for ourselves, some people get rich, and most get left behind.
We chose the Republican option....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
The American Dream sounds like apple pie and motherhood. Everyone is for it.
But when everyone endorses an ideal, whether it's the American Dream, equal opportunity, or justice, you can be pretty sure that they disagree about what the ideal means, and that the appearance of agreement is being achieved by talking past one another.
There are at least two competing versions of the American Dream, and they are not only different but mutually incompatible. Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that they will both need to be reinvented if our children and grandchildren are to inhabit a livable planet.
In one version, this country is the place where anyone who builds a better mousetrap can get rich. To do that, the mousetrap builder will need a lot of help: workers to make the mousetraps, salespeople to put them in the hands of consumers, and security guards to prevent the world from beating a path to the inventor's door and helping themselves. In order to get rich, mousetrap developers will also have to pay their workers far less than they make themselves. Otherwise there won't be enough money left over from mousetrap sales to make the inventor rich.
This version of the American Dream emphasizes individual talent and effort. It favors freedom and opposes government regulation. And it belongs to the Republican Party.
Democrats have another version of the American Dream: Everyone who works hard and behaves responsibly can achieve a decent standard of living. But the definition of a decent standard of living is a moving target. For those who came of age before 1950, it usually meant a steady job, owning a house in a safe neighborhood with decent schools, and believing that your children would have a chance to go to college even if you did not.
True, lots of people who worked hard and behaved responsibly didn't realize this dream. Blue-collar workers were laid off during recessions through no fault of their own, and their jobs often disappeared when technological progress allowed employers to produce more stuff with fewer workers. Still, more and more people achieved this dream between 1945 and 1970, so the Democratic version of the American Dream had broader appeal than the Republican version, in which a smaller number of people could get much richer.
Since the early 1970s, however, all that has changed.
The American economy has been under siege. Real per capita disposable income has continued to grow, but the average annual increase has fallen, from 2.7 percent between 1947 and 1973 to 1.8 percent between 1973 and 2005. Of course, even a 1.8-percent annual increase in purchasing power is far more than the human species achieved during most of its history, and it is also far more than we are likely to achieve in the future unless we do a lot of creative accounting.
What transformed the political landscape was not the slowdown in growth but the distributional change that accompanied it. From 1947 to 1973, the purchasing power of those in the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution rose at the same rate as per capita disposable income, about 2.7 percent a year. Among families in the top 5 percent, the growth rate was 2.2 percent. From 1973 to 2006, however, the average annual increase in the purchasing power of the bottom 95 percent was only .6 percent. The top 5 percent, in contrast, managed to maintain annual growth of 2.0 percent, which was almost the same as what they enjoyed before 1973.
That's a lot of numbers, but what my students at the Kennedy School call the "take-away" is pretty simple: After 1973, when economic growth slowed, America had a choice. We could have tried to share the pain equally by maintaining the social contract under which living standards had risen at roughly the same rate among families at all levels. Or we could have treated the slowdown in growth as evidence that the Democratic version of the American Dream didn't work, and that we should try the Republican version, in which we all look out for ourselves, some people get rich, and most get left behind.
We chose the Republican option....