THE AMERICAN DREAM….Paul Krugman writes in The Nation this week on “The Death of Horatio Alger:
Over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically. Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence. This goes along with other studies indicating that rags-to-riches stories have become vanishingly rare, and that the correlation between fathers’ and sons’ incomes has risen in recent decades.
And, as Krugman points out, public policy is helping to exacerbate the problem, not solve it.
I didn’t worry too much about income inequality 20 years ago, but today I do ? not because my values have changed, but because the facts on the ground have changed. Inequality is getting worse, social mobility is declining, and it’s all being helped along by very deliberate policy decisions. I wonder how long it will take before even conservatives admit that it’s a real problem?
Probably forever. But there’s still the ballot box.
