what evidence either supports or refutes the idea that it is harder to get ahead
today well there's been a number of studies done uh... or studies I should
say have been done over the last several decades that are now
being reported on
looking at intergenerational mobility and what that means is look taking
taking a person from the time that they're coming of age and coming into the
workplace until the time that they have children so about a twenty year
period and looking at whether they're doing better worse uh the same as
their parents and what those statistics show us is that america is following
behind particularly in comparison to europe which i think is really
interesting because we think again to go back to the statue of liberty to
the generations before us that's why people came to america they thought it
was going to be easier here one other important point
that you make is that
if you were born in nineteen seventy
in the bottom
one-fifth of the socioeconomic ladder you are far less likely to get ahead than
you would have at one time yeah i wonder if you'd talk a little bit about
that yeah so if you were to be uh... in that bottom uh... quartile in say the
fifties
it would've been a lot easier to get ahead than it would be if you started out
in the seventies and went 'till today and i think that
that reflects a kind of mega shift in our economy the period of highest growth
in most of our lifetime was from the fifties to the seventies it was the
post war era europe was rebuilding america was surging ahead
on there was a tremendous amount of uh... there was a tremendous amount of consolidation growth in american
industry but globalization
hadn't really taken off yet once you hit the seventies and in particular the late
seventies
you start getting a lot of other countries coming online you know you get
the emerging markets china you get eastern europe you get a little bit later on you
get the fall of the soviet union and all those countries coming in
and of course people in those places want theirs as well but then that means
many many uh billions billions of of more people that we have to compete
with
are people today better off or worse off than their parents
well it's interesting uh... there's two ways to look at it you can look at it in
absolute figures which a lot of economists will to be fair and then we
have to say we're better off we actually do have more money than our
parents we have
many many technologies that they didn't have i mean you know look at our flat
screen televisions and our snazzy refrigerators and things like that
uh... but if you look at it in relative terms
a lot of people would say that we're not as well-off and
i think relative is what matters because as i as i write in the article
we don't peg ourselves to our parents we peg ourselves to the jones's will you talk a
little bit about the divide between the richest and the poorest
in america today
i'm gonna refer to coming apart again because i do think it's it's a very very
interesting look
uh and this is someone who is uh... he's on the right i i tend to think
of myself more as a liberal but i think some interesting points are being made
in that
there's an entire cultural divide now
between the upper middle class and the upper classes in this country and the working
class uh...
in terms of education
which is the base of the pyramid that's that's where it all starts really um...
because that is education is you know as you know is the number one
factor in terms of mobility if you don't have that your chances of getting up the
ladder really are are slim
so these people are more highly educated
their lives are different they tend to get married and stay married more than say a
working-class person would no moral judgment on that but what it does mean is
they tend to be richer and to be not operating with one income you tend to have
more stability there's all different sorts of ways in which their lives are
different their their
habits are different their
um... their political values are different so we're really creating a
bifurcated society here and i do think that that's a risk for democracy what
about the real-estate market how has that impacted
things
that's a huge
missing link that i think people don't don't speak enough about so
you know there was a lot of talk uh during the clinton administration and
later in the bush years of creating an opportunity society by allowing people to buy homes
and certainly while uh... homeownership has been an important part of the
american dream as we all know there was there were an unfortunate number of
flawed mortgages given to people often fraudulently on the part of the banks
who couldn't afford them the government
in some cases knowingly
pushed these policy ideas out because they wanted this debt
to cover up this long term problem of the hollowing middle that has been
happening since the late nineteen seventies basically since the seventies
wages in this country and every other rich country in the world have been flat
and we've been trying to hide that with debt and we can't do it anymore
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