Nobel winner Stiglitz: “American Dream is a myth”

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nobel-prize-winner-joseph-stiglitz-american-dream-is-a-myth/

by gull • 11 years ago

23 27 11 years ago

CaiGengYang3• 11 years ago

Hmm ... I disagree. America still seems to be the place with the greatest civil liberties, technological and scientific advancements

erkose• 11 years ago

Not to mention the largest incarcerated population in the world. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...

CaiGengYang3• 11 years ago

I'm genuinely surprised that USA has such a high incarceration rate, and even so much higher than China which I consider still a police state.

But in terms of science, technology and programming , civil liberties ... can any other country compete with America ? Google, Apple, Microsoft, FaceBook, Yahoo ... all the most innovative companies are made in America ... . You can express political dissent in America without getting jailed (as far as I know). You can't do that in China or Singapore

Numberwang• 11 years ago

That's not really disagreeing. You are talking about other things than what he is writing about.

vanderZwan• 11 years ago

That's not what is meant with The American Dream in this context. Stiglitz is talking about social mobility.

It's also not the first tim I hear talk about social mobility not really existing. Gregory Clark gave an interesting lecture about the topic on the RSA youtube channel a year ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyIMwzHuiCU&t=25s

CaiGengYang3• 11 years ago

Why did I get negative 4 points for making this comment ?

linkydinkandyou• 11 years ago

Maybe for Stiglitz it is, but for hard-working people with real skills, America provides great opportunities.

dominotw2• 11 years ago

Yea look at Indians and Chinese in America.

ljw1001• 11 years ago

i think you mean hard-working people with real skills - and copious amounts of luck. America used to be a place where most hardworking people could improve their living standard, now it's a lottery where a small minority do.

dominotw2• 11 years ago

Lottery based on what?

Are you willing to send your kids to a non segregated school and live in a non segregated neighborhoods?

forrestthewoods• 11 years ago

The days if simply being able to work hard and do well are long gone. All the straight forward factory jobs are long gone and never coming back. So that American dream is probably dead.

twblalock• 11 years ago

Studies have shown that intergenerational social mobility in America since the 80s has been a bit lower than is popularly assumed. Stiglitz's book about this is newsworthy because most people still don't know that, despite the fact that economists and sociologists have known it, and talked about it, and taught it to their students, for decades.

sandworm101• 11 years ago

The American dream is like the pony express. It was the product of a great many particular circumstances. It did once exist, for a handful of people in a few chosen places, but disappeared before anyone realized. It's a romantic ideal more important as fiction than practical reality. It is something to be talked about, not something that ever actually happens. So it is no more dead today than ever because it wasn't never really alive in the first place.

huxley• 11 years ago

Just for perspective for those unfamiliar with what short a period the Pony Express[1] actually operated its 2000 mile long, 184 station mail delivery system: it started in April 3 1860 and ended October 24, 1861.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express

fsloth• 11 years ago

When was the myth born anyway? II. world war ended the depression and the job market became shortaged of workers - I'm sure those of that generation profited. Before that there was the campaign in the 1800:s to colonize the vacant fertile lands and farmers could get all the land they could farm dirt cheaply. But other than those two episodes - was there actually that much socio-economic mobility compared to other areas? In the mid 1800:s the americans were massively more literate than e.g. english (something like 80% compared to 50%?) so I can belive the comparable opportunities were much better in the US than in the UK but I'm short of statistics...

notahacker• 11 years ago

In the mid 1800:s the americans were massively more literate than e.g. english (something like 80% compared to 50%?)

If you compare the US figure for 1870 with the UK figure for 1820, perhaps, but in an era where both nations are noted to have seen significant rises in literacy that seems a tad unfair...

In 1870 the figures were 80% and 76% respectively[1], hardly a "massive" difference and I'm not aware of any evidence or even arguments to the effect that US levels of literacy rose earlier or faster.

The US certainly was exceptional in the mid 1800s in still having opportunities to stake out unclaimed fertile land, perhaps a more attractive route to prosperity than labouring in a British mill but then again until the 1860a it was also unusual in having a significant proportion of its population having no social mobility whatsoever on account of being slaves...

[1]http://ourworldindata.org/data/education-knowledge/literacy/

rst• 11 years ago

Post World War II, you had a bunch of other things leading to compression of the income distribution, from very high top marginal tax rates (90% through 1960; 70% through 1980) to low cost education (subsidized for just about everyone through better support than currently for good state schools -- and even more for returning troops in particular, a substantial fraction of all college-age men, through the GI bill). And of course, there were much stronger labor unions, present in most large workplaces.

Anyone who thinks the '50s were a good time because they came before "big government" has managed to forget about the New Deal, the GI Bill, and a National Labor Relations Board that still had teeth. Among other things...

dredmorbius• 11 years ago

1940s is about right:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=American+Dream...

Earlier instances would have been Manifest Destiny and the concept of progress, which emerged in the mid 19th century.

huac• 11 years ago

I've always wondered if 'affirmative action,' but conditioned on household wealth instead of racial origin, could create more social or economic mobility. Has anyone else considered this strategy?

IkmoIkmo3• 11 years ago

The issue is that you can game wealth, you can't game skin color. (or at least, few have tried! [0]) If you can get job or university positions on the basis of household wealth I think we may see increasing abuse of this system.

Beyond that, affirmative action attacks a real issue which is a low level of racism, which is unintentional, not malicious, but exists in the form of bigotry that has real effects.

This has been studied quite a bit. For example, teachers who are told who the top students are in the class at the start of the year and told that they're predicted to do the best, end up being affected by this. Because at the end of the year, these very students have the best outcomes. Makes sense you'd think, until you hear that the choice of the students at the beginning was totally random. Similarly, studies show that students who are told they'll do great, actually do better than those who're told the opposite.

The combination of these facts, with the fact that teachers perceive minorities as being less able (again, not intentionally, a teacher won't say or even think a student is less able because he's e.g. black, but when perceptions are studied it is what, on average, shows up in the numbers), given teachers negatively affect students who they perceive as less able or low-opportunity, and the fact students respond to this, creates issues.

And similar things happen in the workplace, too, when applying for say a job, or indeed across society. I remember a German on hackernews a year ago who wrote a script to apply to housing via mass email with auto-generated profiles. He sent thousands of them. A guy named Hanz got a virtually 100% response rate. A guy with an arab name 1%.

In such cases, affirmative action can help. It doesn't matter how poor or rich you are. Hypothetically, a rich, educated, hard-working arab would face mostly the same issue, and a poor guy with no ambition or work ethic named Hanz would not. Affirmative action attacks the inherent discrimination based on ethnicity in that process, affirmative action based on wealth would not.

Affirmative action based on ethnicity is imperfect in obvious ways, of course. But I think it better targets the issue better and can't be gamed or manipulated as easily.

Of course there are obvious ways to use household wealth to affect policy and they're very common. For example here in the Netherlands you can get free healthcare, full coverage, if you earn little. You get deep subsidies for housing. If you're young and your parents can't afford recreational stuff (whether it's karate or playing violin) the government allocates to your child roughly the entire amount of what these things would cost. Education is de facto free, but if your parents earn little (i.e. can't support you financially), then you get an extra $250 or so per month, and an extra $500 or so if you don't live at home anymore, as a stipend. (after all, if you study full time, you can't work full-time. So this will help cover part of the bills. And again, tuition is already covered. To lower barriers to education and make it accessible to all, equal financing is important). If you're a single parent with children, this amount is drastically increased, specifically for the possibility to study. All of these things mean that kids aren't ostracised based on wealth and class (as much). Kids whose parents aren't rich can actually participate in sports, recreation and culture to a large extent. Kids whose parents are poor can go to top universities. They get full health care coverage and support with housing. All of these things mean that if you're poor, you're not immediately relegated to a social circle of poor people, and you're not forced (financially) into making short-term decisions (like going to work straight out of highschool because bills need to be paid), and room exists to plan for the long-term (like spending years in uni).

This does wonders for social mobility of minorities, which leads to better outcomes, a stronger workforce which is less dependent and generates more tax revenues, which means the generous social welfare system isn't leaned on as much as a meagre one which keeps people locked into it. Not to mention all kinds of social cohesion benefits, between classes as well as ethnicities.

It's far from perfect but it seems like the right approach. Affirmative action alone is no solution, not without a system that helps minorities create similar outcomes like the one described. Without that, disadvantaged minorities (and indeed poor majorities, e.g. white people in the US) can't make transformational gains between ages of 1 and 22, end up actually less capable than the ethnic/socioeconomic majority, and this creates resistance to policies like affirmative action and perpetuates the problem, and importantly also doesn't solve the issue of social mobility issues for the poor people in the majority population either.

[0] http://www.vice.com/read/everything-we-know-so-far-about-the...

littletimmy• 11 years ago

I am optimistic that this "American Dream" could still be a reality. The United States absolutely has the resources to put a hard floor on living, health and education standards, thereby helping people to break the rut of family poverty.

That the US people collectively don't have the will to do it is another story. The amount of psychopathy in this country towards the unfortunate is astounding.

wkcamp• 11 years ago

Part of the issue is that many people are ready to perceive themselves as correct before perceiving another as correct. So the U.S. divides into numerous positions with everyone casting blame on others and making unsubstantiated generalizations. And progress then becomes elusive.

Nobel winner Stiglitz: “American Dream is a myth”

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