As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls
Those in Bottom Rung Enjoy
Better Odds in Europe;
How Parents Confer an Edge
Immigrants See Fast Advance
The notion that the U.S is a special place where any child can grow up to be president, a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class, dates to Benjamin Franklin . The 15th child of a candle-and-soap maker, Franklin started out as a penniless printer's apprentice and rose to wealth so great that he retired to a life of politics and diplomacy at age 42.
The promise that a child born in poverty isn't trapped there remains a staple of America's self-portrait. President Bush, though a riches-to-riches story himself, revels in the humble origins of some in his cabinet. He says his attorney general "grew up in a two-bedroom house," the son of "migrant workers who never finished elementary school." He notes that his Cuban-born commerce secretary's first job for Kellogg Corp. was driving a truck; his last was chief executive.
But the reality of mobility in America is more complicated than the myth. As the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970, the odds that a child born in poverty will climb to wealth -- or a rich child will fall into the middle class -- remain stuck. Despite the spread of affirmative action, the expansion of community colleges and the other social change designed to give people of all classes a shot at success, Americans are no more or less likely to rise above, or fall below, their parents' economic class than they were 35 years ago.
Although Americans still think of their land as a place of exceptional opportunity -- in contrast to class-bound Europe -- the evidence suggests otherwise. And scholars have, over the past decade, come to see America as a less mobile society than they once believed.
As recently as the late 1980s, economists argued that not much advantage passed from parent to child, perhaps as little as 20%. By that measure, a rich man's grandchild would have barely any edge over a poor man's grandchild.
"Almost all the earnings advantages or disadvantages of ancestors are wiped out in three generations," wrote Gary Becker, the University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate, in 1986. "Poverty would not seem to be a 'culture' that persists for several generations."
But over the last 10 years, better data and more number-crunching have led economists and sociologists to a new consensus: The escalators of mobility move much more slowly. A substantial body of research finds that at least 45% of parents' advantage in income is passed along to their children, and perhaps as much as 60%. With the higher estimate, it's not only how much money your parents have that matters -- even your great-great grandfather's wealth might give you a noticeable edge today.
Many Americans believe their country remains a land of unbounded opportunity. That perception explains why Americans, much more than Europeans, have tolerated the widening inequality in recent years. It is OK to have ever-greater differences between rich and poor, they seem to believe, as long as their children have a good chance of grasping the brass ring.
This continuing belief shapes American politics and economic policy. Technology, globalization and unfettered markets tend to erode wages at the bottom and lift wages at the top. But Americans have elected politicians who oppose using the muscle of government to restrain the forces of widening inequality. These politicians argue that lifting the minimum wage or requiring employers to offer health insurance would do unacceptably large damage to economic growth.
Despite the widespread belief that the U.S. remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity. Miles Corak, an economist for Canada's national statistical agency who edited a recent Cambridge University Press book on mobility in Europe and North America, tweaked dozens of studies of the U.S., Canada and European countries to make them comparable. "The U.S. and Britain appear to stand out as the least mobile societies among the rich countries studied," he finds. France and Germany are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so.
Even the University of Chicago's Prof. Becker is changing his mind, reluctantly. "I do believe that it's still true if you come from a modest background it's easier to move ahead in the U.S. than elsewhere," he says, "but the more data we get that doesn't show that, the more we have to accept the conclusions."
Still, the escalators of social mobility continue to move. Nearly a third of the freshmen at four-year colleges last fall said their parents hadn't gone beyond high school. And thanks to a growing economy that lifts everyone's living standards, the typical American is living with more than his or her parents did. People today enjoy services -- cellphones, cancer treatment, the Internet -- that their parents and grandparents never had.
Measuring precisely how much the prosperity of Americans depends on advantages conferred by their parents is difficult, since it requires linking income data across many decades. U.S. research relies almost entirely on a couple of long-running surveys. One began in 1968 at the University of Michigan and now tracks more than 7,000 families with more than 65,000 individuals; the other was started by the Labor Department in 1966.
One drawback of the surveys is that they don't capture the experiences of recent immigrants or their children, many of whom have seen extraordinary upward mobility. The University of California at Berkeley, for instance, says 52% of last year's undergraduates had two parents who weren't born in the U.S., and that's not counting the relatively few students whose families live abroad.
Nonetheless, those two surveys offer the best way to measure the degree to which Americans' economic success or failure depends on their parents. University of Michigan economist Gary Solon, an authority in the field, says one conclusion is clear: "Intergenerational mobility in the U.S. has not changed dramatically over the last two decades."
Bhashkar Mazumder, a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economist, recently combined the government survey with Social Security records for thousands of men born between 1963 and 1968 to see what they were earning when they reached their late 20s or 30s. Only 14% of the men born to fathers on the bottom 10% of the wage ladder made it to the top 30%. Only 17% of the men born to fathers on the top 10% fell to the bottom 30%.
Land of the Self-Made Man
Benjamin Franklin best exemplified and first publicized America as the land of the mobile society. "He is the prototype of the self-made man, and his life is the classic American success story -- the story of a man rising from the most obscure of origins to wealth and international preeminence," one of his many biographers, Gordon S. Wood, wrote in 2004.
In 1828, a 14-year-old Irish immigrant named Thomas Mellon read Franklin's popular "Autobiography" and later described it as a turning point in his life. "Here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame," Mellon wrote in a memoir. The young Mellon left the family farm, became a successful lawyer and judge and later founded what became Pittsburgh's Mellon Bank. In front, he erected a statute of Franklin.
Even Karl Marx accepted the image of America as a land of boundless opportunity, citing this as an explanation for the lack of class consciousness in the U.S. "The position of wage laborer," he wrote in 1865, "is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term."
Self-made industrialist Andrew Carnegie, writing in the New York Tribune in 1890, catalogued the "captains of industry" who started as clerks and apprentices and were "trained in that sternest but most efficient of all schools -- poverty."
The historical record suggests this widely shared belief about 19th-century America was more than myth. "You didn't need to be told. You lived it. And if you didn't, your neighbors did," says Joseph Ferrie, an economic historian at Northwestern University, who has combed through the U.S. and British census records that give the occupations of thousands of native-born father-and-son pairs who lived between 1850 and 1920. In all, more than 80% of the sons of unskilled men moved to higher-paying, higher-status occupations in the late 1800s in the U.S., but less than 60% in Britain did so.
The biggest factor, Mr. Ferrie says, is that young Americans could do something most British couldn't: climb the economic ladder quickly by moving from farm towns to thriving metropolises. In 1850, for instance, James Roberts was a 14-year-old son of a day laborer living in the western New York hamlet of Catharine. Handwritten census records reveal that 30 years later, Mr. Roberts was a bookkeeper -- a much higher rung -- and living in New York City at 2257 Third Ave. with his wife and four children.
As education became more important in the 20th century -- first high school, later college -- leaping up the ladder began to require something that only better-off parents could afford: allowing their children to stay in school instead of working. "Something quite fundamental changed in the U.S. economy in the years after 1910 and before the Great Depression," says Prof. Ferrie.
One reason that the once-sharp differences between social mobility in the U.S. and Britain narrowed in the 20th century, he argues, is that the regional economies of the U.S. grew more and more similar. It became much harder to leap several rungs of the economic ladder simply by moving.
The paucity of data makes it hard to say how mobility changed for much of the 20th century. Individual census records -- the kind that Prof. Ferrie examines -- are still under seal for most of the 20th century. Data from the two national surveys didn't start rolling in until the 1970s.
Whatever the facts, the Franklin-inspired notion of America as an exceptionally mobile society persisted through most of the 20th century, as living standards improved after World War II and the children and grandchildren of immigrants prospered. Jeremiads in the 1960s and 1970s warned of an intractable culture of poverty that trapped people at the bottom for generations, and African-Americans didn't enjoy the same progress as whites. But among large numbers of Americans, there was little doubt that their children would ride the escalator.
Old Wisdom Shatters
In 1992, though, Mr. Solon, the Michigan economist, shattered the conventional academic wisdom, arguing in the American Economic Review that earlier studies relied on "error-ridden data, unrepresentative samples, or both" and misleadingly compared snapshots of a single year in the life of parent and child rather than looking over longer periods. There is "dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research," he said. Subsequent research work confirmed that.
As Mr. Mazumder, the Chicago Fed economist, put it in the title of a recent book chapter: "The apple falls even closer to the tree than we thought."
Why aren't the escalators working better? Figuring out how parents pass along economic status, apart from the obvious but limited factor of financial bequests, is tough. But education appears to play an important role. In contrast to the 1970s, a college diploma is increasingly valuable in today's job market. The tendency of college grads to marry other college grads and send their children to better elementary and high schools and on to college gives their children a lasting edge.
The notion that the offspring of smart, successful people are also smart and successful is appealing, and there is a link between parent and child IQ scores. But most research finds IQ isn't a very big factor in predicting economic success.
In the U.S., race appears to be a significant reason that children's economic success resembles their parents'. From 32 years of data on 6,273 families recorded by the University of Michigan's long-running survey, American University economist Tom Hertz calculates that 17% of whites born to the bottom 10% of families ranked by income remained there as adults, but 42% of the blacks did. Perhaps as a consequence, public-opinion surveys find African-Americans more likely to favor government redistribution programs than whites.
The tendency of well-off parents to have healthier children, or children more likely to get treated for health problems, may also play a role. "There is very powerful evidence that low-income kids suffer from more health problems, and childhood health does predict adult health and adult health does predict performance," observes Christopher Jencks, a noted Harvard sociologist.
Passing along personality traits to one's children may be a factor, too. Economist Melissa Osborne Groves of Maryland's Towson University looked at results of a psychological test for 195 father-son pairs in the government's long-running National Longitudinal Survey. She found similarities in attitudes about life accounted for 11% of the link between the income of a father and his son.
Nonetheless, Americans continue to cherish their self-image as a unique land where past and parentage puts no limits on opportunity, as they have for centuries. In his "Autobiography," Franklin wrote simply that he had "emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred to a state of affluence." But in a version that became the standard 19th-century text, his grandson, Temple, altered the words to underscore the enduring message: "I have raised myself to a state of affluence..."
美国贫富差距加大 社会阶层变动停滞
美国在人们心目中是一个独具特色的地方，哪个孩子长大后都有可能是总统；也是一个精英荟萃的地方，渊博的知识和万丈的雄心比出身、比阶级更重要。这一切可以追溯到本杰明?弗兰克林(Benjamin Franklin)的时代。
弗兰克林的父亲不过是一个蜡烛和肥皂生产商，他自己更是家中的第十五个孩子。最初，他在一家印刷厂当学徒，几乎一文不名。但最终，他赢得了巨大的财富，42岁时就不必再为金钱发愁，可以专心从事政治和外交活动了。
贫穷家庭的孩子并不会一生贫苦，这仍然是美国自画像的重要特征。
美国总统布什(Bush)自己虽然从没尝过贫穷的滋味，但却对他这届政府中几位高官的低微出身深感自豪。布什说，司法部长“在一所两居室房子里长大”，他的父母是“小学都没读完的移民工人”。古巴出生的商务部长第一份工作是在Kellogg Corp.开货车；担任商务部长之前是首席执行长。
但美国人社会阶层升降的现实却比传奇故事要复杂。从上世纪七十年代以来，美国的贫富差距就一直在扩大，但穷孩子致富，或者富孩子沦落到中产阶级的几率却未有改变。尽管乐观的例子数不胜数，社区大学越来越多，社会也在不断变革以便使各个阶层的美国人都有机会获得成功，但与35年前相比，美国人上升到其父母所在经济阶层之上或跌落到这一阶层之下的机会并无改变。
虽然美国人仍然认为脚下这片土地成功的机会比比皆是，与社会阶层严谨的欧洲相比尤其如此，但现实例证却指向了另一个方向。有学者穷十年之功，发现美国人社会阶层的变动幅度并不像他们原来认为得那么高。
直到八十年代末期，经济学家们还认为，父母的优势传递给孩子的机会并不多，几率可能低至20%。由此推算，富豪的孙子与穷汉的孙子相比几乎没什么优势。
“穷、富都不会超过三代，”芝加哥大学经济学家、1986年诺贝尔奖得主格雷?贝克(Gary Becker)写到。“贫穷不会变成一种代代相传的‘文化’。”
但是，最近这十年来质量更高的数据和更详细的数据研究工作让经济学家和社会学家们得出了新的结论：美国人社会阶层的升降速度越来越慢了。一项涉及广泛的调查研究发现，父母在收入方面的优势至少有45%会传给子女，最高可能达到60%。如果用后者来推算，那么不单单是你父母的经济状况很重要，连你高祖父的收入状况都会在今天的你身上体现出来。
许多美国人相信他们的国家遍地机会。这正好解释了为什么美国人远比欧洲人更能容忍这几年贫富差距的扩大。似乎美国人相信，只要他们的孩子刻苦努力就很有可能实现成功，那么贫富差距再大一些也没什么了不起。
正是这种毫不动摇的信念塑造了美国的政治和经济政策。科技、全球化和不受约束的市场都倾向于让穷者更穷，富者更富。但美国人选出的政治家往往都是这样一种人：反对通过政府之力抑制那些导致贫富差距加大的因素。这些政客们认为，提高最低工资或者要求雇主提供健康保险，会极大地损害经济增长。
虽然人们普遍认为美国人的社会阶层变动速度要快于欧洲人，但经济学家和社会学家们表示，最近几十年，欧洲大陆或者加拿大贫困家庭的普通孩子要比美国贫困家庭的孩子更有机会致富。加拿大国家统计机构的经济师迈尔斯?克罗科(Miles Corak)最近编辑出版了一本讨论欧洲和北美洲社会阶层变动情况的书，由哥伦比亚大学出版社(Cambridge University Press)出版。他把美国、加拿大和欧洲国家的同类调查数据作了一些调整，以便进行对比研究。“美国和英国似乎是研究所及富裕国家中社会阶层变动性最差的，”他得出结论说。法国和德国多少比美国好一点儿；加拿大和北欧国家则好很多。
即使是芝加哥大学教授贝克也在改变看法，虽说有点不太情愿。“我仍然相信如果你家境平常，你在美国比在其他地方更容易发达，”他说，“但我们得到的数据却越来越不支持这一点，这使我们越来越难坚持原来的看法。”
不过，人们还是不断在不同的社会阶层之间流动。去年夏天，大约三分之一的大学新生说他们的父母均未接受过大学教育。另外，社会生活条件不断改善，一般美国人的生活水准都比父辈要好。目前人们享受的种种便利──移动通讯、癌症治疗、互联网服务──都是父辈和祖辈从未享受过的。
很难准确衡量富裕家庭的美国人从父母身上得到的优势有多大，因为这需要对比好几十年的家庭收入数据。美国在这方面的研究几乎全部依赖于几项长期调查。一项由密歇根大学(University of Michigan)于1968年发起，到现在追踪调查著7,000户家庭、65,000人的有关数据。另一项研究由美国劳工部(Labor Department)于1966年发起。
这些调查的缺陷之一在于未能涵盖最新移民子女的情况，许多移民子女的社会阶层上升很快。例如，加州大学伯克利分校(University of California at Berkeley)就称，该校本科生中双亲均非美国出生人士的比例去年高达52%，这还不包括少量举家居于国外的学生。
但无论如何，密歇根大学和劳工部的这两项长期调查仍然是衡量美国人从家庭遗泽中受惠多少的最佳途径。密歇根大学经济学家格雷?索伦(Gary Solon)是这个领域的权威，他说有一个结论不容置疑：“这二十年来，上下两代美国人在社会阶层上的变化不大。”
芝加哥联邦储备银行(Federal Reserve Bank)的经济学家巴莎尔?马苏德(Bhashkar Mazumder)最近综合研究了美国劳工部的长期调查报告与1963-1968年间出生的几千人的社会保障记录，以考察这些人在30岁左右的的收入水平。在这个人群中，父亲的收入排在社会收入统计后10%的人里面只有14%的人进入了社会收入统计排名的前30%。相比之下，父亲排在前10%的人里面只有17%的人自己的收入跌入了社会收入统计的后30%。
本杰明?弗兰克林的经历是反映美国社会阶层变动的最好证明。“他是靠自我奋斗取得成功的楷模，他的一生是一个典型的美国人的成功故事，一个从社会底层到财富和名声享誉海内外的故事，”弗兰克林众多传记的作者之一伍德(Gordon S. Wood)于2004年写道。
1828年，14岁的爱尔兰移民梅隆(Thomas Mellon)读到了弗兰克林的畅销著作《自传》(Autobiography)，后来他将这描述为自己人生的一个转折点。“曾经比我还要穷的弗兰克林凭藉勤奋和节俭成为了一个博学而智慧的人，并拥有了大量财富和很高的声望，”梅隆在一份回忆录中写道。年轻的梅隆离开了家庭农场，成为一名成功的律师和法官，后来建立了如今匹兹堡梅隆银行(Mellon Bank)的前身。在这家银行的门口，他竖立了一尊弗兰克林的雕像。
就连卡尔?马克思(Karl Marx)也承认美国是一片蕴含著无限机遇的土地，并将此解释为美国缺乏等级观念的原因所在。
靠自我奋斗取得成功的产业家安德鲁?卡耐基(Andrew Carnegie)1890年在《纽约论坛报》(New York Tribune)上撰文列出了“各个行业的领军人物”，这些最初当过职员和学徒的人们都曾在最严厉但也最有效的学校──贫穷中得到了磨练。
历史告诉我们，20世纪美国土地上普遍信奉的这个理念并非只是神话。“无需别人告诉你，你就有亲身经历，如果你没有，你的邻居中也会有人有此经历，”美国西北大学经济史学家约瑟夫?菲瑞(Joseph Ferrie)表示。他仔细梳理了美国和英国1850-1920年间本国出生的父子职业等人口统计资料，结果显示，总的来说，在美国19世纪末期，无一技之长的人的子女有80%以上后来进入了收入较高、地位也较高的行业，但在英国这个比例不到60%。
菲瑞表示，其中最重要的原因是美国的年轻一代能做大多数英国人无法做的事情：从乡镇迁徙到繁华的大都市，然后迅速提升自己的经济地位。例如，1850年，当时14岁的詹姆斯?罗伯茨(James Roberts)住在纽约西部一个名叫Catharine的小村庄中，父亲是一个按日计酬的工人。人口资料显示，30年后，罗伯茨成了一个簿记员，地位提高了许多，目前他与妻子和4个孩子住在纽约市第三大道2257号。
随著教育在21世纪变得越来越重要──先是高中学历，后来又是大学学历，要提升社会地位开始变得只有一些有钱的父母才能提供：只有经济状况良好的父母才能让孩子继续求学之路，无需为生活所需而中止学业去工作。“1910年以后到大萧条之间，美国经济发生了一些根本性的变化，”菲瑞教授表示。
他说，21世纪美国社会阶层之间的变动不那么频繁了，与英国的情形开始接近，一个原因就是美国的地区间经济变得越来越相似。因此，要想通过单纯的迁徙来实现经济地位的大跃升开始变得困难。
数据的缺乏使得我们难以说明21世纪美国社会阶层之间变动性出现的变化。21世纪大部分时期的个人统计纪录（像菲瑞在研究中使用的这种）目前尚未公开。而两国调查的数据直到1970年才开始公诸于众。
不管事实如何，在21世纪大多数时间里，弗兰克林成长史所激发的美国社会流动性极强的观点仍在继续得到认同。二战后人们的生活水平得到提高，最初移民的儿孙们成就卓著。在大多数美国人眼中，毫无疑问他们的孩子将进入更高的阶层。
但1992年，密歇根大学的经济学家索伦向这种传统的学术观点发起了挑战。他在《美国经济评论》(American Economic Review)上撰文称，以前的研究是建立在“错误百出的数据或缺乏代表性的样本基础上”，其截取两代人一生中的某一年进行比较，而不是更长一段的时间，也具有误导性。他说，实际上社会阶层之间的变动性并没有像以前研究指出的那样频繁。后来的研究工作证实了索伦的结论。
为什么如今社会阶层之间的变动没有加大？除了财产遗赠等明显但有限的因素以外，要估量父辈是如何传承其经济地位的恐怕是件很困难的事。但教育显然起到了很重要的作用。与70年代形成对比的是，一张大学文凭在如今的就业市场中发挥著越来越大的作用。大学毕业生往往会与其他大学毕业生结婚，然后将自己的孩子送到较好的小学、中学以及大学，这样他们的孩子就拥有了长期优势。
聪明的成功人士的子女也将具有出众的智商，并取得成功，这种观念听起来很有吸引力，父母与子女之间的智商的确存在一定联系。但大多数研究发现，智商在决定人们能否取得经济成功方面并不是一个很大的影响因素。
在美国，族裔似乎是决定下一代的经济地位类似于父母的一个显著因素。基于密歇根大学一项长期调查所积累的6,273户家庭的32年数据，美国大学(American University)的经济学家汤姆赫茨(Tom Hertz)计算出：在社会收入排在最后10%的白人家庭中，17%的子女收入与父辈相同，而在黑人子女中这个比例为42%。或许正因为如此，民意调查发现非裔美国人可能要比白人更支持政府的再分配方案。
父母经济状况良好，其子女往往会更健康，或者说其子女的疾病可能会得到更好的救治，这也可能是一个影响因素。“非常有力的证据表明，低收入家庭的儿童有更多的健康问题，儿童时期的健康状况的确预示著他成年后的健康状况，而后者对其职业或生活有非常大的影响，”哈佛大学(Harvard)著名的社会学家克里斯托夫?杰克斯(Christopher Jencks)表示。
将个性特质遗传给下一代，可能也是一个因素。马里兰州Towson University的经济学家奥斯波尼(Melissa Osborne)在研究了政府长期调查中对195对父子的心理测试结果后发现，相似的人生态度在父子收入关系中的影响为11%。
不管怎样，美国人依然珍视几百年来“在美国这片土地上，过去和父辈都不会成为个人发展障碍”的观念。弗兰克林在《自传》中直言，他是在贫穷和籍籍无名中长大，早年的经历帮助他创造了巨大的财富。但在20世纪的一个标准版本中，他的孙子泰姆伯(Temple)改变了措辞，以强调其中不变的精神：“通过自我奋斗，我创造了巨大财富……”。
