With Upward Mobility Frustrated at Every Turn, Let’s Revitalize the American Dream

October 6, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As I write this, tens of thousands of people are waiting in line in London “to pay their respects” to the Queen. This is no casual choice, since the viewing-line stretches for miles and it could take you a day to reach your goal, which is a walking glimpse (and perhaps a bow of the head or bended knee) before her standard-draped coffin in Westminster Hall.

If you were lucky enough yesterday, the trajectory of your arrival might also have coincided with the brief visit by the Queen’s children (and new King) who were there paying homage to her memory at the compass points of her resting place. But the lines that kept forming outside didn’t need the glimpse of any living royal.

Some asked why so many would wait so long to just walk by.

In my own wondering, I learned that since at least World War II, the Brits have developed a curmudgeonly fondness for standing, waiting for something and ambling towards “whatever it is” with others, chatting and complaining as they go. In the War years, the quest was for rations; today, it’s for a different kind of sustenance.

The British are known for their love of getting in line, which in Britain has long been called a ‘queue,’ from the French word for tail. It was once said ‘an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’

Despite the solitary joke, joining a queue is essentially a group experience, the participants joined by a common desire about what they’re likely to find at the end along the way.

Jenny Muskat, a middle-age woman from London, emerged from Westminster Hall late Thursday and said it took her ‘only’ six-and-a-half hours of waiting. She said she had been unsure earlier in the day about joining the line, but was happy she did after making fast friends with others in the queue. ‘We spent all these hours together, we laughed together, we just now cried together, and it was beautiful,’ she said.

What most of these Brits are doing—and it seems incomprehensible to some—is investing a great deal of time and effort to express their collective respect. They’re saying by this stupendous outpouring: “Thank you. As our Queen, you have given me, given all of us a great deal. In fact, you’ve given us a view of our best selves: Steady. Gracious. Tireless. Of our wry sense of humor. Thank you for being there, for making the rest of us look this good for all these years.”

Masses of people “paying their respect” seems almost unthinkable at a time when irony and cynicism make short work out of anything that’s cherished. People on social media were incredulous that anyone in their right mind would wait for that many hours to walk past a box with a body in it. If a national figure with millions of followers like Donald Trump (certainly a ”comparable” in terms of devotion) were to die tomorrow, the crowds would surely come out, but their gathering would be more of a political act, a kind of middle finger to everyone who didn’t come out, instead of a mass demonstration of respect for public virtues and the personal impacts of their mirrored glory.

_{The Queen’s Queue}

To me, the Magic of the Queen derived from the fact that she was always, throughout her very long life, a kind of cipher. We knew what she wanted us to know about her, and almost nothing more—those virtues again, like steadfastness, self-restraint and even nobility while she was greeting “her people” and accepting their hellos and flowers in her “walkabouts” at another town hall or soccer field.

Because the Queen was a kind of screen, her subjects and other admirers could project what they wanted onto her—a sense of majesty or a quintessential Britishness—and see such qualities reflected back upon them. Her fans are grateful today, eager to express their thanks and respect, because this idealized Queen made these “commoners” feel better about the parts of her that they see in themselves, and that at a time when almost nothing else in modern life does.

The closest that Americans come to this kind of “give and take” with popular figures tend to involve individuals with two qualities that are very different from those that the Queen projected and then returned by way of “reflected glory.” Our idealized figures are usually both “self-made” and “very rich.” The clearest example I can think of is Steve Jobs, who turned his particular mirror back on the rest of us by encouraging the dream that we could also transform the world (and become fabulously rich in the process) by having an idea and a garage in which to realize it. Interestingly, some of Jobs’ unshakable aura may also have come from his timing. In the years after his passing, social media’s cynicism and irony have done a better job of rightsizing his successors (like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) so that their reflected glories are much less desirable to see in ourselves.

Instead these days, most of us have to project our plans about “making ourselves” and “becoming rich” onto a faceless American Dream, while hoping that what gets reflected back encourages our self-sacrifice, inventiveness, hard work and everyday desire to give our children better lives than we’ve had. Unfortunately, while millions continue to believe in that Dream, its promises are no longer encouraging most of us to work harder to achieve it. Instead, those workers who are paying attention in the lower 4/5ths of our economy feel stifled, stuck, betrayed, undermined and “quietly quitting” instead of having their upward mobility encouraged and advanced.

I say “those who are paying attention” because the “tradeoffs” of a top-down, government-managed economy (from the more entrepreneurial one that we had until the 1970s) were not only greater “fairness to all” (without regard to individual talent or effort), but also more material well-being (that is, more stuff) so that hopefully no one would feel quite so badly about the loss of an economic upside, and well-oiled corporations could reap more profits by satisfying our consuming desires.

Having this glut of stuff, along with the distractions of entertainment and social media—its full-bore anesthetizing effects as the years spooled on—are what Aldus Huxley forecast in “Brave New World Revisited,” written in 1932. In a prior post called Whose Future Should We Fear Most (which contrasted George Orwell’s and Huxley’s forecasts through today), I tried to capture the context for mass sedation that Huxley’s book so accurately anticipated.

In our era of 24/7 entertainment ‘on demand,’ of non-stop drama from our ‘news’ outlets, and of a constant barrage of social media updates, none of us ever has to pay much attention to what is happening in the so-called “real world” or the roles we should be playing in it. There is always a new ‘prompt’ from our phones, watches or “smart” speakers to provide us with a refuge from reality. The soma of near constant screen distraction and ‘the internet of things’ has also become a fixture of our daily lives in the four score years since Brave New World was published.

Too many who are no longer animated by the American Dream or disappointed by its promises have also been reduced to passivity by these diversions. They simply can’t be bothered to muster a justifiable sense of outrage before Netflix or YouTube suggests the next thing for them to watch.

But as inflation bites and more data gets mustered, it’s amazing to me that anyone “who’s not already rich or totally checked out” can avoid a sense of outrage and its class-driven political upheavals.

In a post from a couple of weeks back called The Great Resignation is an Exercise in Frustration and Futility I cited data suggesting that government management of the economy has caused the middle, lower middle, and lowest economic classes to realize essentially the same income at the end of their working (or non-working) days due to government transfer payments. But these redistributions of wealth also stifle upward mobility. Mass quitting followed by a frantic search for “better lives via better jobs” is not only a fool’s errand but also an invitation to deeper resentments against “capitalism” and “the American way of life.” It embodies the reality that most Americans these days feel stuck on their rungs of the economic ladder.

The effective death-knell for upward mobility may be saddest for previously disadvantaged people who have struggled and saved and sacrificed so that they could reach the middle classes only to find that they’re still experiencing economic anxiety over the costs of health care, education, a comfortable retirement or an unexpected emergency. It’s hard working rural or immigrant whites, urban Blacks, second or third generation Latinos who finally thought they’d broken through—were on their way to the Dream they’d projected their hopes upon—only to find that nothing but futility was reflecting back on them and making them feel like failures.

These white, brown and black Americans have sometimes directed their anger and bitterness towards the poorest among us who seem to be living as well as they are, or towards rich/oblivious Progressives at the top of the pile who can afford to have privileged views since they come at the expense of the remaining 80%. Instead of having someone to be thankful for (like the Queen) or to aspire to be like (such as Steve Jobs), Americans have been finding scapegoats for their rage like Black Lives Matter and its supporters or the Coastal Elites.

Notwithstanding where we find ourselves today (and in spite of all evidence to the contrary), the American Dream still encourages more hope than it can deliver on, and the country’s ire still hasn’t turned on the richest 20%, or the corporations that are also accruing a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth.

Instead, there are enough folks in that lower 80% who still believe they can hit the economic jackpot that neither the “Occupy Wall Street” uprising of 2011 nor Bernie Sander’s democratic socialism movement in 2016 could enlist enough of the disgruntled masses. Moreover, while President Trump was directing his ire at poor and often minority protestors after the death of George Floyd, he and Congress enhanced the protections for the richest Americans and our most profitable corporations in the so-called Tax Reform Act of 2017. Like we were his game-show contestants, he continued to hock the Dream by telling us: Everyone in America can be a billionaire, just like me, once we rid ourselves of all these freeloaders.

Our increasingly empty Dream was about to lose even more of its hold on our imaginations during the pandemic. As a consequence, the pressure in the pressure cooker for the vast majority that finds it nearly impossible to better their circumstances will continue to build against the way that our elected leaders (both Democrat and Republican) have managed the American economy and designated its winners and losers for the past 50 years.

So where do we go from here?

Like an anti-addiction program, the first step is acknowledging the overwhelming evidence of the American Dream’s fragile state. In 2015, according to a study reported in Fast Company, the U.S. already ranked “among the lowest of all developed countries in terms of the potential for upward mobility, despite clinging to the mythology of Horatio Alger.” That article, called “The American Dream is Dead: Here’s Where It Went,” provided a breakdown of the developed countries where your chances of rising economically were the strongest.

1. Denmark
2. Norway
3. Finland
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Sweden
7. New Zealand
8. Germany
9. Japan
10. Spain

America is simply not the Land of (Economic) Opportunity that it once was.

In my Great Resignation post, I joined Nobel-Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps in waxing nostalgic for a more-entrepreneurial/ less-government-managed economy given the psychological and economic benefits that it brings to everyone who’s willing to work hard to get ahead. But Phelps didn’t provide much of a roadmap to recover our economic vitality when he wrote “Mass Flourishing.” On the other hand another economist, Oren Cass, has several ideas about boosting upward mobility for all American workers given the much-changed country that we’re living in today. (See my 2019 post A Winter of Work Needs More Color for an overview of Cass’s proposals, including incentivizing all of the country’s working families instead of subsidizing only a few of its most impoverished ones.)

In line with both Phelps’s and Cass’s thinking, we need to come to a more inclusive approach to the harms that follow when we stifle individual initiative and deprive a vast majority of the workerforce of its financial and psychological rewards.

A study that was reported out of Yale University this week argues that the lack of upward mobility early in life increases mortality rates in all young adults who confront it. While the emphasis in the study’s presentation was on groups that suffer the most (like young urban Blacks), it’s important to note the pernicious effects that are felt by every young person when they feel that they can’t improve their personal fortunes. A similar message came from studying pockets of white rural America that are dying from opioid abuse and suicide as chronicled in Angus Deaton’s and Anne Case’s ground-breaking “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” a book I briefly discussed here in another earlier post.

Many of the researchers and prognosticators who have confronted these problems have argued that “intergenerational wealth accumulation” is essential for upward economic mobility. In other words, how much your parents or even grandparents “had” and “left to you” may be as significant (if not more) to upward mobility than your personal work ethic. Some observers, like the author of this New York Magazine essay, clearly agree:

Without the safety net of accumulated family wealth, the children of self-made men and women can be ‘unmade’ in a hurry. With such wealth, by contrast, the trust-fund deadbeat’s child can follow her grandparents’ footsteps back through Harvard.
Thus, making America an exceptionally [upwardly] mobile society [again] will require a greater degree of income and wealth redistribution than most politicians would dare to suggest: To get more poor kids up the ‘ladder of opportunity’ we’re going to have to shorten the space between its rungs.

With my caveat that it’s not just “poor kids” but (more accurately) nearly everyone in the middle, lower middle and lowest classes, I am reluctant to argue that the same bipartisan government that nearly killed the American Dream should be given the mandate of “redistributing” the accumulated wealth at the top of our economy’s pyramid. But something needs to be done. If unlocking the nation’s sleeping economic vitality can’t be driven by wise leaders, than it is likely to be advanced by protests (and worse) on the streets.

Projecting my hopes for upward mobility onto the American Dream doesn’t have to become a reminder of my failures as a worker, it simply doesn’t. And allowing that kind of resentment to keep accruing is a dangerous thing.

Just as the Brits saw their reflected glory in their Queen and wanted to thank her for it, we can recover our reflected glory in the promises of that Dream—but we’ll have to want it as a country, almost more than we want anything else, given how hard that revitalization process is likely to be.

This post was adapted from my September 18, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A New American Dream

December 23, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I took this photo on the Fourth of July in Glenside, a town just outside of Philadelphia. Its citizens had set out chairs, waiting for a parade to honor a struggle that began in revolution but seems to have lost its momentum today.

Looking back at past newsletters and from them, even farther back in my life and my parents’ lives, I was surprised by how much I’ve been thinking about the future this year. It wasn’t my original intention.

I guess I’ve become convinced that the deep-down quality of the present isn’t the same as it seems on the surface—that the core I remember has been hollowed out—and that what’s coming next may shatter the illusion that the party we’ve been enjoying in spite of it will go on forever. Still, there is no denying that the party has been pretty grand while it’s lasted, a place to enjoy ourselves amidst all the comforts of home.

In our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes, America sold the Dream of sunny, middle-class home ownership, consumerism, material comfort, and upward social mobility that it thought it needed to reward its WWII veterans and win the ideological battles of the Cold War. (Our kitchens are nicer here than they are in Moscow.) Madison Avenue’s advertising machine helped with the sales pitch, and today we’ve not only won these wars but continue to live the Dream we were supposedly fighting for. And let’s face it, that American Dream has been delivered to many, if not most of us despite our rising income inequality, our concern that our kids may end up with “less” than we have today, and our shabby public infrastructure.

Of course, Edmund Phelps’ “mass flourishing” has been tapering off since the 1970’s (my 11-25-18 post) and our safety nets are fraying, but even the poorest neighborhoods have wide-screen TVs, smart phones, and more than their pets could ever want or need. So why, amidst all of this plenty, are we wondering: “Is that all there is?” Is that comfortable surface all that we’re working for? Living for?

Maybe some of the uneasiness is recalling—on some level—that we once had more ambitious dreams than getting the latest gadget from Amazon delivered in an hour, binge-watching another series on Netflix, or pleasuring ourselves with the latest meme on Facebook. We’ve either heard about or actually remember a time when the American Dream was much bolder than the warm bath we’re sitting in today—and that those more vital days weren’t so long ago.

In his 1999 book For Common Things, Jed Purdy recalls the transformative political climate of The Great Society of the 1960s where America debated ways “to eliminate” inequalities based on race and “to wage a war” on poverty. A half-century later, that debate has been reduced to “managing” the poor with welfare programs and racial inequality with good intentions. Looking at the diminishment of our public aspirations, Purdy argues that:

Americans who came of age after 1974 have never seen the government undertake a large-scale project other than highway maintenance and small wars, and relatively few are inspired by the idea that it should.

Of course, state-engineered income and racial equality would likely interfere with the mass flourishing of Phelps’ more individualistic and entrepreneurial economy. But what may be most noteworthy about where we find ourselves is the absence of any serious debate—really any tension at all—between the basic problems we face and the different ways we could solve them. This acceptance of “the way things are,” along with our sedating comfort, are the principal reasons that the American Dream has become “fossilized” and needs to be reimagined. Very little of it still resonates with any of us at its core.

Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream by Sarah Churchwell ends with that argument. But before getting to its conclusion, most of her new book is about returning to the newspapers, speeches and other original sources over the past 150 years to identify “the gaps” between “what we tell each other that history shows and what it actually says” about the quality of the American Dream.

While Churchwell finds plenty of evidence of darkness in our nativism, racism, and materialism, the forces of light have nearly always shined brightly in our history as well. In the five years between 1915 and the end of the Great War, America rocked between an isolationist, America-First agenda to making the world safe for democracy on the battlefields of Europe and trying to create a new League of Nations. Before and after the Civil War, during the Gilded Age of business monopolies and mass immigration, and during the Great Depression some of our most selfish tendencies as a nation were in pitched battles with champions of social justice and “principled appeals for a more generous way of life.”

Through much of our history, there has always been a push and pull that defined the American Dream for the generations that were trying “to make it” here—at least until fairly recently. It’s the long stretch since the Great Society of the 1960s to the present that Churchwell is most worried about.

According to the historical record she has unearthed, the America that is reflected in its Dream has “diminished,” and the fact that we once “dreamed more expansively” has been “obscured.” As she eloquently argues, “if even your dreams are ungenerous, then surely you have lost your way.” In its 300+ pages, Behold America demonstrates how a “rich, complex, difficult dream” has been forgotten in a race that focuses on wealth, material comfort and disengagement from a broader struggle for America’s soul. For Churchwell, the time to re-energize a Promise that once motivated us as workers, as citizens and as a nation is now.

So why aren’t we doing so? Churchwell doesn’t say, but I’ve tried to offer some explanations here over the past several months—at least for our personal reluctance. Beyond disengaging from any notion that sounds like rally-around-the-flag or that asks us “to believe in something” instead of remaining at a cynical distance, preoccupation with our comforts and “the rush of the future” leave little space for the kinds of activism that challenged America’s worst tendencies in the past.

Almost a year ago (in my 1-7-18 newsletter), I quoted from a Roxane Gay essay about “the tiny house movement” that quickly turned from playful to serious regarding the promises that we make to one another.

When we talk about the American dream, we never talk about what that dream costs. We never talk about how so many Americans are one financial crisis away from losing their savings or their homes. And we don’t talk about how the American dream should not be grounded in material things like large homes or fancy cars rather than, say, single-payer health care, subsidized childcare, or a robust Social Security system.

We don’t talk enough about what should and shouldn’t be included in the American Dream and spend even less time acting on our convictions. Perhaps there’s not enough hope that anything we do will matter. But believing in our priorities enough to act on them always matters. As John Berger says in my post last month about the rescuers after the Paradise California fire, hope is the fuel, the “detonator of energy,” that drives us to act on our convictions. A dream, the American Dream, is just a good story that embodies those hopes.

I mentioned several reasons why the fuel line between hope and action gets clogged in another post last August.

The Future Is Coming At Me Too Fast to Do Anything Other Than Meet It

Whole industries can change in a heartbeat. Think local travel (Uber, Lyft). Remote travel (Airbnb). Outside shopping (Amazon). Personal transport (self-driving cars). Our phones change, the apps on them change, how we use them and protect them changes. We’re so busy keeping up with the furious pace of change, we can’t think about any future other than the leading edge of it that we’re experiencing right now.”

I’m Too Absorbed By My Immediate Gratifications To Think Long-Term

The addictiveness of social media. The proliferation of entertainment to listen to, watch, and get lost in. The online availability of every kind of diverting information. A consumer economy that meets every real and imagined need for those who can afford it. We move between jobs that fail to engage us to leisure time that gratifies us into a kind of torpor. We’re too sedated by the warm bath we’re in now to worry about a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

My General Laziness and Inertia

And not just during the dog days of August….

The only way to overcome these obstacles is by finding enough hope to want to demonstrate our capabilities and act on our generosity once again.

In the Shadow of the Washington Monument

In his poem the Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot described the moral emptiness that seemed to him to envelope everything in the wake of World War I. What he wrote then is not so different from where we find ourselves today.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

The July 4th parade in Glenside aimed to celebrate what we’ve “created” and how we’ve “responded” to our challenges as a nation but it has fallen into Shadow. In our jobs, as members of a community and as citizens, the only way out of the Shadow is to “respond” once again to priorities that are bigger than our comfort or cynicism and to “create” an American Dream that is worth living in again: one capable and generous step at a time.

This post is adapted from my December 23, 2018 newsletter.

A Class Apart

September 17, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What we want in America is a fair chance to succeed. On the other hand, imposing economic equality through the redistribution of wealth has always seemed un-American. But there is a place where the needs for greater equality and a fairer playing field converge, and we are in that place today.

A good life and good work are not possible without the opportunity to make enough to meet our basic economic needs. In other words, every American needs a fair shot at the American pie, as opposed to an increasingly small piece of it. As the nation’s wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, fair opportunity disappears and makes the need for a national conversation about greater economic equality more pressing.

“Fairness” (in terms of opportunity) and “equality” (as a way to distribute wealth) are not the same thing.

Surveys regularly find that Americans accept a certain amount of inequality when it comes to wealth because of factors like individual merit. When one study asked about their ideal distribution of wealth, most responded with an allocation that was far from equal. People in the top 20% could have three times as much wealth as those in the bottom 20%, they said. In the article that reported these findings, this study’s author described the majority’s comfort level as “not too equal, but not too unequal.” By contrast, 84% of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the top 20% today compared to only 0.3% in the hands of the bottom 20% (or more than 250 times as much)—an almost textbook case for “too unequal.”

In order to focus debate on this vast disparity of wealth in America, it will be necessary to bear in mind the differences between fairness and equality, because the distinction:

allows us to zoom in on certain critical questions that have long been of interest to political scientists and moral philosophers. When is it unjust to treat people the same—that is, which factors (hard work, skill, need, morality) are fair grounds for inequality and which are not? Which resources should be distributed on the basis of merit?

We can accept inequality under certain circumstances, but extreme disparities in wealth offend our basic sense of justice and fairness.

The richest 20% seem to know that there is something offensive about the gulf that exists between them and the other 80% of Americans. There was a piece in the New York Times last week that had a great deal to say about their (or our) discomfort with what the author called “the moral stigma of privilege.” Interviews with wealthy New Yorkers revealed that they routinely:

-take price tags and labels off expensive purchases so housekeepers and nannies can’t see the “obscenely high” amounts that they pay for items like “six dollar bread;”

-describe themselves as “comfortable,” “fortunate” or even “middle class” instead of rich or upper class;

-point out how “hard-working,” “charitable” and sensitive they are about “not showing off” what they have.

Their consideration, lack of ostentation, and other personal qualities seemed to be offered so that the interviewees can be seen as “worthy” of their privilege. “If they can see themselves [and the rest of us can see them] as hard workers and reasonable consumers,” the author notes, “they can belong symbolically to the broad and legitimate American ‘middle,’ while remaining materially at the top.”

Whether rich people are also “good people” simply obscures the important issue however.

[W]hat’s crucial to see is that such judgments distract us from any possibility of thinking about redistribution. When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.

So the issue isn’t whether rich people are also nice and hardworking. Instead, it is whether we should tolerate a small percentage of our citizens having so much more than everyone else. Is this state of affairs “good” for us as citizens and as a country?

With more wealth concentrating at the top of society, it is hardly surprising that the populism behind movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party became even more pronounced in the last election. Wealthy, often urban professionals on the right and left coasts may be puzzled by it and disgusted with some of the key players, but somewhere within this political upheaval is the desire for a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work. To realize that desire will mean reducing the economic divide after an honest discussion with these same wealthy, often urban professionals about the inequality that benefits them most.

“A shot at the American Dream” was the chance that every returning soldier wanted to take in 1945. The G.I. Bill after World War II reduced economic inequality by providing a fairer opportunity (with the possibility of college and home ownership) to the mostly white men of every economic class who were coming home. After their own struggle for greater equality, women and minorities secured a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and work after the Great Society programs of the Sixties and the women’s movement of the Seventies. Indeed, many of the men and women who benefitted from that 30-year push for greater equality made it into today’s wealthiest class, or lived to see their highly educated children enter it.

Today, there is once again an urgent need to confront the economic disparities that have become entrenched since our last conversation as Americans about greater equality in terms of wealth and class. For the vast majority, a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work will not be possible until we do.

You Need Money to Make Money

January 31, 2014 By David Griesing 4 Comments

The promise of a free market is that you can get ahead with hard work and sound investment.

In other words, you need your hard-earned money (or “working capital”) to make more money. But if you’re not earning enough to have money left over in savings at the end of the week, chances are no family member is willing to give it to you and no bank is willing to lend it to you. Access to capital—or rather the lack of access—is changing the promise that you can get ahead if you work hard.

Productivity isn’t just about, or even primarily about making money, but money is part of it. Money makes a better life possible. Beyond the essentials, it buys time off for enrichment to read a book, connect with your neighbors or just smell the clover. It gives you time to think about the quality of your work, and not just recover from it.

That’s why it’s a problem when those who want to work can’t earn enough to live on. Everyone in a community should be able to earn a living wage if they have the discipline, skill and desire, and everyone in the community has a stake in creating that opportunity. Escape from social dependence rests on the willingness to work and develop new skills. Work allows “the pursuit of happiness.” A community that fails to support that kind of self-reliance and personal fulfillment is at risk of unraveling.

Productivity is also about seizing the opportunity to build new wealth with talent and elbow grease. It’s the Korean market in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood where the whole family works 8-12 hours a day, saving every penny, while the kids do school work between customers so they can get into Penn. The dream is that hard work, savings, and self-improvement will get you to a better life tomorrow. Our communities also used to support that dream.

Unfortunately, as you know, the news is full of statistics about threats to upward mobility in developed countries today (most recently in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, published for this week’s conference in Davos, Switzerland). For the middle class, it’s become harder to live on what you earn. With reduced savings at the end of the day, increasingly it is only the wealthiest wage earners who have enough money to invest in an even better future.

Aside from the spigot of student loans, it’s been difficult if not impossible for most Americans to gain access to capital by borrowing money. You need capital to grow your business, and the kinds of companies I work with can’t get it from the banks, even when they’re doing well. In other words, unless the business owner has her own source of funds, she cannot finance her company’s future growth.

It’s the same for innovation. While there are more ways to crowdfund your brilliant idea, unless your family and thousand new friends can be your bank, bringing a new product or service to market is a longer shot than ever. Banks no longer come even close to satisfying the need that business owners have for capital.

Not so long ago it was different.

In his article “Less Innovation, More Inequality,” Nobel laureate (in economics) Edmund Phelps notes that American inventiveness and therefore general prosperity has been in decline for more than 50 years. Even with the disruptions of war and depression, from the1820’s to the 1960’s in America there was:

a frenzy of creative activity, economic competition and rapid growth in national income provided widening economic inclusion, rising wages for all and engaging careers for most.

Today, the consequences of the fall-off from a flourishing economy are becoming apparent. New wealth is increasingly produced by and new innovation is increasingly funded by those who are rich already.

The fear is that this accumulation of wealth is creating the kind of permanent nobility last seen in 17^th and 18^th century Europe. Today, rich people increasingly go to the best schools with, marry, do business with, and eventually inherit much of society’s wealth from one another. (I’ve talked elsewhere about Charles Murray’s take on this relatively new cultural divide.)

In terms of your work today, these are some of the questions that are worth considering:

What happens to how you view your work when an economic system that rewarded talent, discipline and sacrifice evolves into an aristocracy?

What happens when only a fortunate few have access to the capital that makes future dreams come true?

An article in the Wall Street Journal last week noted:

For some, this would be a dystopian vision, skewing incentives across the economy, and making inherited wealth even more important to signaling social status. It runs contrary to the idea of a meritocracy and equality of opportunity that many in the U.S., on both sides of the political spectrum, see as forming the bedrock of a just society.

It’s certainly a nightmare vision for those of us who believe in the ennobling qualities of work.

Clearly, it’s time to shake things up.