[Marxism] Serendipity

[<lshan@xxxxxxx>]

I was at my computer, looking at Marxmail (of course) when my 19-year-old
daughter interrupted me to ask how the 60s were different from today. I
know, by now it should have been a granddaughter, but many of us were busy
with other things.

I couldn't answer by simply describing what we did. She's beyond that and,
besides, heard enough of that before. Was there a deeper answer?a
materialist one, based on socio-economic processes at work in society? Why
did we feel free enough to risk future middle-class success. I told her that
in many ways we felt more free, we didn't worry as much about "getting
ahead." In post WW II United States, our economic situation appeared secure.
We didn't think about upward mobility, but on the other hand, we didn't
worry about downward mobility. We'd be o.k. But why did we feel that way?

Just after she walked away, I checked my e-mail: Paul Krugman to the rescue.

Kate Gilpin from the SLATE list (U.C. Berkeley late 1950s and early 1960s
campus political party), forwarded this article from the latest Nation.
________________

The myth of income mobility has always exceeded the reality: As a general
rule, once they've reached their 30s, people don't move up and down the
income ladder very much. Conservatives often cite studies like a 1992 report
by Glenn Hubbard, a Treasury official under the elder Bush who later became
chief economic adviser to the younger Bush, that purport to show large
numbers of Americans moving from low-wage to high-wage jobs during their
working lives. But what these studies measure, as the economist Kevin Murphy
put it, is mainly "the guy who works in the college bookstore and has a real
job by his early 30s." Serious studies that exclude this sort of
pseudo-mobility show that inequality in average incomes over long periods
isn't much smaller than inequality in annual incomes.

It is true, however, that America was once a place of substantial
intergenerational mobility: Sons often did much better than their fathers. A
classic 1978 survey found that among adult men whose fathers were in the
bottom 25 percent of the population as ranked by social and economic status,
23 percent had made it into the top 25 percent. In other words, during the
first thirty years or so after World War II, the American dream of upward
mobility was a real experience for many people.

Now for the shocker: The Business Week piece cites a new survey of today's
adult men, which finds that this number has dropped to only 10 percent. That
is, 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. In modern America,
it seems, you're quite likely to stay in the social and economic class into
which you were born.
_______________
Looking more closely, it appears that Krugman should run this through the
ringer again. His statistics are about "men" and "father's and son's
incomes." How do you factor in women? But the statistics do correspond to my
gut feeling about economic security then and now.

full article at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040105&c=1&s=krugman



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