Thursday, December 04, 2014

Economist: I've crunched the numbers, and the American Dream is dead

Travis Gettys
02 Dec 2014 at 08:21 ET                  
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A California economics professor says he's crunched the numbers, and he has concluded that the American Dream is dead.
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Gregory Clark, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, found that social mobility had diminished significantly in the past 100 years, reported KOVR-TV.
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"America has no higher rate of social mobility than medieval England or pre-industrial Sweden," Clark said. "That's the most difficult part of talking about social mobility, is because it is shattering people's dreams."
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He said social mobility is little different in the United States than in other countries, where ancestry strongly predicts adult social status.
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"The status of your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, (and) your great-great grandchildren will be quite closely related to your average status now," Clark said.
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That's upsetting to many of his students, Clark said.
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"My students always argue with me, but I think the thing they find very hard to accept is the idea that much of their lives can be predicted from their lineage and their ancestry," he said.
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Clark's findings, which were published by the Council on Foreign Relations, showed that Americans with French ancestry, for example, became doctors at a much lower rate than other immigrant groups.
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"The French who arrived in the United States were overwhelmingly drawn from the lower classes of Acadia and Quebec, as a result of demographic patterns and selective migration," Clark argued. "The effects of this lower social status have persisted across generations, even amid extensive intermarriage."
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Some immigrant groups - such as Africans, Chinese, Christian Arabs, and Indians - enjoy higher social status because visa restrictions limited entry to mostly skilled workers from higher social classes, he found.
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