Chelsea and her family live in a large white home with a wide porch overlooking the lake. They also have an expensive second home in a nearby small town, where Chelsea and her older brother went to school. Chelsea’s mother, Wendy, comes from an affluent family in Michigan, where her father was a prominent lawyer. She has a graduate degree and works part-time as a special educator in private practice. She values her flexible schedule, because raising her two kids (who are now in college) has been her top priority. Chelsea’s father, Dick, is a sales manager for a major national corporation, and he travels a great deal for his business. “He wasn’t real big on being a father when they were young,” Wendy says.
Wendy herself, on the other hand, has been intensely involved in her children’s lives growing up. “I probably pushed my kids a lot more than my parents ever pushed us,” she says. “I was a real grade hound [with my kids]. I really pushed them through high school, and then I just continued. I read to them [as infants]. That’s the biggest thing—read, read, read, read when they were little, and they were both reading when they got into kindergarten.” She is critical of other moms who are not so involved. “I see so many kids that are just so lost,” she says. “Their mothers don’t care.”
When Chelsea got home from school each day, at least one parent was always home. She and her older brother did their homework at the kitchen island while their mom cooked dinner. The whole family ate together every night, except when her brother was playing football. “Family dinner is critical,” Wendy says, “because the kids learn how to discourse with other people.”
Chelsea’s parents threw fancy themed birthday parties for her every year—tea party at age five, Barbie princess at six, Academy Awards (complete with limo pickups for the guests) at 11, Las Vegas casino night at 16. Worried that kids in town had nowhere to hang out, Chelsea’s parents installed an elaborate 1950s-style diner in their basement. “I’m the cook at the 1950s diner,” Wendy says, “which was good, because all their friends would talk to me about stuff, and I knew where they were.”
Wendy is proud of standing up for her kids at school. When a seventh-grade teacher claimed that Chelsea’s older brother had not completed an assignment, she proved to the teacher that he had—and when the teacher then refused to change his grade to reflect that, she appealed first to the principal and then to the school board. The school board changed the grade and moved the teacher to a different position. Another case in point: Chelsea worked hard on her high school yearbook for four years, and served as its editor-in-chief during her senior year, anticipating that she would get the annual yearbook-based college scholarship. When the teacher in charge declined to nominate Chelsea for the scholarship, her mother went to the principal. He knew immediately why she was there. “You know me,” she said. “I will go to the school board. . . . Just tell the teacher to write the [fellowship] check, and let’s get this over with.” The check arrived next day.
Chelsea describes herself as “the most active person” in her high school—student body president, yearbook editor, National Honor Society, president of the book club, “and a whole bunch of other stuff.” Her parents pitched in for school events, even more than other parents. They helped build a giant King Kong float out of chicken wire, because the kids did not know how. When Chelsea was in charge of the prom, and other students failed to show up to construct the scenery, Wendy was there, hot-gluing in the middle of the night.
Although the family is comfortable financially, Wendy doesn’t see herself or her affluent peers as “old money” gentry. “Most parents around here are Midwest parents who work for their money,” she says. “It’s not like Beverly Hills and the Hamptons.” She encourages her kids to have part-time and summer jobs. “You have to work if you want to get rich,” she insists. She’s skeptical about special funding for educating poorer kids. “If my kids are going to be successful, I don’t think they should have to pay other people who are sitting around doing nothing for their success.”
Asked about times of stress in her life, Chelsea responds, “There’s never really been any financial problem.” When a friend of her family committed suicide, it was emotionally very stressful, but she was able to talk with her mom and dad about her feelings, and describes them as good role models. “The people I surround myself with have always tried to help me and push me in the right direction,” she says. “I am content with what I’m doing in my life.”
Chelsea always knew that she’d go to college. Her parents encouraged good grades by promising her and her brother to pay the full ticket for college if they graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. Both did, and both now attend the same Big Ten university. Chelsea is aiming for law school, following in the footsteps of her grandfather.
David was a scrawny 18-year-old in jeans and a baseball cap when we first encountered him in a Port Clinton park in 2012. His father had dropped out of high school and tried in vain to make a living as a truck driver, like his own father, but as an adult has been employed only episodically, in odd jobs like landscaping. David apologizes for not being able to tell us more about his father. “He’s in prison,” he explains, “and I can’t ask him.” David’s parents separated when David was very little, and his mother moved out, so he can’t tell us much about her, either, except to say that she lives in the Port Clinton area. “All her boyfriends have been nuts,” he says. “I never really got to see my mom that much. She was never there.”
David has bounced around a lot. He has grown up mostly in his father’s custody, though his father has been in and out of prison. A steady stream of women flowed through his dad’s life during David’s childhood, often floating on drugs. David and his dad would live with David’s paternal grandmother on the impoverished side of East Harbor Road for a while; then his dad would try to make it on his own, and another woman would come into his life. But eventually either his dad couldn’t pay the rent, or he would start “partying” again, and they’d end up back with the grandmother. David has nine half-siblings, but no fixed address.
When David was ten or 11, his dad hooked up for several years with a woman whom David called his stepmother, although she was never actually married to his father. The stepmother, he says, was “crazy . . . drinking, pills, drugs,” and now lives with another guy, with whom she has several other children. When she left, David says, his dad “went off the deep end” with drugs and women. The way adults moved in and out of his life without worrying about what happened to the kids left David feeling as though “nobody gave a shit” about him and his half-siblings.
David’s father was recently sent to prison for a string of robberies. David can’t visit him in prison, because he himself is on probation. He feels close to his father, the only adult who has been around all his life, but he worries that his father is unstable. “Sometimes he’s mad at me,” he says, “sometimes he’s not. It’s just if I catch him on a good day.”
David’s family life was obviously chaotic. He dealt with the stress by escaping with friends, staying away from home, and smoking marijuana. “I missed having a home,” he says. “I know how close I want my own family to be, because of how close I wasn’t.” He adds, “I never really had around-the-table family dinners at all, so I never got to miss it.”
Because of his dad’s itinerant existence, David went to seven different elementary schools. School, he recalls, was always a problem. “I just let grades float until the end of the semester,” he says, “and I passed every year. I’ve never been held back. In middle school I got into a fight with another kid, so they kicked me out and sent me to ‘behavior school,’ ” which he hated. Finally, with assistance from a local teacher, in 12th grade he transferred to a “career-based intervention class” at a nearby high school, where he earned a diploma, mostly because he got school credit for working at Big Bopper’s Diner. Immediately after graduation, the Big Bopper fired him.
David himself got into lots of trouble, in part because he started hanging out with the wrong kids. At age 13 he broke into a series of stores and was put under house arrest for five months. He could attend school, but otherwise he had to stay at home alone, where all he did was play video games. “It’s all I had to do,” he says. Out on probation, he got into further trouble by getting drunk and failing a drug test, which sent him back to juvie. He has essentially no support network. It was his pre-jail friends who got him in trouble in the first place, and the ones he met behind bars were no better. “If you make friends in jail,” he says, “you usually go back to jail with them friends.”
Since leaving school, David has had various temporary jobs—at fast food restaurants, in a plastics factory, and doing landscaping. He has a hard time getting a job because of his juvenile record, and he can’t afford the “couple hundred dollars” in legal fees that it would cost to get the record expunged. He worked hard to qualify as foreman on the landscaping job, but then lost that opportunity because he had points on his license for speeding.
Despite his troubles in school, David has clear educational aspirations. “I really want to get a higher education,” he says. “I need one. It’s hard to get a job without one anymore.” But he has no idea how to get there. He can recall no helpful guidance counselor or teacher from his school years, and his parents are obviously useless. He notes bitterly that nobody at all in Port Clinton was willing to offer him help when he was younger. People in town knew what was going on in his family, he says, but no one cared enough to reach out to him. The fact that his father and mother “had a bad name in town,” he believes, meant that townspeople were disinclined to treat him with any sympathy. In the most fundamental sense, David has had to fend for himself his entire life.
Unexpectedly, given his life experience, David feels great responsibility for his diverse brood of younger half-siblings, because no competent adult is caring for them. “I’m the only one that can raise them,” he says. David’s sense of obligation to his half-siblings seems deep and sincere. “It’s like everybody is looking at me to hold it together,” he says, “and I feel a lot of pressure because of that.” In fact, when we first met him in the park in 2012, he was affectionately watching over an eight-year-old half-brother. Earlier that day, he had been the only family member to attend the school Olympics in which his little brother had competed. In a conversation two years later, David reported that that same little brother was now himself caring for a still younger baby brother, born to the drug-addled stepmother.
In 2012 David’s girlfriend became pregnant. “It wasn’t planned,” he says. “It just kind of happened.” At that point, he was hoping that the birth of his child would bring his life together, but he admitted he wasn’t sure if he could trust his girlfriend. Sadly, his instincts proved accurate: two years later she was living with a new partner (a drug addict, like her), and David shares custody of their daughter. He lives paycheck to paycheck, but says his daughter has provided him with a sense of purpose. “I love being a dad,” he says. “She just looks at me like I’m the Almighty.”
In 2012, we asked David if he ever felt like just giving up. “Yeah,” he replied, “Sometimes I get that feeling that there’s no point in it, but I bounce out of it. It kind of gets me down at times, but I try not to put my mind to it that much.” By 2014, distraught by his girlfriend’s betrayal and his dead-end job, he posted an update on Facebook. “I always end up at the losing end,” he wrote. “I just want to feel whole again. I’ll never get ahead! I’ve been trying so hard at everything in my life and still get no credit at all. Done . . . I’m FUCKING DONE!”
• • •
Comparing Port Clinton kids in the 1950s with Port Clinton kids today, the opportunity gap has widened dramatically, partly because affluent kids now enjoy more advantages than affluent kids then, but mostly because poor kids now are in much worse shape than their counterparts then. Frank’s parents were relaxed about his indifferent performance at school, in contrast to Wendy’s intensive parenting, from her “read, read, read, read” regime to her midnight hot-gluing of prom props. Frank’s family encouraged him to hang out with kids from modest backgrounds, whereas Wendy hired limos for fancy birthday parties. Chelsea’s neighborhood is exclusive, whereas Frank’s wasn’t. Chelsea dominated her high school’s activities, whereas Frank definitely didn’t. Chelsea and her mom are proud of Wendy’s interventions at school on her kids’ behalf, while Frank is appalled at the thought.
Compared to working-class kids in 1959, their counterparts today, like David, lead troubled, isolated, hopeless lives. Don, Libby, Cheryl, and Jesse all had stable, two-parent, loving families. David hardly has a family at all. Don’s dad, despite working two jobs, came to every one of Don’s games, and Libby’s and Cheryl’s moms were role models, while David’s dad, mom, and stepmom are, at best, object lessons of failed lives. Libby learned manners, values, and loyalty at regular family dinners, but David has no idea what a family dinner would be like. All four of the 1950s working-class kids were encouraged by family or school or both to head for college, whereas David “floated” with virtually no guidance from anyone. Teachers, coaches, church elders, and even fur-clad matrons reached out to help Libby and Jesse and Cheryl and Don, while townspeople left David to fend for himself. Everyone in my parents’ generation (from pool shark to pastor) thought of Don and Libby as “our kids,” but surprisingly few adults in Port Clinton today are even aware of David’s existence, and even fewer would think of him as one of “our kids.”16
Port Clinton is just one small town among many, of course—but the rest of this book will show that its trajectory during the past five decades, and the divergent destinies of its children, are not unique. Port Clinton is not simply a Rust Belt story, for example, although it is that. Subsequent chapters will trace similar patterns in communities all over the country, from Bend, Oregon, to Atlanta, and from Orange County, California, to Philadelphia. But first, zooming out from our close focus on Port Clinton to a wide-angle view of contemporary American society, let’s examine the principle of equality and what it actually means for Americans today.
Contemporary discussion of inequality in America often conflates two related but distinct issues:
• Equality of income and wealth. The distribution of income and wealth among adults in today’s America—framed by the Occupy movement as the 1 percent versus the 99 percent—has generated much partisan debate during the past several years. Historically, however, most Americans have not been greatly worried about that sort of inequality: we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it, given equal merit and energy.
• Equality of opportunity and social mobility. The prospects for the next generation—that is, whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact, getting onto the ladder at about the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it—pose an altogether more momentous problem in our national culture. Beginning with the “all men are created equal” premise of our national independence, Americans of all parties have historically been very concerned about this issue.
These two types of equality are obviously related, because the distribution of income in one generation may affect the distribution of opportunity in the next generation—but they are not the same thing. The distribution of income and wealth among today’s parents forms a crucial backdrop to our story, just as it does to the contrasting lives of Chelsea and David. However, this book will focus primarily on the distribution of opportunity among today’s kids and will seek to answer this question: Do youth today coming from different social and economic backgrounds in fact have roughly equal life chances, and has that changed in recent decades?17 The difference in starting points between Frank and Don in the 1950s, for example, seems dwarfed by the difference between Chelsea and David in the 2010s, but how far can we generalize those cases? I begin with an overview of aspiration, myth, and reality regarding inequality in both senses throughout the long course of American history.
Americans are today divided about how much (if at all) income and wealth should be redistributed, Robin Hood–like, from today’s affluent to today’s poor. More than two thirds of us (concentrated among Democrats, minorities, and the poor, but including majorities of people of all political persuasions and walks of life) favor a more equal distribution than obtains today. While large majorities favor pragmatic steps to limit inequality of condition, we are also philosophical conservatives, suspicious of the ability of government to redress inequality and convinced that responsibility for an individual’s well-being rests chiefly with him or her.18
On the other hand, we are less divided about the desirability of upward mobility without regard to family origins. About 95 percent of us endorse the principle that “everyone in America should have equal opportunity to get ahead,” a broad consensus that has hardly wavered since opinion surveys began more than a half century ago.19 (The consensus is a bit shakier when the question is whether our society should do “whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.” Nine in ten Americans agree, but only 48 percent of the top quintile in terms of socioeconomic status agree strongly, as compared to 70 percent of the bottom quintile.20) About 90 percent of Americans of all political persuasions say they support more spending on public education to try to ensure that everyone gets a fair start in life. And if forced to choose, Americans at all income levels say by nearly three to one that it is “more important for this country . . . to ensure everyone has a fair chance of improving their economic standing [than] to reduce inequality in America.”21 As the former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke has phrased it, “A bedrock American principle is the idea that all individuals should have the opportunity to succeed on the basis of their own effort, skill, and ingenuity.”22
The roots of this primal commitment to equality of opportunity are deep and diverse. Ben Franklin’s Autobiography laid down the quintessential “rags-to-riches” narrative of colonial America. The absence of a preexisting feudal social structure—an important exception must be made for the antebellum slave-owning aristocracy—helped create and sustain an egalitarian political structure, marked especially by the rise of populist Jacksonian democracy of the 1830s. The vastness of the American frontier, with its virtually free land—free at least to the new settlers—made the ideal of upward mobility seem attainable. As Frederick Jackson Turner, the renowned historian of the frontier, put it, “The West was another name for opportunity.”23 Recurring spurts of evangelical religious fervor in America’s Great Awakenings (like the abolitionist Second Great Awakening of the 1830s and the “Social Gospel” of the Progressive Era) provided morally freighted reinforcement for extension of the foundational national pledge that God had created each of us equal.
America’s bounteous economy, finally, encouraged the hope that upward mobility was possible for all. The same 1950s boom that sustained Port Clinton’s egalitarian culture led the historian David Potter in his 1954 best-seller People of Plenty to claim that American affluence had allowed more equality of opportunity “than any previous society or previous era of history had ever witnessed.”24 Even if the popular belief in equality of opportunity was exaggerated, he added, it had led Americans to believe that if we can’t make it on our own, it’s our own fault. Equality in America, Potter wrote, had come to mean not equality of outcome, as in Europe, but “in a major sense, parity in competition.” That transatlantic contrast in outlook persists undiminished today.25 Compared to our European peers, Americans remain more skeptical about redistributive policies and more emphatic about social mobility.
Although “the American Dream” is a surprisingly recent coinage (the term was first used in its modern sense in the 1930s), the cultural trope of Horatio Alger and the prospect of upward social mobility have very deep roots in our psyche. In 1843, McGuffey’s Reader—in effect, our first national school textbook—told students, “The road to wealth, to honor, to usefulness, and happiness, is open to all, and all who will, may enter upon it with the almost certain prospect of success.”26
Throughout the half century after World War II, roughly two thirds of Americans from all walks of life told pollsters that as a matter of fact, anyone who worked hard could get ahead.27 In the twenty-first century, however, surveys have revealed a creeping pessimism about the chances for upward mobility for the next generation, and about whether hard work would really be rewarded. Nevertheless, on balance most Americans have believed (at least until recently) that equality of opportunity characterizes our society—that the American Dream, in other words, endures.28
So far we’ve surveyed Americans’ beliefs about equality and mobility. But what about the facts? When it comes to class differences in America, what have been the trends, now and in the past?
Graphically, the ups and downs of inequality in America during the twentieth century trace a gigantic U, beginning and ending in two Gilded Ages, but with a long period of relative equality around mid-century. The economic historians Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz have described the pattern as “a tale of two half-centuries.”29 As the century opened, economic inequality was high, but from about 1910 to about 1970 the distribution of income gradually became more equal. Two world wars and the Great Depression contributed to this flattening of the economic pyramid, but the equalizing trend continued during the three postwar decades (the egalitarian period during which my classmates and I grew up in Port Clinton). “From 1945 to 1975,” the sociologist Douglas Massey has written, summarizing that era, “under structural arrangements implemented during the New Deal, poverty rates steadily fell, median incomes consistently rose, and inequality progressively dropped, as a rising economic tide lifted all boats.”30 In fact, during this period the dinghies actually rose slightly faster than the yachts, as income for the top fifth grew about 2.5 percent annually, while for the bottom fifth the rise was about 3 percent a year.
In the early 1970s, however, that decades-long equalizing trend began to reverse, slowly at first but then with accelerating harshness. Initially, the growing division appeared in the lower reaches of the income hierarchy, as the bottom dropped away from the middle and top, but in the 1980s the top began to pull away from everyone else, and in the first decades of the twenty-first century the very top began to pull away even from the top.31 Even within each major racial/ethnic group, income inequality rose at the same substantial rate between 1967 and 2011, as richer whites, blacks, and Latinos pulled away from their poorer co-ethnics.32 In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth, and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households.33
Income trends were especially divergent among men with different levels of education. “Between 1980 and 2012,” reports economist David Autor, “real hourly earnings of full-time college-educated U.S. males rose anywhere from 20% to 56%, with the greatest gains among those with a postbaccalaureate degree. During the same period, real earnings of males with high school or lower educational levels declined substantially, falling by 22% among high school dropouts and 11% among high school graduates.”34
Income inequality was momentarily reduced by the immediate impact of the Great Recession in 2008–2009, but in the ensuing years the trend toward increasing affluence at the very top, coupled with stagnation or worse for the rest of the society, resumed and even accelerated. From 2009 to 2012, the real incomes of the top 1 percent of American families rose 31 percent, while the real incomes of the bottom 99 percent barely budged (up less than half a percentage point).35
The causes of this breathtaking increase in inequality during the past three to four decades are much debated—globalization, technological change and the consequent increase in “returns to education,” de-unionization, superstar compensation, changing social norms, and post-Reagan public policy—though the basic shift toward inequality occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations. No serious observer doubts that the past 40 years have witnessed an almost unprecedented growth in inequality in America.36 Ordinary Americans, too, have gradually become aware of rising inequality, though they underestimate the extent of the shift.
The growth of income inequality—especially the gap between the ultrarich and everyone else—has been widely discussed in the public square in recent years. This growing gap between rich and poor is reflected in many other measures of well-being, including wealth, happiness, and even life expectancy.
Since the 1980s, mortality has declined among college-educated white women but has actually increased among white women with less than a high school degree, largely because of growing differences in economic well-being. The sociologist Michael Hout reports that “the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross income gap [in happiness] was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s.”37
Growing inequality in accumulated wealth is particularly marked, as shown in Figure 1.3. Even taking into account the losses of the Great Recession, the net worth of college-educated American households with children rose by 47 percent between 1989 and 2013, whereas among high school–educated households net worth actually fell by 17 percent during that quarter century. Parental wealth is especially important for social mobility, because it can provide informal insurance that allows kids to take more risks in search of more reward. For example, a child who can borrow living expenses from Mom and Dad can be more selective when looking for a job, whereas a child without a parent-provided life preserver has to grab the first job that comes along. Similarly, family wealth allows for big investments in college without requiring massive student debt that then cramps the choices open to a new graduate.