Some time ago, NPR ran an item on the the decline in American social mobility and the end of the American Dream. I meant, at that time, to comment on it, but I never got to it. That item is here: Social Mobility: Is The American Dream Slipping Away? : NPR
This topic came back into my mind this past week for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the President has been commenting on the economy recently, and even though it's generally the case that we've been in an economic recovery for some time, there's a very widespread sense that it's pretty shaky and might even reverse course at any moment. There seems to be, in other word, very little faith in the economy.
Newsboys of the early 20th Century, all about ten years old. No doubt that for their children, the future was better than that of their parents.
Added to that, this past week the local newspaper ran a wire service article that holds a majority of Americans no longer believe in one of the definitions of the American Dream, that being that their children's lives shall be better than their own. I suspect that observation is only partially an economic one, but the story also noted that around 75% of Americans experience a period of "economic uncertainty" in their lives, that being defined by a variety of criteria, including having a year or more or off and on employment. By that definition, I've experienced that myself, which may be why I've always been pretty jumpy about such topics.
Most disturbing of all, however, a lawyer that was in a deposition I was in told us, after the deposition, about his experiences as a board member on a statewide food bank program. Apparently this town has a huge homeless population. That's scary indeed, as we're on the periphery of the North Dakota oil boom, and our economy is supposed to be benefiting. Apparently it is, but the problem is that a lot of the jobs don't equate to enough to even rent a place to live here, which at rental rates, I'd believe.
What does all of this mean, then? Is the American Dream slipping away?
I guess in order to look at that, we'd have to define what the American Dream is. That may be tougher than we suppose, as it seems to be vaguely defined in varying ways, depending on the era. I've heard it specifically tied to home ownership. An older definition tied it to land ownership, and it was certainly the dream of many immigrants from Europe to own their own farms, rather than be a tenant farmer as was so often the case in Europe. Indeed, that dream would best perhaps be called the North American Dream, or even the Dream of North and South Americans, as it defined the goals of thousands of immigrants who settled from the tip of Argentina to the outreaches of Alaska. But then, we also have the simple definition of a hope and expectation that children's lives will be better than their parents. An expectation of ever rising economic fortune, in other words.
There are real reasons to suspect that the national sense that there's been a change in conditions making the American Dream less viable is very real, just as there are real reasons, indeed little doubt, that for much of the country's history the American Dream has basically been a reality. But why has that been?
Classically, in the US, this has been sort of explained as an element of American Exceptionalism. And it's probably a warranted explanation, but one which would actually apply to more than just the US, but to a collection of nations that enjoyed similar circumstances. What we term the "American Dream" has been generally observed to be the conditions in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Chile, plus probably a host of other locations which don't come immediately to mind. It wasn't immigration alone that explained this, as there are plenty of other New World nations that didn't experience these conditions, and outside of southern Africa, it wasn't really greatly experienced in Africa, which was likewise subject to European colonization.
So what were the elements that explained this? It seems to be vast untapped natural resources combined with a culture that allowed for little restriction in entrepreneurial activity. And, and often missed, the other factor was free access to agricultural land.
Access to natural resources is a condition that existed in a large number of locations, and still exists in many, and can't explain rising economic fortunes or the expectation of rising economic expectations in and of itself. Russia, for example, probably has more untapped natural resources than any other place on earth and has forever. But the role of the availability to natural resources is a critical element of this "dream." This is made evident by the fact that many people in the US, or Canada, or elsewhere, got their start this very way, and their families benefited from it. For example, in my own family my great grandfather on my father's side moved to Colorado in order to mine gold, participating in the gold rush around Leadville. He didn't do this for long, and converted his early activities into one allowing him to own a store in the same community, but that isn't an uncommon story. By doing this, he was able to provide for his family in a manner that was superior to that which his parents probably had (we know nothing about them).
Access to farm land in the same fashion is an even more common and critical element of this story. In the US we often look back romantically on the story of homesteaders, and that story really forms to the basis of American economic success. Next to no homesteaders of the 19th Century conceived of htat enterprise as one that would lead them to wealth, and it generally did not. By the 20th Century, contrary to our cultural expectation, there was a fairly pronounced believe that farming in particular was a door opener to wealth, and by the teens that belief was extremely common, even though not held, by any means, by all homesteaders. Indeed, various bodies, railroads for example, promoted homesteading in that fashion and during World War One entrepreneurial homesteading reached manic levels before it collapsed post war. Still, for most homesteading offered the hope for basic farming based independence, but not a lot more. Most homesteads actually failed, as is often noted, but less noted is that many failed homesteaders came late in the era, and many who failed earlier simply took their newly acquired knowledge and moved on.
Perhaps the best summation of the hope offered by American homesteading was summed up by a friend of mine whose grandparents were Russian Jews who immigrated to Wyoming and started homesteading outside of Cheyenne. "It was great for poor people." That was really true, and they were examples of that. Condemned to a marginal, and dangerous, life in Russia, they made it out and homesteaded in the early 20th Century. Their children went on to become solidly middle class, and the family remains so down to the current generation. The American Dream, of which there are many analogous examples, was a reality for them as they managed to live a life that was in fact better than their Russian parents, and their children did better than they did. The ranch itself is now long gone.
I can almost feel some hackles raise with these two examples, as they are critically land based, and somebody will surely point out that the Homestead Acts were repealed in 1934, but people have done well since then. That's true (although it's odd to note the last major general homestead act passed by Congress was passed in 1916). But we cannot dismiss this example too lightly, and what followed may actually support it.
Americans continued to see and expect rising economic fortunes well into the late 20th Century. Certainly this was the case in the 1950s, and again in the 1980s. In both instances, however, there were unique economic events going on that allowed people to claim a stake, so to speak, in the economy. World War Two saw the crack in social barriers for certain demographics and the first widespread availability of a college education for most Americans. The massive post war rise in education and the release of various demographics from heavy labor meant that the economy expanded and large numbers of men (and that's largely what they were) were able to essentially stake a claim in the economy, when previously they simply would have gone into certain types of blue collar labor. The 1980s and 1990s saw something similar with a technological revolution, which was the functional equivalent of opening up a new continent for many people.
As part of all of this it must be noted that one thing that Americans, and Canadians, Australians, etc., enjoyed that allowed all of this to occur were governments that supported this. Russia, as noted above, is larger and has more land than any nation on earth, and its natural wealthy is undoubtedly far greater than any other nations. But it's done generally poorly. Why? Well, its governments have not allowed the average Russian to benefit, usually, from owning anything. We think, of course, of the Soviet Union in this context, but it was true of pre revolution Russia, to a large degree, as well. And a person can find any number of other examples from other countries. Even in the United Kingdom, which gave us our legal system, land ownership was concentrated, through the assistance of the law, in a large landowning hereditary class up until the early 19th Century, when the system began to be attacked by Parliament, although that divestiture took all the way up until after World War One. Indeed, the war made continuance of it a social impossibility.
Throughout this entire period of American history, indeed North American history, a certain constant set of factors therefore existed. One is that, up until the early 1930s, and even well beyond that, access to land was readily available. Indeed, this was so much the case that farmers were sort of disdained in popular culture as uneducated yokels, something that was never true, but which showed the extent to which aspiring to something else was pretty common, and that farming, for many people and families, was the basic starting point for everything else. That there was something else that paid decently was also a constant. Blue collar jobs often paid quite well. And education was a nearly guaranteed means of achieving an upper middle class standard of living, if not the only way, and it certainly wasn't the only way.
An middle class living itself seems to have meant something different from what it currently does at that. The focus of most people's economic activities was to provide a decent living for their families, but the family element of that was the main focus. That may seem self evident, but when combined with the fact that the "consumer society" hadn't taken root yet, it means something considerably different from what we might suppose. The concept of an economy based on "consumers" itself didn't exist, and the first beginnings of it started only a century ago. It didn't really take fully off until after World War Two, and didn't reach its entrenched modern status until the 1980s. So, when we look at the earlier era of the "American Dream" we're not really seeing a dream focused on the concept of wealth or acquisition.
That doesn't mean vast wealth didn't exist. It certainly did. Indeed, there's some spectacular examples of it. But the idea, rather, that a person lived to buy stuff, or that a person should always be buying the newest and greatest, really didn't. Certain items were quite valued, but people didn't generally have the concept of having disposable stuff, and they didn't have the general idea of constantly upgrading things. People moved from one house to another, if they did, out of necessity. Some items were bought with the idea that they were nearly permanent, such as nice stereos and the like, rather than something destined to be upgraded and replaced. So economic life was different from the modern concept of it, in some significant ways, and in some subtle ones. So, when people spoke of their children's lives being better than their own, they often conceived of it as being an easier life, in terms of economic need and want, and at some point a semi wealthy life, with that life being sort of on part with what the upper middle class actually experiences today.
But now people don't seem to be expecting this and are skeptical that they ever shall. Why would that be?
It may be because many of the constants of the American Dream no longer are. That is, the basic underpinnings of it may have evaporated.
Starting with the most basic underpinning of them all, land, that's certainly the case. Land, which was once an almost free commodity in the Unites States, no longer is. Indeed, a little noticed evolving situation in the US, and in Canada as well, is that our pattern of land ownership is heading towards replicating the Europe of old, or perhaps the Mexico of always. That is, the land belongs to individuals who are born into it, and buying it is becoming increasingly impossible.
I don't know that owning farm ground, as was once the case, remains the dream for everyone today. Indeed, I doubt it, as Americans have become more and more urbanized that part of their collective culture becomes increasingly diluted. But for the many who do, it is well beyond the means of most. The old "40 acres and a mule" days, no matter how romantic (or no matter how unrealistic that may have been in the past) is gone. And with it has gone one of the most basic ways that people had in our society, indeed in any society that's allowed for it, for people to have a basic means of making a decent living. When it becomes impossible for a segment of society to enter into one of the most basic employments, its troubling. Keep in mind that farming was once so common as an occupation that it was somewhat disdained as one.
Indeed, in some economic circles, its still disdained and those economist actually take heart at the inability of average people to become farmers. This explained, by those individuals, with the theory that society has become so wealthy that the value of land has accordingly inflated due to its use for other things, with some of those things being merely recreational for private landowners. This is a good thing, they explain, because it means that most people have been freed from farming so that they may now pursue more worthwhile, higher, pursuits.
That assumes, of course, that those who would have farmed instead are now pursing "higher", or at least more economically lucrative, pursuits, which is a suspect assumption at best. It also has the uncomfortable view of sublimating basic human desires in that some are regarded as worthy and others not, or at least assuming that everyone would be happier in one of the pursuits that these economist approve of, which seems to be a fairly incorrect assumption based upon real world observation. At any rate, what this generally means is that it's become very difficult for people to enter one of the basic age old occupations, meaning that we've replicated a situation that existed in 19th Century Europe here.
That perhaps wouldn't be entirely disturbing except that the same thing has happened to blue collar employments to a very large degree. Many people sustained themselves and their families in well paying blue collar jobs. But most manufacturing jobs have fled the US and are now overseas. Some remain, to be sure, but those that pay well are concentrated in a relatively small economic arena. One of those is mineral production, so for those living in the Rocky Mountain Region, right now, this may not be as evident as it is elsewhere. But elsewhere, all the heavy industry and manufacturing jobs that once dominated the Mid West are largely gone.
Again, many economist have winked at this as a good thing, viewing this as freeing a sector of the workforce from industrial employment for other pursuits. But with farming now gone as one, and heavy industry gone as another, to a large degree, that assumes that everyone can be absorbed by a white collar service world or, moreover, that they want to be.
And even at that, it's now increasingly the case that these jobs are either evaporating, or are no longer as lucrative as they once were.
What's very clear is that nearly all retail jobs, occupations that were never lucrative but which at least let a person get by, no longer pay that well. Office jobs now tend to increasingly require a college education to obtain, where once they often did not. The fact that a college education is necessary in order to obtain nearly any office job, means that the value of a college education has been, ironically, accordingly debased. As late as the 1970s a college education nearly guaranteed that a person could walk into an entry level management job with most corporate concerns irrespective of the degree. Now degrees without specific application are dicey propositions. A degree in Art History, for example, probably isn't going to let a person go to work for IBM.
This has even spread to some professions that were regarded for some time as guaranteeing an economic success. Two of the three classic professions (law, medicine, and the clergy) have become synonymous with wealth. That is, the assumption has been forever, that having a law degree or a medical degree meant that a person was guaranteed to do well. Now that's no longer true.
That's become very much the case with a JD, which is actually a return to the historic norm in the United States. Law used to be a favorite vehicle, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, for the sons of farmers to try to find another occupation, in an era when they were few. With hard fought reforms coming in during the early 20th Century, law became by the early 20th Century a means by which those from a rural background or who were born into blue collar families could enter the white collar world and earn a middle class income. In that regards, perhaps the saintly portrayal of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird or the semi cynical portrayal of the lawyer protagonist in Anatomy of Murder are particularly accurate. "Rich lawyers" were (and always have been) quite rare, but the expectation of wealth wasn't there. At some point it developed, even if it never reflected reality.
Now it's the case that in most areas of the nation it's becoming increasingly difficult for newly admitted lawyers to find work at all and the era of lawyer wealth, to the extent that it ever existed, has passed. And that seems to be also spreading to physicians, who are coming under increasingly scrutiny as people grow displeased with the high costs of medical care. Whatever a person thinks of "Obamacare", it's emblematic of a situation in which a large number of people can no longer afford health care and the displeasure with the situation was at least sufficiently large to cause a majority in Congress to act upon the concern. No matter what hereafter happens, some sort of corner has been turned, and doctors are now indicating this themselves. For the first time ever, I've heard physicians counsel the young not to follow in their footsteps and avoid a career as a doctor, it not being worth the costs of the education, they claim.
So, if all of this is correct, what it would seem to mean is that the basic American story of people moving from poverty onto farms or into factories, and their children moving on to white collar affluence, is over, as those foundational occupations are gone, and even the aspired ones are becoming increasingly less lucrative. But perhaps there's another element of this too, which should be looked at, which is expectations.
Not only has the American Dream become seemingly more difficult to obtain, but perhaps what it means in terms of expectations has changed, and that could be significant.
Going back to an earlier point, the dream to many immigrants amounted to nothing more than to be able to farm their own land. That's about it. Raised in part of the world where to be a farmer meant to be the underling of a landlord, American meant that the same labor would go to yourself, rather than the lord. That's a pretty basic dream. Not that its' insignificant, however. And obtaining that level of self sufficiency remained a basic part of the dream, and for many people all of the dream, for over a century.
That concept of the world does not involve a great deal of materialism. For most of American history, however, that didn't really matter. As late as 1919 farm incomes were on par with urban incomes, in terms of what they could buy, which was in part because there was a lot less for middle income people to buy. After that date, farm incomes, on average, and city incomes never again really reached parity with urban incomes. The government actually emphasized the disparity shortly after that with a series of programs that sought to address it, but which might have really only had the impact of emphasizing it to the rural population in an era when, Great Depression aside, materialism in the form of consumerism was just beginning to really start to take over. This process, society wide, really began to grow post World War Two and took off enormously in the 1970s.
That in turn seems to have lead to a series of social expectations based upon ever improving stuff or replacing stuff. The concept of a "starter home", for example, didn't exist until some time well post war, but now it seems to be the norm. At least for those in the middle class or perhaps upper middle class there's an expectation that homes will continually be traded up, when previously most people just tried to buy a house and stuck with it. Some people did trade up of course, but it wasn't so much planned as it was the presentation of an opportunity of one kind or another.
The reason that I mention that is that perhaps the reason the American Dream is imperiled is that it's evolved to the point of being somewhat unrealistic, which doesn't say much about the original dream. If that's the case, and it seems to be at least partially the case, what the "slipping away" of the American Dream might really mean is a tampering down of a fever dream into a more realistic one. Going back to the lawyer example again, the overheated aspect of law student dreams of the 90s seems to have been that they'd all enter into some super lucrative job that didn't entail work, while in reality they're finding that the jobs that are available recall an era a century ago when there were plenty of lawyers, but the jobs were not necessarily tickets to wealth.
Which brings up the fact that the past was very difficult in ways that would be almost impossible for many to appreciate today.
Still, it seems there's more than a little evidence that something is amiss. It's no longer the case that a lot of basic jobs exist that allow Americans into the work place. Many of have gone overseas, and many which remain have become the domain of recent immigrants, sometimes illegal, which both political parties have excused on the basis that "Americans won't take those jobs" which really means that the wages are being kept depressed in that fashion, below that which Americans can afford to take. White collar jobs in turn are also leaving, with it now being the case that even professional jobs are imperiled. Therefore, it's no longer the case that a hard working but fairly poor person can expect to take an automobile manufacturing job in Detroit, and enter the middle class, and then send his son to college to become a lawyer, and have him enter the upper middle class. There is unlikely to be a job in Detroit, and even if that son made it to law school, there might not be a job for him thereafter, or at least it might be quite a bit different than what he'd expected economically.
So what can be done about this? There probably are plenty of things actually, but they all entail rethinking how our economy, immigration policies, and education system work. And I don't think there's a strong desire to do any of that.
Short of that, what is clear is that more than ever, education is massively critical to an individuals ability to make a living, of any kind. In the mid 20th Century, a fairly high school drop out rate almost didn't matter, as a person could still find a way to make a pretty decent living. Now, that's just not true. Not having a high school education will catch up with a person sooner or later, and probably sooner. College is becoming nearly mandatory for any sort of economic security, while at the same time, just having a college degree no longer means that a person can convert that into a job. The degree must be a real one with some application. In some ways, the right college degree is the homestead, or at least the homesteader's plow, of the current era.
Postscript
Recently I heard somebody comment that when you learn a new word you suddenly find the word being used everywhere. That seems true to me not only about vocabulary expansion, but oddly even about topics that I might post on here. At least that's what I'm finding here. Since I posted this, and that's not long ago, I've heard or read several additional things directly on topic.
I guess, because economic news is constantly being commented on, that's not too surprising. For example, just today I read an article by a columnist in the newspaper, and a pretty good one at that, in which the columnist comments on the very disturbing fact that four out of five Americans struggle with poverty at some point in their lives. That's scary in the extreme, to say the least. That person claimed, in the column, that being a Middle Class American had become something akin to being European royalty, you had to be born into it.
I'm afraid that might becoming true. That comment made me recall something that Mary Billiter, whose columns appear weekly in the Casper Star Tribune, and which I do not care for at all (maudlin, in my view, and highly repetitive in theme), wrote about which I found startling and interesting at the time. She claimed she'd read something, somewhere, which reported a study that those born into the middle class were almost incapable of dropping out of it.
I don't know if that squares with the more recent information. I'd like to think that's true, and that more people can get into the middle class, but I do think that there's something to the point in that education and connections are better in the middle class than they are amongst the poor, to be sure. However, that would also apply but even more so, for those in the upper class.
Moving into the upper class is something that bring up something else I ran across the other day, and that relates back to the reference to lawyers set out above. After I wrote this I heard an ABA podcast interview of a law professor regarding a book he'd written in which he reported that law school was now an educational exception and very likely not to be a good investment for students. More on that in a second, as I tried to find who he was, but I'd forgotten his name and found instead a book review of a book written by a lawyer who did so well that he retired at age 53, coming to essentially the same conclusion. That book found that a glut of lawyers was resulting in high lawyer unemployment and that the future didn't look good for those contemplating entering the field. Having said that, however, his comments were framed in the context of those "struggling" to "climb out of the middle class." That seems pretty limited in view, as the middle class today is undoubtedly wealthier than it has ever been, in spite of perceptions to the contrary. Still, it was a surprising work for somebody who obviously did well himself.
The other book turned out to have been written by
Classically, in the US, this has been sort of explained as an element of American Exceptionalism. And it's probably a warranted explanation, but one which would actually apply to more than just the US, but to a collection of nations that enjoyed similar circumstances. What we term the "American Dream" has been generally observed to be the conditions in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Chile, plus probably a host of other locations which don't come immediately to mind. It wasn't immigration alone that explained this, as there are plenty of other New World nations that didn't experience these conditions, and outside of southern Africa, it wasn't really greatly experienced in Africa, which was likewise subject to European colonization.
So what were the elements that explained this? It seems to be vast untapped natural resources combined with a culture that allowed for little restriction in entrepreneurial activity. And, and often missed, the other factor was free access to agricultural land.
Access to natural resources is a condition that existed in a large number of locations, and still exists in many, and can't explain rising economic fortunes or the expectation of rising economic expectations in and of itself. Russia, for example, probably has more untapped natural resources than any other place on earth and has forever. But the role of the availability to natural resources is a critical element of this "dream." This is made evident by the fact that many people in the US, or Canada, or elsewhere, got their start this very way, and their families benefited from it. For example, in my own family my great grandfather on my father's side moved to Colorado in order to mine gold, participating in the gold rush around Leadville. He didn't do this for long, and converted his early activities into one allowing him to own a store in the same community, but that isn't an uncommon story. By doing this, he was able to provide for his family in a manner that was superior to that which his parents probably had (we know nothing about them).
Miner's Delight, Wyoming. Part of the delight was that starting up mining was nearly free, if exceptionally laborious.
Access to farm land in the same fashion is an even more common and critical element of this story. In the US we often look back romantically on the story of homesteaders, and that story really forms to the basis of American economic success. Next to no homesteaders of the 19th Century conceived of htat enterprise as one that would lead them to wealth, and it generally did not. By the 20th Century, contrary to our cultural expectation, there was a fairly pronounced believe that farming in particular was a door opener to wealth, and by the teens that belief was extremely common, even though not held, by any means, by all homesteaders. Indeed, various bodies, railroads for example, promoted homesteading in that fashion and during World War One entrepreneurial homesteading reached manic levels before it collapsed post war. Still, for most homesteading offered the hope for basic farming based independence, but not a lot more. Most homesteads actually failed, as is often noted, but less noted is that many failed homesteaders came late in the era, and many who failed earlier simply took their newly acquired knowledge and moved on.
Nebraska homestead, 1884. This looks to be a successful operation, but even so look at the number of people working and living there, and the small size of the house. Also, the windmill is odd as I can't recall seeing one that runs through a structure like that. They might have found it necessary to cover the well head.
Nebraska homestead, 1880s.
I can almost feel some hackles raise with these two examples, as they are critically land based, and somebody will surely point out that the Homestead Acts were repealed in 1934, but people have done well since then. That's true (although it's odd to note the last major general homestead act passed by Congress was passed in 1916). But we cannot dismiss this example too lightly, and what followed may actually support it.
Americans continued to see and expect rising economic fortunes well into the late 20th Century. Certainly this was the case in the 1950s, and again in the 1980s. In both instances, however, there were unique economic events going on that allowed people to claim a stake, so to speak, in the economy. World War Two saw the crack in social barriers for certain demographics and the first widespread availability of a college education for most Americans. The massive post war rise in education and the release of various demographics from heavy labor meant that the economy expanded and large numbers of men (and that's largely what they were) were able to essentially stake a claim in the economy, when previously they simply would have gone into certain types of blue collar labor. The 1980s and 1990s saw something similar with a technological revolution, which was the functional equivalent of opening up a new continent for many people.
As part of all of this it must be noted that one thing that Americans, and Canadians, Australians, etc., enjoyed that allowed all of this to occur were governments that supported this. Russia, as noted above, is larger and has more land than any nation on earth, and its natural wealthy is undoubtedly far greater than any other nations. But it's done generally poorly. Why? Well, its governments have not allowed the average Russian to benefit, usually, from owning anything. We think, of course, of the Soviet Union in this context, but it was true of pre revolution Russia, to a large degree, as well. And a person can find any number of other examples from other countries. Even in the United Kingdom, which gave us our legal system, land ownership was concentrated, through the assistance of the law, in a large landowning hereditary class up until the early 19th Century, when the system began to be attacked by Parliament, although that divestiture took all the way up until after World War One. Indeed, the war made continuance of it a social impossibility.
The English countryside. Beautiful, but largely concentrated in the hands of large landowners well into the 20th Century.
Throughout this entire period of American history, indeed North American history, a certain constant set of factors therefore existed. One is that, up until the early 1930s, and even well beyond that, access to land was readily available. Indeed, this was so much the case that farmers were sort of disdained in popular culture as uneducated yokels, something that was never true, but which showed the extent to which aspiring to something else was pretty common, and that farming, for many people and families, was the basic starting point for everything else. That there was something else that paid decently was also a constant. Blue collar jobs often paid quite well. And education was a nearly guaranteed means of achieving an upper middle class standard of living, if not the only way, and it certainly wasn't the only way.
Wheat farmer, July 1941.
An middle class living itself seems to have meant something different from what it currently does at that. The focus of most people's economic activities was to provide a decent living for their families, but the family element of that was the main focus. That may seem self evident, but when combined with the fact that the "consumer society" hadn't taken root yet, it means something considerably different from what we might suppose. The concept of an economy based on "consumers" itself didn't exist, and the first beginnings of it started only a century ago. It didn't really take fully off until after World War Two, and didn't reach its entrenched modern status until the 1980s. So, when we look at the earlier era of the "American Dream" we're not really seeing a dream focused on the concept of wealth or acquisition.
That doesn't mean vast wealth didn't exist. It certainly did. Indeed, there's some spectacular examples of it. But the idea, rather, that a person lived to buy stuff, or that a person should always be buying the newest and greatest, really didn't. Certain items were quite valued, but people didn't generally have the concept of having disposable stuff, and they didn't have the general idea of constantly upgrading things. People moved from one house to another, if they did, out of necessity. Some items were bought with the idea that they were nearly permanent, such as nice stereos and the like, rather than something destined to be upgraded and replaced. So economic life was different from the modern concept of it, in some significant ways, and in some subtle ones. So, when people spoke of their children's lives being better than their own, they often conceived of it as being an easier life, in terms of economic need and want, and at some point a semi wealthy life, with that life being sort of on part with what the upper middle class actually experiences today.
Diamond Jim Brady, right, the symbol of self made flashy wealth from the late 1890s and early 20th Century.
It may be because many of the constants of the American Dream no longer are. That is, the basic underpinnings of it may have evaporated.
Starting with the most basic underpinning of them all, land, that's certainly the case. Land, which was once an almost free commodity in the Unites States, no longer is. Indeed, a little noticed evolving situation in the US, and in Canada as well, is that our pattern of land ownership is heading towards replicating the Europe of old, or perhaps the Mexico of always. That is, the land belongs to individuals who are born into it, and buying it is becoming increasingly impossible.
I don't know that owning farm ground, as was once the case, remains the dream for everyone today. Indeed, I doubt it, as Americans have become more and more urbanized that part of their collective culture becomes increasingly diluted. But for the many who do, it is well beyond the means of most. The old "40 acres and a mule" days, no matter how romantic (or no matter how unrealistic that may have been in the past) is gone. And with it has gone one of the most basic ways that people had in our society, indeed in any society that's allowed for it, for people to have a basic means of making a decent living. When it becomes impossible for a segment of society to enter into one of the most basic employments, its troubling. Keep in mind that farming was once so common as an occupation that it was somewhat disdained as one.
Indeed, in some economic circles, its still disdained and those economist actually take heart at the inability of average people to become farmers. This explained, by those individuals, with the theory that society has become so wealthy that the value of land has accordingly inflated due to its use for other things, with some of those things being merely recreational for private landowners. This is a good thing, they explain, because it means that most people have been freed from farming so that they may now pursue more worthwhile, higher, pursuits.
That assumes, of course, that those who would have farmed instead are now pursing "higher", or at least more economically lucrative, pursuits, which is a suspect assumption at best. It also has the uncomfortable view of sublimating basic human desires in that some are regarded as worthy and others not, or at least assuming that everyone would be happier in one of the pursuits that these economist approve of, which seems to be a fairly incorrect assumption based upon real world observation. At any rate, what this generally means is that it's become very difficult for people to enter one of the basic age old occupations, meaning that we've replicated a situation that existed in 19th Century Europe here.
That perhaps wouldn't be entirely disturbing except that the same thing has happened to blue collar employments to a very large degree. Many people sustained themselves and their families in well paying blue collar jobs. But most manufacturing jobs have fled the US and are now overseas. Some remain, to be sure, but those that pay well are concentrated in a relatively small economic arena. One of those is mineral production, so for those living in the Rocky Mountain Region, right now, this may not be as evident as it is elsewhere. But elsewhere, all the heavy industry and manufacturing jobs that once dominated the Mid West are largely gone.
Again, many economist have winked at this as a good thing, viewing this as freeing a sector of the workforce from industrial employment for other pursuits. But with farming now gone as one, and heavy industry gone as another, to a large degree, that assumes that everyone can be absorbed by a white collar service world or, moreover, that they want to be.
And even at that, it's now increasingly the case that these jobs are either evaporating, or are no longer as lucrative as they once were.
What's very clear is that nearly all retail jobs, occupations that were never lucrative but which at least let a person get by, no longer pay that well. Office jobs now tend to increasingly require a college education to obtain, where once they often did not. The fact that a college education is necessary in order to obtain nearly any office job, means that the value of a college education has been, ironically, accordingly debased. As late as the 1970s a college education nearly guaranteed that a person could walk into an entry level management job with most corporate concerns irrespective of the degree. Now degrees without specific application are dicey propositions. A degree in Art History, for example, probably isn't going to let a person go to work for IBM.
This has even spread to some professions that were regarded for some time as guaranteeing an economic success. Two of the three classic professions (law, medicine, and the clergy) have become synonymous with wealth. That is, the assumption has been forever, that having a law degree or a medical degree meant that a person was guaranteed to do well. Now that's no longer true.
W. Morgan Shuster, who was at that time a lawyer in New York.
That's become very much the case with a JD, which is actually a return to the historic norm in the United States. Law used to be a favorite vehicle, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, for the sons of farmers to try to find another occupation, in an era when they were few. With hard fought reforms coming in during the early 20th Century, law became by the early 20th Century a means by which those from a rural background or who were born into blue collar families could enter the white collar world and earn a middle class income. In that regards, perhaps the saintly portrayal of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird or the semi cynical portrayal of the lawyer protagonist in Anatomy of Murder are particularly accurate. "Rich lawyers" were (and always have been) quite rare, but the expectation of wealth wasn't there. At some point it developed, even if it never reflected reality.
African American lawyer of the 1930s, a more realistic view of what lawyers actually typically do. Contrary to the common view, minority communities have typically had members of their demographic who were lawyers, that being one of the few professional jobs they could generally take and occupy.
Now it's the case that in most areas of the nation it's becoming increasingly difficult for newly admitted lawyers to find work at all and the era of lawyer wealth, to the extent that it ever existed, has passed. And that seems to be also spreading to physicians, who are coming under increasingly scrutiny as people grow displeased with the high costs of medical care. Whatever a person thinks of "Obamacare", it's emblematic of a situation in which a large number of people can no longer afford health care and the displeasure with the situation was at least sufficiently large to cause a majority in Congress to act upon the concern. No matter what hereafter happens, some sort of corner has been turned, and doctors are now indicating this themselves. For the first time ever, I've heard physicians counsel the young not to follow in their footsteps and avoid a career as a doctor, it not being worth the costs of the education, they claim.
So, if all of this is correct, what it would seem to mean is that the basic American story of people moving from poverty onto farms or into factories, and their children moving on to white collar affluence, is over, as those foundational occupations are gone, and even the aspired ones are becoming increasingly less lucrative. But perhaps there's another element of this too, which should be looked at, which is expectations.
Not only has the American Dream become seemingly more difficult to obtain, but perhaps what it means in terms of expectations has changed, and that could be significant.
Going back to an earlier point, the dream to many immigrants amounted to nothing more than to be able to farm their own land. That's about it. Raised in part of the world where to be a farmer meant to be the underling of a landlord, American meant that the same labor would go to yourself, rather than the lord. That's a pretty basic dream. Not that its' insignificant, however. And obtaining that level of self sufficiency remained a basic part of the dream, and for many people all of the dream, for over a century.
That concept of the world does not involve a great deal of materialism. For most of American history, however, that didn't really matter. As late as 1919 farm incomes were on par with urban incomes, in terms of what they could buy, which was in part because there was a lot less for middle income people to buy. After that date, farm incomes, on average, and city incomes never again really reached parity with urban incomes. The government actually emphasized the disparity shortly after that with a series of programs that sought to address it, but which might have really only had the impact of emphasizing it to the rural population in an era when, Great Depression aside, materialism in the form of consumerism was just beginning to really start to take over. This process, society wide, really began to grow post World War Two and took off enormously in the 1970s.
That in turn seems to have lead to a series of social expectations based upon ever improving stuff or replacing stuff. The concept of a "starter home", for example, didn't exist until some time well post war, but now it seems to be the norm. At least for those in the middle class or perhaps upper middle class there's an expectation that homes will continually be traded up, when previously most people just tried to buy a house and stuck with it. Some people did trade up of course, but it wasn't so much planned as it was the presentation of an opportunity of one kind or another.
The reason that I mention that is that perhaps the reason the American Dream is imperiled is that it's evolved to the point of being somewhat unrealistic, which doesn't say much about the original dream. If that's the case, and it seems to be at least partially the case, what the "slipping away" of the American Dream might really mean is a tampering down of a fever dream into a more realistic one. Going back to the lawyer example again, the overheated aspect of law student dreams of the 90s seems to have been that they'd all enter into some super lucrative job that didn't entail work, while in reality they're finding that the jobs that are available recall an era a century ago when there were plenty of lawyers, but the jobs were not necessarily tickets to wealth.
Which brings up the fact that the past was very difficult in ways that would be almost impossible for many to appreciate today.
Striking coal miners, 1930s
Prior to World War Two a lot of labor was just flat out exceptionally difficult and dangerous. If the occupiers of those jobs dreamed of a different future for their children, they achieved it, as the conditions of much of that type of work did change and so it is the case today that many jobs just aren't as long, hard or dangerous as they once were. People rarely think of the past as much more difficult that than the present, but for many, many, people, it truly was. For people working poor paying, dangerous jobs, just getting a child into a different line of work in the middle class was an enormous success.
Early 20th Century newsboy. The caption of this photograph notes: Some results of messenger and newsboy work. For nine years this
sixteen year old boy has been newsboy and messenger for drug stores and
telegraph companies. He was recently brought before the Judge of the
Juvenile Court for incorrigibility at home. Is now out on parole, and
was working again for drug company when he got a job carrying grips in
the Union Depot. He is on the job from 6:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M.
(seventeen hours a day) for seven days in the week. His mother and the
judge think he uses cocaine, and yet they let him put in these long
hours every day. He told me "There ain't a house in 'The Acre' (Red
Light) that I ain't been in. At the drug store, all my deliveries were
down there." Says he makes from $15.00 to $18.00 a week. Eugene Dalton.
Location: Fort Worth, Texas. Clearly, the American Dream wasn't working that well for everyone in the past.
Still, it seems there's more than a little evidence that something is amiss. It's no longer the case that a lot of basic jobs exist that allow Americans into the work place. Many of have gone overseas, and many which remain have become the domain of recent immigrants, sometimes illegal, which both political parties have excused on the basis that "Americans won't take those jobs" which really means that the wages are being kept depressed in that fashion, below that which Americans can afford to take. White collar jobs in turn are also leaving, with it now being the case that even professional jobs are imperiled. Therefore, it's no longer the case that a hard working but fairly poor person can expect to take an automobile manufacturing job in Detroit, and enter the middle class, and then send his son to college to become a lawyer, and have him enter the upper middle class. There is unlikely to be a job in Detroit, and even if that son made it to law school, there might not be a job for him thereafter, or at least it might be quite a bit different than what he'd expected economically.
So what can be done about this? There probably are plenty of things actually, but they all entail rethinking how our economy, immigration policies, and education system work. And I don't think there's a strong desire to do any of that.
The University of Wyoming College of Engineering building, circa 1950s.
Postscript
Recently I heard somebody comment that when you learn a new word you suddenly find the word being used everywhere. That seems true to me not only about vocabulary expansion, but oddly even about topics that I might post on here. At least that's what I'm finding here. Since I posted this, and that's not long ago, I've heard or read several additional things directly on topic.
I guess, because economic news is constantly being commented on, that's not too surprising. For example, just today I read an article by a columnist in the newspaper, and a pretty good one at that, in which the columnist comments on the very disturbing fact that four out of five Americans struggle with poverty at some point in their lives. That's scary in the extreme, to say the least. That person claimed, in the column, that being a Middle Class American had become something akin to being European royalty, you had to be born into it.
I'm afraid that might becoming true. That comment made me recall something that Mary Billiter, whose columns appear weekly in the Casper Star Tribune, and which I do not care for at all (maudlin, in my view, and highly repetitive in theme), wrote about which I found startling and interesting at the time. She claimed she'd read something, somewhere, which reported a study that those born into the middle class were almost incapable of dropping out of it.
I don't know if that squares with the more recent information. I'd like to think that's true, and that more people can get into the middle class, but I do think that there's something to the point in that education and connections are better in the middle class than they are amongst the poor, to be sure. However, that would also apply but even more so, for those in the upper class.
Moving into the upper class is something that bring up something else I ran across the other day, and that relates back to the reference to lawyers set out above. After I wrote this I heard an ABA podcast interview of a law professor regarding a book he'd written in which he reported that law school was now an educational exception and very likely not to be a good investment for students. More on that in a second, as I tried to find who he was, but I'd forgotten his name and found instead a book review of a book written by a lawyer who did so well that he retired at age 53, coming to essentially the same conclusion. That book found that a glut of lawyers was resulting in high lawyer unemployment and that the future didn't look good for those contemplating entering the field. Having said that, however, his comments were framed in the context of those "struggling" to "climb out of the middle class." That seems pretty limited in view, as the middle class today is undoubtedly wealthier than it has ever been, in spite of perceptions to the contrary. Still, it was a surprising work for somebody who obviously did well himself.
The other book turned out to have been written by
