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This is the story of a couple of people who were not lucky enough to be born in the land of the free. Instead of accepting their fate, these two people, along with their families, accomplished a goal they never thought possible.

These two people happen to be both of my parents, born and raised in small, Chinese villages.

My mother lived with three other siblings and hardworking parents. Her family lived in a house no bigger than a modern bedroom. This room had a kitchen, restroom, and a bed that everyone shared. My grandpa worked as a rickshaw puller, barely making enough to feed his family of six. My grandma was a stay at home mom, taking care of my mom and her siblings. My mother and her family finally decided that China was not the place to raise a family, so they decided to move across the world to a place where they only knew a few words of the language. Once in New York, my mother and her family would work on the streets, selling fabric. Every day after school, my mom and her siblings would go straight to the shop to work.

On the other side of the family tree, my father grew up with his parents and two other siblings. When my father became a teenager, he moved to Japan in order to support his family back in China. After a year in Japan and not a lot of success, he decided to move across the world as well. He worked at a restaurant in New Jersey and lived in an apartment right above that restaurant.

Finally, my parents met, married, and worked for several years together in the restaurant business. They packed everything and moved the family to the Midwest. They decided to spend most of the money they had accumulated over the years to buy a restaurant in a small town in Illinois. After two months of little to no business, my parents decided to move once again to another small town in Illinois with the name of Tuscola. They knew that this was the last resort and if this restaurant failed, they will have nothing. One month after opening the restaurant, business was a huge success. They worked 12 hours a day every day for the first few years of business. They have continued to work extremely hard, working over 60 hours a week and rarely going a week without working.

My parents are the definition of the American Dream where people with nothing can reach a level they never thought possible. I believe that America provides hope to people around the world and a place to raise children. I believe that with hard work and dedication, anyone in America can achieve their dreams. I believe that I am extremely lucky to have parents who were brave enough to move to a foreign country for the future of me and my sister. I believe that America has changed all of our lives.

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This is the story of a couple of people who were not lucky enough to be born in the land of the free. Instead of accepting their fate, these two people, along with their families, accomplished a goal they never thought possible.

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America is an improbable idea. A mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone. "Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image," the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote. That's because it was built of bits and pieces that seem discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades. Out of many, one. That is the ideal.

The reality is often quite different, a great national striving consisting frequently of failure. Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry. Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other. Children learn in social-studies class and in the news of the lynching of blacks, the denial of rights to women, the murders of gay men. It is difficult to know how to convince them that this amounts to "crown thy good with brotherhood," that amid all the failures is something spectacularly successful. Perhaps they understand it at this moment, when enormous tragedy, as it so often does, demands a time of reflection on enormous blessings.

This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as "community added to individualism." These two are our defining ideals; they are also in constant conflict. Historians today bemoan the ascendancy of a kind of prideful apartheid in America, saying that the clinging to ethnicity, in background and custom, has undermined the concept of unity. These historians must have forgotten the past, or have gilded it. The New York of my children is no more Balkanized, probably less so, than the Philadelphia of my father, in which Jewish boys would walk several blocks out of their way to avoid the Irish divide of Chester Avenue. (I was the product of a mixed marriage, across barely bridgeable lines: an Italian girl, an Irish boy. How quaint it seems now, how incendiary then.) The Brooklyn of Francie Nolan's famous tree, the Newark of which Portnoy complained, even the uninflected WASP suburbs of Cheever's characters: they are ghettos, pure and simple. Do the Cambodians and the Mexicans in California coexist less easily today than did the Irish and Italians of Massachusetts a century ago? You know the answer.

What is the point of this splintered whole? What is the point of a nation in which Arab cabbies chauffeur Jewish passengers through the streets of New York--and in which Jewish cabbies chauffeur Arab passengers, too, and yet speak in theory of hatred, one for the other? What is the point of a nation in which one part seems to be always on the verge of fisticuffs with another, blacks and whites, gays and straights, left and right, Pole and Chinese and Puerto Rican and Slovenian? Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.

Once these disparate parts were held together by a common enemy, by the fault lines of world wars and the electrified fence of communism. With the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen--African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American--would overwhelm the right. And slow-growing domestic traumas like economic unrest and increasing crime seemed more likely to emphasize division than community. Today the citizens of the United States have come together once more because of armed conflict and enemy attack. Terrorism has led to devastation--and unity.

Yet even in 1994, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center agreed with this statement: "The U.S. is a unique country that stands for something special in the world." One of the things that it stands for is this vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, than on either side of the country's Chester Avenues. Faced with this diversity there is little point in trying to isolate anything remotely resembling a national character, but there are two strains of behavior that, however tenuously, abet the concept of unity.

There is that Calvinist undercurrent in the American psyche that loves the difficult, the demanding, that sees mastering the impossible, whether it be prairie or subway, as a test of character, and so glories in the struggle of this fractured coalescing. And there is a grudging fairness among the citizens of the United States that eventually leads most to admit that, no matter what the English-only advocates try to suggest, the new immigrants are not so different from our own parents or grandparents. Leonel Castillo, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and himself the grandson of Mexican immigrants, once told the writer Studs Terkel proudly, "The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stores are still around. They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European any more. Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin American. They live in the store. They work seven days a week. Their kids are doing well in school. They're making it. Sound familiar?"

Tolerance is the word used most often when this kind of coexistence succeeds, but tolerance is a vanilla-pudding word, standing for little more than the allowance of letting others live unremarked and unmolested. Pride seems excessive, given the American willingness to endlessly complain about them, them being whoever is new, different, unknown or currently under suspicion. But patriotism is partly taking pride in this unlikely ability to throw all of us together in a country that across its length and breadth is as different as a dozen countries, and still be able to call it by one name. When photographs of the faces of all those who died in the World Trade Center destruction are assembled in one place, it will be possible to trace in the skin color, the shape of the eyes and the noses, the texture of the hair, a map of the world. These are the representatives of a mongrel nation that somehow, at times like this, has one spirit. Like many improbable ideas, when it actually works, it's a wonder.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

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America is an improbable idea. A mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone. "Of all the nations in the world, the United States was

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via Pixabay Images

This post was co-written by Robin Moriarty, PhD.

Daily articles are written about Millennials, but are they really that different from their Baby Boomer parents?

Get a cubicle job, a perfect marriage, two large cars, and a white-picket fence in the suburbs. Though these symbols are often associated as key to the "American Dream," they are based on a post-WWII 1950s world, a world that looks much different sixty years later.

When the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1946 to 1964) came-of-age, the core beliefs in working hard for success, prosperity, and social mobility existed, but Boomers added the ideas of self-realization and self-fulfillment -- so much that they were dubbed the "Me Generation" ( which only a few seemed to remember after Time Magazine published a cover naming Millennials as the "Me Me Me Generation").

Now Boomers are hurling the stereotypes of narcissism and entitlement to a whole generation made up of their own Millennial offspring (generally defined as born 1980 and after). But are the Millennials actually that different from the Boomers? After all, the core, capitalistic American value of achievement and success is alive and well across both generations. Perhaps the younger generation isn't having a shift in fundamental values, but rather Millennials are simply defining the symbols of success differently and in a way that makes sense given the economic and technological realities of their generation.

(Note: According to Pew Research, a nonpartisan fact tank, the often overlooked Generation X (born 1965-1979) experiences the left out "middle child" syndrome in these debates particularly as they only represent 65 million vs. the 75+ million each of the Baby Boomers and Gen Y/Millennials.).

After the post-war economy of the mid-20th century, corporations were profitable, consumer goods were plentiful, and opportunity was ripe. Thus, for the Boomers, "success" has typically meant focusing on financial stability (the bigger the salary the better!), a high-achieving career, living a suburban lifestyle, and owning assets from big houses to fancy cars.

The Millennials grew up in quite different times in the world. Many graduated at the height of the recession with tuition skyrocketing over 1,120 percent since 1978, saw their parents struggling to keep a work/life balance, experienced their formative years hyper-connected and more global than ever, and had years of dealing with increasing severity of issues from climate change to gun violence. Thus, "success" seems to mean an abundance of experiences rather than an abundance of things, a career that provides a basic level of financial enjoyment as well as one that's fulfilling a passion, a lifestyle that promotes health, and social media accounts that depict all these achievements (whether for better or for worse).

Millennials reject the notion that success is measured by income and long hours... They see success as including the opportunity to participate fully in the lives of their families. And they are not embarrassed to include among their key priorities the need to exercise and maintain friendships. Further, they will seek workplaces where the growth and development of employees are a strategic focus and where a culture of inclusion and respect is a priority.

The real question is whether the Millennials' current definition of success will change. Are these simply characteristics of a life phase and Millennials will eventually become like their Baby Boomer counterparts seeking material symbols to show off their success? Or is it going to be a long-term, sustained difference of focus on experiences rather than things? After all, once upon a time, the Boomers themselves were hippies who also demanded social change through the human rights movement and questioned authority before settling in to the pursuit of happiness via the pursuit of things.

Until then, let's end the back-and-forth between the two generations. After all, the mid-90s born teenagers of Generation Z are set to overtake us all.

Related

Business generation x Baby Boomers Millennials Careers

Content writer on Millennials, tech, and personal finance.

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Are Millennials Redefining the American Dream?

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The real question is whether the Millennials' current definition of success will change. Are these simply characteristics of a life phase and Millennials will eventually become like their Baby Boomer counterparts seeking material symbols to show off their success?

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Let's start today with a pop quiz. Here we go: in 1970, what percentage of 30-year-olds in America earned more money than their parents had earned at that age? Adjusted for inflation, of course. That's question No. 1. And question No. 2: what percentage of American 30-year-olds today earn more than their parents earned at age 30? I'll give you a second to think it over.

All right, you ready for the answer? The percentage of American 30-year-olds in 1970 who were earning more than their parents had earned at 30? Ninety-two percent. Isn't that amazing? That, in a nutshell, is what we call the American Dream. And what's the percentage now? It's somewhere around 50 percent, which has led some people to say this:

Donald TRUMP: Sadly, the American Dream is dead!

Donald Trump's view of the American Dream - and his promise to revive it - had a lot to do with his getting elected president. According to Gallup polls, before the election more than 50 percent of Americans saw our economic conditions worsening. And, in case you're wondering, it's not just cranky old people. A poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that nearly fifty percent of millennials think the American Dream is "dead." We went out on the streets of New York ourselves to ask people if they thought the American dream was real, and achievable.

VOICES ON THE STREET: MALE 1: Absolutely, it's real. Especially, standing here in Battery Park you look at different people from all across nations that come to America to realize the American dream. FEMALE 1: I think that if you really work hard then you can do whatever you want in America. It might be a little difficult at first but you can still do it. MALE 2: I don't think the American dream is achievable. I think it's a motivator, to try to achieve it. FEMALE 2: The American Dream is something of a mythology for a way in which to advance and have a good life under what is essentially not just a capitalist system but a country founded on exploitation. FEMALE 3: You put in some work, you put in some sweat, and you can definitely make the American Dream happen. MALE 3: Well, there's a lot of cynicism now over the American dream. I am a product of it. My family, our families are refugees, came to this country 30 years ago. Had nothing. Was able to send all their kids to college, was able to have a house, was able to give a better future for myself and their children than they ever would have had back in Vietnam.

A lot of the conversations we have these days about the American Dream are in political terms, or theoretical terms. Today on Freakonomics Radio: the actual, unvarnished economics of the American Dream. Which we will define, for the sake of today's conversation, as this:

Raj CHETTY: If you're born into a low-income family, do you really have a shot at rising up no matter what your background is?

And we'll discuss whether the American Dream is really dead - or maybe if it's just moved a bit ... north.

CHETTY: You're twice as likely to realize the American Dream if you're growing up in Canada rather than the U.S.

* * *

James Truslow Adams, born in 1878 to a wealthy New York family, became a financier and, later, an author. He won a Pulitzer Prize for a history of New England; and later he wrote a book called The Epic of America. Even though it was written during the Great Depression, Adams took a fundamentally bullish view of the United States.

His book was hugely popular, and as best as we can tell, it introduced the phrase "The American Dream." Adams defined this as "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." The phrase caught on, and not just a little bit. Especially among our presidents:

Barack OBAMA: The bedrock of our economic success is the American Dream. Richard NIXON: The American Dream does not come to those who fall asleep. George W. BUSH: So every citizen has access to the American Dream Ronald REAGAN:They have lived the American Dream Bill CLINTON: The American Dream will succeed or fail in the 21st Century. Donald TRUMP: Raj CHETTY: The reason my parents came to this country was in search of the American Dream. Sadly, the American Dream is dead!

That's Raj Chetty.

CHETTY: I was born in New Delhi, India, and came to the United States when I was 9-years-old, and grew up mostly in the Midwest.

Chetty is now an economist at Stanford:

CHETTY: I study issues of inequality and opportunity and how we can use economic policy to improve people's outcomes.

Chetty was one of the scholars behind the research I cited earlier, about the massive drop in the share of 30-year-old Americans earning more than their parents did. In fact, he is behind a lot of the most important research on income inequality, mobility, and the fragile state of the American Dream. His work is highly regarded by the people who give awards - he has won a MacArthur "Genius" Award and the John Bates Clark Medal. Politicians admire him as well.

Senator Jeff SESSIONS: Dr. Chetty, thank you for your participation. Senator Bernie SANDERS: Dr. Chetty, what do you think?

That was Senator Bernie Sanders and, before him, then-Senator Jeff Sessions, when Chetty testified at a Senate hearing on income mobility and inequality. Chetty is a favorite of Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Hillary CLINTON: Some really interesting work being done by Professor Raj Chetty and his colleagues.

As well as Republican Paul Ryan.

Paul RYAN: Economists - you know, if you talk to Raj Chetty or others - they'll tell you this is social capital.

Chetty is the policymakers' policymaker. The economists' economist. Which means he tries to be, above all, empirical. Not ideological or political.

CHETTY: One of my missions is to try and inject more evidence into these important policy debates because I think we're making huge investment decisions with very little knowledge about exactly what is going to work. Stephen J. DUBNER: Do you vote? Are you a political participant? CHETTY: I'm independent. And so I've thought hard about this. I think it's very difficult to keep yourself objective, which is very important to me. I mean it's important to me that I have some findings that I think are more supportive of policies that Democrats are pushing, and there are some findings that are more supportive of policies that Republicans are pushing. DUBNER: Some academics I know whose work gets cited for political purposes have told me that the work is inevitably cherry-picked or cream-skimmed to suit the politician's position. CHETTY: I think while the big-picture focus might be chosen based on political views, there are lots of details that matter greatly, and I think science can be very useful there, in addition to perhaps guiding which areas we focus on - affordable housing versus tax cuts versus other things.

For all his influence, Chetty is only 37-years-old.

CHETTY: I was actually the last person in my family to publish a paper. My parents are both in academics, and I have two older sisters who are in bioscience.

Chetty went to Harvard as an undergrad but he didn't spend spent much time undergradding: he got his Ph.D. at 23.

CHETTY: Basically, I did a six-year Ph.D. and didn't go to college, in the sense that starting my sophomore year, I actually didn't take any undergraduate classes.

He taught at Berkeley, then Harvard, and in 2015, moved to Stanford.

DUBNER: You are hardly the first economist from Harvard to go to Stanford in the last few years. There's been quite a little exodus. CHETTY: Recently, as the field of economics is shifting towards big data and increasing use of modern statistical techniques, like machine learning, to think about economic questions, Stanford has tremendous strength in those areas and other fields. And of course, we all know that the birthplace of much of modern computing is here in Silicon Valley at Stanford. DUBNER: Now, economists in particular, but social scientists more broadly, have in the past few years especially, just been being gobbled up by tech firms. Because they, too, have discovered that big data is potentially exciting and a number of academic economists, many of whom I'm sure you know well, are moonlighting or sidelining with tech firms, Uber and Facebook and on and on. What about you? Was that an appeal for you to be out there and are you doing any consulting, advising work on the side with these private firms? Or are you strictly an academic economist? CHETTY: Yeah, that is a very important trend. I, myself, am not doing any work with those firms directly, but what I am interested in is working with the data from firms like Facebook and Twitter, for instance, to think about social and economic policy questions. So, to give you a concrete example, I'm starting a project with my colleague Matt Jackson here at Stanford, and others at Facebook, where we're exploring the role of social networks in inequality, and trying to understand essentially whether you can network yourself out of poverty. Social scientists have been interested in that sort of question for a very long time, but we just haven't had the data to really investigate that question precisely from an empirical point of view. And the Facebook data, of course, are game-changing in that respect.

A lot of Chetty's research falls under the banner of something called the Equality of Opportunity Project. That is a group of economists - and other social scientists - who are trying to find the most effective, and efficient, ways to address chronic poverty. Which, Chetty argues, is really important. Because the economy that for so many years facilitated the American Dream for so many millions is no longer reliably doing so.

CHETTY: While modern technology and economic growth is changing the world in tremendous ways - I mean, we can now do things with our cell phones that we never would have imagined 10 years ago - I think unless we think carefully about social policy, doesn't necessarily end up benefiting everyone. There are many people for whom progress over the last 30 years hasn't really had a tremendous impact on their lives in terms of better opportunities for their kids or better health outcomes and so forth.

Chetty admits the American Dream worked out great for his immigrant family.

CHETTY: And so partly with that personal motivation, partly out of scientific interest, I wanted to think about whether the American Dream truly is alive and well, and what the determinants of the American Dream are.

O.K., so how do you do that? How do you measure the state of the American Dream? And, more important, how do you identify the determinants that enable one family, or one kid, to shoot up out of poverty while others are left behind? Well, if you're an economist, you do that with ... data. Lots and lots of data.

CHETTY: And this specific angle we took is by using the large data that we have now from administrative tax and Social Security records where we're able to see for the full population what income distributions look like for kids and for parents. And so you can basically ask, taking say, all of the kids born in America in the 1980s, "What fraction of the kids born to low-income families actually make it to the top of the income distribution? How much intergenerational mobility is there in America?" In the U.S., if you take, say, the set of children who are born to families in the bottom quintile of the income distribution, in the bottom fifth, about seven-and-a-half percent of those kids make it to the top fifth of the income distribution. DUBNER: And that number in isolation doesn't sound off the bat so bad. CHETTY: Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Seven-and-a-half percent, is that a big number, is that a small number? It's hard to judge in isolation. So to give some context for that, I think, Stephen, it's useful to start first by thinking about comparisons across countries. So if you look at that number in other countries where we have comparable data, like the United Kingdom, for instance. In the U.K., that number is nine percent. A little bit higher, but not all that much higher. If you go to a place like Canada or Denmark, the number is 13 percent, or 13 and a half percent. That's quite a bit higher. And it's useful, in thinking about these numbers, is 13 percent a big number? Well, you have to remember, of course, that no matter what you do, you can't have more than 20 percent of people in the top 20 percent, right? So the maximum value this statistic can take, I think, is plausibly 20 percent. To put it more precisely, if you lived in a society where your parents played no role at all in determining your outcomes, we'd expect one-fifth of kids to rise from the bottom 20 percent to the top 20 percent. And so relative to that benchmark, that upper bound, if you will, the 13 and a half percent rate in Canada and the seven-and-a-half percent rate in the U.S., that's a really big difference. It's almost like you're twice as likely to realize the American dream of moving up if you're growing up in Canada rather than the U.S, right? DUBNER: Or perhaps more precisely, we should just call it the Canadian Dream instead of the American Dream, if they're twice as good. Well, but what we want to know then is why, right? What makes that more possible in Canada? So that's what your research is really about, yes, is about identifying the factors that move that needle? CHETTY: Exactly. Exactly. So that I think is kind of useful as background, but there are lots of differences between Canada and the U.S. The first of which is that Canada has less inequality than the U.S. There's less distance between the 20th percentile and the 80th percentile in Canada, relative to America. DUBNER: Which means - so are you making a social point or is this a statistical point? In other words, it's easier to move because it's a smaller jump. CHETTY: That's exactly right. From a statistical point of view, one view you could have is maybe the reason you see higher upward mobility in Canada is not really so much that it is actually easier to move up in Canada, but it's easier to make that move because it's a shorter distance in a sense. So that's one example of why I think these cross-country comparisons, while they can be motivating, in and of themselves it's inevitably going to be very difficult to say for sure what you can learn from comparing Canada to the U.S. DUBNER: So that shouldn't really, I guess, surprise us if you know a little bit about the makeup and history of the United States and the fact that we are states that have different policies, different populations and then obviously counties and cities that really differ a lot. CHETTY: Yeah, I think that's right. But I think that line of thinking would lead you to think that most of this variation is regional. But what's perhaps more surprising is that as we zoom in more finely we continue to find almost as much variation. So kids growing up in San Francisco, for example, have about twice the chance of climbing from the bottom to top as kids just across the Bay Bridge in Oakland. But I think before we even get to the issue of why is the U.S. is different from Canada, it turns out the story even in America itself is much more nuanced. Within America, there are actually a number of places that truly are lands of opportunity, places where kids achieve the American Dream at high rates. In some places, like in Salt Lake City, Utah, or in the Bay Area, something like 13 percent of kids are making it from the bottom fifth to the top fifth. Turns out in the center of the country, like in Iowa, for example, in many areas of Iowa you see more than 15 or 16 percent of kids making it from the bottom fifth to the top fifth. So higher than the numbers we see in the data for Canada and for Scandinavian countries. But at the other end of the spectrum, you take places like Atlanta, Georgia; or Charlotte, North Carolina; or much of the southeast of the U.S., and you have rates of upward mobility below four-and-a-half percent. Lower than any country for which we currently have data.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: the preliminary results of an incredibly ambitious government program to address poverty.

CHETTY: What you ended up finding was frankly I think somewhat disappointing.

All right then: how do you engineer the possibility of the American Dream?

CHETTY: We've identified five factors that seem to be particularly strongly correlated with these differences.

* * *

The Stanford economist Raj Chetty has been working with large data sets to try to understand why so many Americans are no longer living the American Dream. When it comes to economic opportunity, Chetty and his colleagues found huge regional and even local differences throughout the U.S.

As he told us, kids growing up in San Francisco have about twice the chance of living the American Dream as kids from just across the bridge, in Oakland. Why? One easy explanation would be that the people in those different areas are just different - they have different abilities, different cultures, different job opportunities. And that certainly has some explanatory power. But Chetty and his colleagues found the story isn't that simple.

CHETTY: A lot of this variation is driven by differences in childhood environment, as opposed to differences in conditions in the labor market or the types of jobs that are available or unemployment rates - things that affect you in adulthood.

How do the data explain that it's the childhood environment making the difference?

CHETTY: So we're going to start by thinking about families who move when their child is exactly 9-years-old, all right? And why age nine? That happens to be the earliest age we can examine in currently available data. DUBNER: And that's not just because you were 9-years-old when you moved from India to Milwaukee, is it? CHETTY: Not, not quite. DUBNER: Just a coincidence? O.K. CHETTY: Interesting coincidence. And so when we look at these 9-year-olds who move, we find that they end up roughly halfway between the kids who grew up in Oakland from birth and the kids who grew up in San Francisco from birth. So they're earning roughly $35,000 when we track them forward 21 years and measure their own incomes when they're age 30. So that's for the kids who move when they're exactly nine, right? So now let's replicate that for kids who move when they're ten, eleven, twelve, and so forth and so on. And what you end up seeing in the data is a very clear declining pattern where the later you make that move, from Oakland to San Francisco, the less of the gain you get. And in fact, if you move after you're 21 or 22 or so, you get absolutely no gain at all, and if you move in your early 20s or when you're 30, the relationship is completely flat. There's no further gain from moving. So this sort of analysis leads us to the conclusion that first of all, where you grow up matters. It's not just that kids who live in Oakland are somehow different from the kids who live in San Francisco. Second, you see that neighborhood environment matters because of childhood factors and not factors in adulthood, right?

This is hardly a new idea - that growing up in a poor neighborhood isn't the best launching ground for economic success. This idea, in fact, led the Clinton Administration to experiment in the mid-1990s with a program called Moving to Opportunity.

CHETTY: They took about 5,000 families, across five large cities in the U.S. including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

In New York for instance ...

CHETTY: So, for instance, in New York, many of the families were living in the Martin Luther King Towers, which is a very high-poverty, large public-housing project in New York. They took these families and they randomly assigned them to one of three groups.

The first was a control group. They stayed put in the Martin Luther King Towers.

CHETTY: And then there were two treatment groups, one of which was called the Standard Section 8 Housing Voucher Group.

This group could use the vouchers to move wherever they wanted.

CHETTY: So many families, for example, moved to a place in the mid-Bronx called Soundview, which is about six miles away from the M.L.K. Towers. So not in the super-high-concentrated-poverty public-housing project, but not in a dramatically different neighborhood either.

Families in the third group were also given a housing voucher.

CHETTY: However, with an additional restriction - which was that you could only use this voucher to rent a house or apartment in a place with a poverty rate below ten percent. So basically, trying to encourage families to move into more mixed-income areas.

Hence the program's name: Moving to Opportunity, or MTO. The people behind the program suspected, or at least hoped, that families who removed themselves from concentrated poverty would end up having better outcomes themselves. For both the adults already in the labor market and their kids, who'd be coming into the labor market. So what happened?

CHETTY: What you ended up finding was frankly I think somewhat disappointing. So you didn't see any differences in employment rates or average levels of earnings.

There were some positive health effects - lower obesity and better mental health, for instance. But the MTO experiment was largely considered a failure.

CHETTY: I think it left the field in kind of a difficult spot, because people still instinctively felt and anecdotally felt like, "Of course, it's got to matter where you grow up." But this gold-standard scientific experiment is telling us that it doesn't matter for economic outcomes.

That indeed was the consensus among researchers who analyzed the MTO data. But several years later, Chetty and his colleague Nathaniel Hendren wound up taking another look at the data. And they saw a different picture. They saw a rather large benefit among some people who had participated in MTO. Why?

CHETTY: Our hypothesis was that earlier studies of MTO had looked at impacts on adults and children who were older at the point of the move.

Remember, the Moving to Opportunity experiment was conducted in the mid-1990s. The studies that found disappointing results were published roughly ten years later.

CHETTY: And, of course, the children who were very young at the point the experiment was implemented - say, kids who were 2- or 3-years-old - 10 years after the experiment was implemented, they were still only 12 and so obviously, you couldn't measure their earnings at that point because they weren't working yet. So these earlier studies for that reason mainly focused on adults and older youth, and they didn't find much of an impact. But to us, in light of our findings on the importance of childhood exposure, that actually made sense. We thought, "Well, in our data, it looks like in order to really see an effect of moving to a better neighborhood, you need many years of exposure to that better neighborhood."

And that's what led Chetty and his colleagues to re-examine the MTO data. They added a layer of IRS data, in order to measure the longer-term earnings for the kids who were young when they moved.

CHETTY: And, quite remarkably, and I still vividly remember seeing this when we were studying this at the I.R.S., looking at the data - when you look at children who moved when they were young, you see extremely clearly that they are doing dramatically better today as adults. They are earning 30 percent more, they are 27 percent more likely to go to college, they're 30 percent less likely to become single parents. And that, in our view, just kind of completely changed everything and I think has changed people's perceptions of MTO.

O.K., so young kids who move out of a high-poverty neighborhood do much better later on. What, exactly, does this signify? What's going on in the poor neighborhoods to depress income mobility and what's going on in the better neighborhoods to increase it? Answering those questions has become a big part of Raj Chetty's work. He and his colleagues have come up with five significant explanations.

CHETTY: The first is residential segregation. Cities that are more segregated by income and by race tend to have much lower levels of upward mobility. So if you look at a city like Atlanta it's an incredibly segregated city. Now cities that look like that, in terms of residential structure, we find systematically tend to have very low rates of upward mobility. In contrast, if you look at a place like the Bay Area, at least in the 1980s and 1990s, and this, Stephen, I think is changing quite a bit over time, especially here in Silicon Valley as prices are rising, but in the 1980s and 1990s, the Bay Area was relatively integrated, at least compared to Atlanta. Where you had neighborhoods of San Francisco with both middle- and high-income people, you had people of different ethnicities living near each other, and those kinds of cities tend to have much higher rates of upward mobility.

The second factor:

CHETTY: Income inequality. You have more people in the middle class, you also tend to have higher levels of upward mobility. This relationship is what Alan Krueger, based on cross-country data, termed the Great Gatsby Curve. The idea that there's a link between inequality in any one generation and rates of intergenerational mobility. Why is this link interesting if one can interpret it causally? It suggests that as we have growing inequality over time, as we do in the U.S., we might be concerned about that not just because we're worried about equitable distribution, but also because we're worried that it might erode children's chances of achieving the American Dream. And so, again, we don't know exactly what the mechanism is and whether this is really a causal effect - inequality causing changes in upward mobility - but there does seem to be some link between these two factors.

The third factor they identified relates to family.

CHETTY: It turns out that the single strongest correlation we find in the data is with measures of family structure, such as the fraction of single parents living in an area. We find that places with more single parents have significantly lower levels of upward mobility. Now in interpreting this correlation, it's very important to note that it's not purely driven by the fact that growing up in a one-parent family leads to worse outcomes for children. And the way you can see that is if we look at the subset of kids who grow up in a two-parent household, we see that for that subset of children, even for them, growing up in neighborhood with a lot of single parents is associated with lower levels of upward mobility. So it's not literally about whether your own parents are married or not - again, it's picking up some community-level factor where growing up in a place that has a lot of single parents - maybe there's more family instability or it's correlated with some third factor that is leading to higher rates of single parenthood. For whatever reason, that seems to be strongly associated with lower levels of upward mobility.

The fourth factor:

CHETTY: Social capital. And so the idea of social capital - I think of it in relation to the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Will someone else in your community help you out when you need help? So as an example, Salt Lake City with the Mormon Church is thought to be the quintessential example of a city with a lot of social capital. And correspondingly in our data, seems to exhibit a lot of social mobility. Now this concept of social capital, as you might know, was popularized in a very well-known book by Bob Putnam called Bowling Alone.

Indeed, we put out an episode not long ago, called " Trust Me," with Bob Putnam, who teaches public policy at Harvard. Years ago, he was looking at the decline of civic life in America.

Bob PUTNAM: We were becoming more and more isolated. Or as a friend suggested to me once, "You mean we're bowling alone?"CHETTY: And the reason for the title of that book is social capital is notoriously difficult to measure. And Bob had the creative idea of using the number of bowling alleys in an area, and in particular whether people are bowling alone, as a proxy for social capital. PUTNAM: CHETTY: So I was amazed to find, I remember actually discussing this with Bob in his office at Harvard, that the number of bowling alleys is actually very highly correlated with the rates of upward mobility in our own data. DUBNER: Were you skeptical when you first looked at that? CHETTY: Yeah, I was surprised, certainly. I also thought, Wow, Bob really had some foresight in thinking about bowling alleys. But I mention that here because it illustrates a caveat to all of these relationships because these are all correlations rather than causal effects, right? And so it would be surprising if the policy implication to draw from this is that we should build more bowling alleys to increase upward mobility in the United States. And so I think that's a very important caveat to keep in mind. I mention that because the fifth factor is a bit of an exception to that. The fifth factor is school quality. CHETTY: We find that places with better public schools, as you might expect intuitively, have much higher rates of upward mobility. And on that dimension, there's a lot of very good evidence showing that improving the quality of schools can really, meaningfully, affect rates of intergenerational mobility. So I would treat school quality a little bit differently from the other four factors, where we see strong correlations, but are not yet sure exactly what the causal mechanisms are. DUBNER: Now each of the factors that you've discussed, even I could think of some potential policy ideas to improve them. Do you think much about that, or are you content at this point to do the research that allows policymakers to have those ideas and make those moves? CHETTY: Absolutely, we want to take the next step to think about what this means for policy, what the causal mechanisms are, what the levers are, that we can push to change some of these factors. So that I think is a good segue now to come back to the Moving to Opportunity experiment, which I see as a way to potentially tackle segregation. One concrete way in which you might try to integrate a city is by giving low-income families housing assistance, to be able to rent houses in more mixed-income neighborhoods. Thereby mechanically reducing segregation. DUBNER: Now, I could hear you talking about this, extolling the virtues, the latent virtues, that you ultimately unearthed of a program like Moving to Opportunity, where the government spends a bunch of money to relocate families, and I could think, "Oh, you're just another big-government-spending advocate." On the other hand, I know that you have thought quite a bit about the money that is spent in the U.S. on a variety of affordable housing programs, I believe a total of roughly $45 billion. So I'm curious as an economist how you would assess the efficiency of typical or historical housing spending in the U.S., and compare that to the R.O.I. on something like Moving to Opportunity. CHETTY: I certainly recognize that in a time when we have a government that's already spending quite a bit on initiatives like this, the answer can't simply be to just spend more on these problems. I think the power of these data and what we need to be doing is spending money in smarter ways. And so this is a good example of a program, where we're spending $45 billion on various forms of affordable housing, but we're not spending that money in the most efficient possible way in order to achieve outcomes like reduced poverty in the long-run. So let me give you a couple of examples on dimensions in which we can, I think, make improvements. First , the optimal age at which to help families move is when their kids are born or when their kids are very young. In practice, we do almost exactly the opposite. We put families on waiting lists when they have kids, and those waiting lists sometimes take many, many years, particularly in the most depressed cities where we really would like to be moving families out of concentrated poverty. And so what ends up happening is that families only get the opportunity to move exactly when their kids are older, which is exactly backwards, right, in terms of what you'd like to be accomplishing here. So that's a tweak that would not increase program costs but I think would dramatically increase impact. Another example is that the vast majority of housing vouchers are currently being used in very high-poverty, low-opportunity areas. And that is problematic, because we find that it's really critical to move to these higher-opportunity, low-poverty areas in order to see beneficial outcomes. And so we're working with HUD and a large group of public-housing authorities to figure out how, again, without spending more money, how we might be able to reform the program so we can get more families that get these vouchers to move to neighborhoods that are going to better serve their kids in the long-run. A further important aspect to think about in the context of cost is that my sense is that the government will actually recover much of the money we invest in programs like this because we see that these children who are earning 30 percent more as adults - they, of course, are paying more in income taxes themselves as they have higher earnings. And so we calculate that the extra income taxes that they pay actually more than offsets the incremental cost of a program like Moving to Opportunity. So it's actually a, we think, a budget-saving program in many ways. DUBNER: Your work has been cited by politicians certainly across the aisle - by Paul Ryan, you've personally tutored Hillary Clinton in mobility issues and perhaps others, you've advised the Obama Administration and advised Jeb Bush - I'm really curious to know how - well, I was going to ask you how it feels to have that policy pull, I don't know if you actually have pull, but at least you're in the room and you are looked to as an authority who really understands or can explain cause and effect in addressing these issues that policymakers deal with all the time, often not in an evidence-based manner. So could you just talk about that - what those conversations are like, if you feel they're fruitful, if you feel your research is considered seriously and perhaps even acted upon? CHETTY: Yes. I am quite encouraged by how interested policymakers are in this type of evidence, and I think there is a genuine interest, often on both sides of the aisle, in trying to do better things with the money that we're spending. I think when you can come into a room and say, "I'm not saying we should spend an extra $30 billion on affordable housing, I'm saying we should take the money we're already spending and maybe tweak it in certain ways and enact certain reforms, that based on the evidence will actually deliver better outcomes that we all want to achieve." I think that can really be impactful. My sense is by the way, a lot of the political influence that matters here is not just at the national level, but at the local level, given the nature of the problem. Mayors can do a lot. We noticed mayors are talking about things differently. Our hope is ultimately the evidence that we're accumulating and a number of other researchers will ultimately influence policy. The core idea of social capital is so simple that I'm almost embarrassed to say it. It is that social networks have value. There's a huge amount of work on how social networks help us find jobs.

Since our interview with Raj Chetty, he has met for an hour-and-a-half with Ben Carson, the presumptive Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. As Chetty described it in an e-mail: "He and his staff were eager to hear about how the data could help us make better use of the dollars HUD is spending to achieve better outcomes for low-income children."

We asked Chetty if he'd consider serving in this Administration himself. "I would not have considered serving in either a Trump or Clinton administration, largely because I'd like to continue focusing on research to identify the best policy solutions at this point. Perhaps down the road I'd reconsider." Chetty also wrote this: "I hope that the new administration will take an evidence-based approach to making policy decisions, for instance by making smart investments in childhood education, affordable housing, and other programs that can create opportunity in effective ways."

If you want to look at some of the research by Raj Chetty and his colleagues on the Equality of Opportunity Project, I suggest you spend some time on their website. You can look it up: Equality of Opportunity Project. And next time on Freakonomics Radio, we'll expand this conversation about the state of the American Dream.

One argument we've all heard is that the U.S. was too willing to let its manufacturing jobs go to China and elsewhere. Economists were for the most part sanguine; they told us not to worry, that the upsides of global trade would cancel out the downsides of that job loss. What do they say now?

David AUTOR: I'm much less sanguine about it than I used to be. I think if we had realized how traumatic the pace of change would have been, we would have at a minimum had much better policies in place to assist workers in communities that suffered these very severe and immediate consequences and we might have tried to moderate the pace at which it occurred.

The true story of Chinese trade and American job loss - that's next time, on Freakonomics Radio.

* * *

Freakonomics Radiois produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Christopher Werth, Stephanie Tam, Merritt Jacob, Eliza Lambert, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez, and we had help on this episode from Andrew Dunn and Noam Osband. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts.

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Is the American Dream Really Dead? - Freakonomics

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Is the American Dream Really Dead? - Freakonomics

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The "American Dream" is a key thread in this country's tapestry, woven through politics, music and culture. Though the phrase means different things to different people, it suggests an implicit contract that if you work hard, you'll move ahead. But as the effects of the economic downturn continues to reverberate, where is the American Dream today?

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If the American dream is defined as earning more money than your parents, today's young adults are just as likely to have a nightmare as they are to achieve their dream.

Only 50% of people born in the 1980's are making more than their parents, compared to 90% of children born in 1940, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of California-Berkeley.

The study concludes that income inequality is the primary reason why many young people are left behind. Slower rates of economic growth are a secondary factor, according to the findings.

"These results imply that reviving the 'American Dream' of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution," the researchers concluded.

Upward income mobility is diminishing more rapidly for certain regional populations and demographics. The study notes the largest declines are concentrated "in the industrial Midwest states such as Michigan and Illinois," where high-paying manufacturing jobs have declined considerably.

By contrast, of the 50 states South Dakota and North Dakota are holding up better than the rest. South Dakotans and North Dakotans born in 1980 are 62.3% and 59.4% as likely to make more than their parents.

Overall, young men's prospects are worsening at a quickening pace than young women's. Sons born in 1984 are only 41% likely to earn more than their fathers, compared to 95% of sons born in 1940.

Still, they're better off than daughters born in 1984, who are only 26% likely to earn more than their fathers, down from 43% of daughters born in 1940. The study did not compare daughters to their mothers.

If current income distribution was equivalent to the breakdown for the 1940 generation, then 80% of today's young adults would be earning more than their parents.

Alternatively, if gross domestic product had maintained the torrid rates of their parents' generation, 62% of people born in 1980 would be earning more than their parents.

"The key point is that reviving the 'American Dream' of high rates of absolute mobility would require more broadly shared economic growth rather than just higher GDP growth rates," the study concludes.

The study was conducted by Raj Chetty and David Grusky of Stanford, Maximilian Hell and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard, and Jimmy Narang of Berkeley.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @ NathanBomey.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2h53W2N

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CLOSE If the American dream is defined as earning more money than your parents, today's young adults are just as likely to have a nightmare as they are to achieve their dream.

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The United States is not a perfect country, but the American Dream is still a reality. Even with relatively sub-par economic performance in recent years, our economy's overall level of output, as well as the annual growth rate, is still the envy of the developed world. And regardless of how people view President Obama's unilateral amnesty, it says something good about the United States that millions of people from the developing world still want to come to America.

Keeping government within its proper boundaries will be key to the American Dream. The burden of government in the United States is smaller than it is in Europe, and our markets are more open and deregulated than they are in Latin America, Asia and Africa. These features mean that poor people have considerable opportunity to climb the ladder, limited only by their talents, abilities and willingness to work hard.

But things could be even better. There's been a big expansion of government intervention under both President George W. Bush and Obama. And when government gets more power to dictate who wins and who loses in the marketplace, powerful and politically well-connected incumbents almost always reap the benefits on this cronyism. When new regulatory burdens are imposed, big companies have the legal, accounting and compliance staff to deal with the added red tape. For small businesses and entrepreneurs, however, new rules and regulations cause the misallocation of precious resources. Occupational licensing is also a big barrier to upward mobility, particularly at the state and local level.

The bottom line is that there are many problems that should be addressed, but the perfect isn't the enemy of the good. The American Dream exists all across the country, from the small businesses in every town to the energy entrepreneurs that have created so many jobs and driven down oil and gas prices. The dream can be found in the high-tech start-ups of Silicon Valley, as well as the new manufacturers of the Rust Belt.

And if we can restrain the size and scope of government, there's every reason to believe that the America Dream will be strong for the rest of the 21st century.

Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.

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The United States is not a perfect country, but the American Dream is still a reality. Even with relatively sub-par economic performance in recent years, our economy's overall level of output, as well as the annual growth rate, is still the envy of the developed world.

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John Florea / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism, economic inequality, is real and growing. The unemployment rate is dispiritingly high. The nation's long-term fiscal health is at risk, and the American political system, the engine of what Thomas Jefferson called "the world's best hope," shows no sign of reaching solutions commensurate with the problems of the day.

It has not always been this way. On Friday, May 1, 1931, James Truslow Adams, a popular historian, was putting the final touches on the preface to his latest book. It was a curious time in the life of the nation. Though the Crash of 1929 had signaled the beginning of the Great Depression that was to endure for years to come, there was also a spirit of progress, of possibility. On the day Adams was finishing his manuscript, President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in Washington to turn on the lights of the newly opened Empire State Building at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, which, at 1,250 ft., was to be the tallest building in Manhattan until the construction of the World Trade Center four decades later.

(PHOTOS: Behind the Cover: Capturing the American Dream)

High hopes amid hard times: the moment matched Adams' thesis in his book, The Epic of America, a history of the nation that was to popularize a term not yet in the general vernacular in those last years of the reigns of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Adams' subject, he wrote, was "that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank which is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world." It was not a new thing, this abiding belief that tomorrow would be better than today. "That dream or hope," Adams wrote, "has been present from the start."

What was new was the specific phrase Adams was using: the American Dream. From John Winthrop and the Puritan search for an earthly "city upon a hill" in the New World to Benjamin Franklin's "The Way to Wealth" aphorisms to Horatio Alger and the drama of the upwardly mobile, Adams' phrase had — and has — the deepest of roots in the American experience. For reasons ranging from geography to market capitalism to Jeffersonian ideas of liberty, we may well be the only people on the planet who tend to believe without irony that Thomas Paine was right when he declared that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again."

In fact, we don't have that power. No one does. History cannot be dismissed with a nod. But from generation to generation, Americans have indeed dreamed of steady personal and national progress. In the twilight of his life, Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself one of the most accomplished purveyors of hope and dreams in American history, recalled the words of his old Groton School rector, Endicott Peabody, who had told him, "Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights — then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend."

Roosevelt quoted that observation in his final Inaugural Address in the winter of 1945, and in the ensuing decades, American power and prosperity reached epic heights. The Peabody-Roosevelt gospel seemed to get it right: the world was not perfect, nor was it perfectible, but the story of America was at heart the story of doing well, of conquering disease and going to the stars and defending freedom and creating wealth. By and large, Americans of the postwar era were living those "better, richer, and happier" lives that Adams had written about in the shadow of the Crash.

Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best measured by the state of the middle class, about which we hear so much, and with good reason: roughly 90% of Americans self-identify as middle, upper-middle or lower-middle class (2% acknowledge being "upper class"; 6% say they are "lower class").

Definitions of class are hard to come by — so much so that the U.S. Department of Commerce, on behalf of Vice President Joe Biden's White House Task Force on the Middle Class, emphasized descriptive language rather than statistics, finding that "middle-class families are defined by their aspirations more than their income. [We assume] that middle-class families aspire to homeownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirement security and occasional family vacations."

The government's verdict: "It is more difficult now than in the past for many people to achieve middle-class status because prices for certain key goods — health care, college and housing — have gone up faster than income." Median household income has also remained stagnant for more than a decade; when the figures are adjusted for inflation, Americans are making less now than they were when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

There, in brief, is the crisis of our time. The American Dream may be slipping away. We have overcome such challenges before. To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much. Emerson once remarked that there is properly no history, only biography. This is the biography of an idea, one that made America great. Whether that idea has much of a future is the question facing Americans now.

Next The Hard Path to Citizenship

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Work hard and you will prosper: the premise of the American Dream has nurtured our nation and changed the world. Here's how the idea got started - and why its future is in doubt

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Is the Modern American Dream Attainable?

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According to recent studies, more than half of Americans believe that the prospect of a good job and a home with a "white picket fence" is gone, never existed or unachievable.

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I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day-at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

This poem is in the public domain.

Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman is the author of Leaves of Grass and, along with Emily Dickinson, is considered one of the architects of a uniquely American poetic voice.

About Walt Whitman

This version of "I Hear America Singing" appeared in the 1867 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The original version appeared as number 20 in the section titled Chants Democratic in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman is the author of Leaves of Grass and, along with Emily Dickinson, is considered one of the architects of a uniquely American poetic voice.

About Walt Whitman

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd-and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

2

O Me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,

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I Hear America Singing - I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

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For Black People, There Is Martin Luther King's Dream

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The dream rooted in beliefs about racial equality, particularly along political and economic lines, is under siege. The wealth gap between blacks and whites keeps growing.

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The Numbers Show Rags-to-Riches Happens Only in Movies

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Forty-three percent of those raised in the bottom fifth of the income ladder remain there a generation later, and 40 percent of those raised at the top stay there.

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Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

O, let America be America again- And yet must be-the land where
The land that never has been yet-

every man is free. The land that's mine-the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain-
All, all the stretch of these great green states-
And make America again!

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Let America Be America Again - Let America be America again.

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Canadians and Europeans also live longer, on average, than Americans do. Their children are less likely to die than ours. American women are twice as likely to die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth as Canadian women. And, while our universities are still the best in the world, children in other industrialized countries, on average, get a better education than ours. Most sobering of all: A recent O.E.C.D. report found that for people aged 16 to 24, Americans ranked last among rich countries in numeracy and technological proficiency.

Economic mobility is tricky to measure, but several studies show that a child born in the bottom 20 percent economically is less likely to rise to the top in America than in Europe. A Danish child is twice as likely to rise as an American child.

When our futures are determined to a significant extent at birth, we've reverted to the feudalism that our ancestors fled.

"Equality of opportunity - the 'American dream' - has always been a cherished American ideal," Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia University, noted in a recent speech. "But data now show that this is a myth: America has become the advanced country not only with the highest level of inequality, but one of those with the least equality of opportunity."

Consider that the American economy has, over all, grown more quickly than France's. But so much of the growth has gone to the top 1 percent that the bottom 99 percent of French people have done better than the bottom 99 percent of Americans.

Three data points:

* The top 1 percent in America now own assets worth more than those held by the entire bottom 90 percent.

* The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.

* The top six hedge fund managers and traders averaged more than $2 billion each in earnings last year, partly because of the egregious "carried interest" tax break. President Obama has been unable to get financing for universal prekindergarten; this year's proposed federal budget for pre-K for all, so important to our nation's future, would be a bit more than a single month's earnings for those six tycoons.

Inequality has become a hot topic, propelling Bill de Blasio to become mayor of New York City, turning Senator Elizabeth Warren into a star, and elevating the economist Thomas Piketty into such a demigod that my teenage daughter asked me the other day for his 696-page tome. All this growing awareness is a hopeful sign, because there are policy steps that we could take that would create opportunity and dampen inequality.

We could stop subsidizing private jets and too-big-to-fail banks, and direct those funds to early education programs that help break the cycle of poverty. We can invest less in prisons and more in schools.

We can impose a financial transactions tax and use the proceeds to broaden jobs programs like the earned-income tax credit and career academies. And, as Alan S. Blinder of Princeton University has outlined, we can give companies tax credits for creating new jobs.

It's time to bring the American dream home from exile.

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Canadians and Europeans also live longer, on average, than Americans do. Their children are less likely to die than ours. American women are twice as likely to die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth as Canadian women. And, while our universities are still the best in the world, children in other industrialized countries, on average, get a better education than ours.