Slate has an absolutely riveting series on the growing disparity in jobs and income in the U.S. It's got a lot of impressive facts and figures, but one argument the series makes is that while the tech boom has created a lot of wealth over the past decade, it has also decimated the job market in categories that used to be considered middle-class jobs.
Why don't Americans pay more attention to growing income disparity? One reason may be our enduring belief in social mobility. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president. In a survey of 27 nations conducted from 1998 to 2001, the country where the highest proportion agreed with the statement "people are rewarded for intelligence and skill" was, of course, the United States. (69 percent). But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger's "Ragged Dick."
The growing inequality in the U.S. goes against the way that most of us think of the country. We see America as a place where hard work can turn any schmoe into a billionaire. And increasingly, what seems to matter isn't hard work so much as where you went to school, who your friends are and what kind of connections you've made in school.
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