The American dream is a myth: Joseph Stiglitz on "The Price of Inequality".

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

In his latest book, The Price of Inequality, Columbia Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz examines the causes of income inequality and offers some remedies. In between, he reaches some startling conclusions, including that America is "no longer the land of opportunity" and "the 'American dream' is a myth."


While we all know stories of people who've moved up the social stratosphere, Stiglitz says the statistics tell a very different story. In the last 30 years the share of national income held by the top 1% of Americans has doubled; for to the top 0.1%, their share has tripled, he reports. Meanwhile, median incomes for American workers have stagnated.

Even more than income inequality, "America has the least equality of opportunity of any of the advanced industrial economies," Stiglitz says. In short, the status you're born into — whether rich or poor — is more likely to be the status of your adult life in America vs. any other advanced economy, including 'Old Europe'.

For example, just 8% of students at America's elite universities come from households in the bottom 50% of income, Stiglitz says, even as those universities are "needs blind" — meaning admission isn't predicated on your ability to pay.

"There's not much mobility up and down," he says. "The chances of someone from the top [income bracket] who doesn't do very well in school are better than someone from the bottom who does well in school."

Because the children of those at the top of society tend to do better than those at the bottom — thanks, in part, to better education, health care and nutrition — the income inequality that's slowly emerged over the past 30 years will only widen in the next 10 to 20 years.

If the root causes of income inequality go unaddressed, America will truly become a two-class society and look much more like a third world economy, Stiglitz warns. "People will live in gated communities with armed guards. It's a ugly picture. There will be political, social and economic turmoil." (Hence the book's subtitle: 'How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future'

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/american-dream-myth-joseph-stiglitz-price-inequality-124338674.html

[geckosfeet]

1. "They call it the American dream..."

"Because you have to be asleep to believe it."
George Carlin

[xchrom]

2. Du rec. Nt

[DLevine]

3. K&R. n/t

[RKP5637]

4. Yep, American Exceptionalism, the staggering ability to suppress most citizens. n/t

[nxylas]

5. Why the future tense in the last paragraph?

What he describes is already happening.

[hfojvt]

6. In some ways I always thought the American Dream was a nightmare anyway

It's kinda all about greed, materialism and selfishness. There is no community in the American Dream. It's all about money for me, and power for me. It's all about getting a seat on the good job train. When you are on the good job train you have - benefits, insurance, pension, good working conditions, high status, high pay, and more fulfilling and easier work. When you are not on the good job train you have, no benefits, no insurance, no pension, bad working conditions, low status, low pay and backbreaking and boring work.

Even IF the rat race was fair, if rats from poor households had just as good a shot at the gravy train as rats from rich households, and if rats from rich households had just as good a chance of being trampled and discarded by society as rats from poor households, I would still not consider a rat race with rats tearing and biting and scrambling over each other to get to the top - to be anything resembling a dream.

Life should be better than that. America should be better than that.

[RKP5637]

7. Very well said. The American dream is clawing ones way to the

top of the heap, trampling and cheating anyone in the way, fueled by money, power, greed, hostility and selfishness, and all about me, me, me. Not much in my book of being a distinguished civilization.

[Phhhtttt]

8. Amerika is a lie

Amerika is a nation of hustlers.

Two good books:

"Dark Ages America" and "Why America Failed" by Morris Berman.

The books detail the lie that Americans have been sold.Amerika has always sought empire and is not the benevolent force in the world that we are propagandized to believe.

[hifiguy]

9. "Dark Ages America" is a great read.

Just read it a couple of months ago. Scary and depressing but deadly accurate. I have to find Berman's other books.

[Phhhtttt]

10. Yes,the book was quite a reality check NT

[coalition_unwilling]

17. To which I would add Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man" and

Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" (and possibly F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby&quot . All essential titles for understanding the hollowness and moral depravity at the core of this land of hustlers.

[Phhhtttt]

21. I have never read The Confidence -Man,but have read the others.

All good fictional accounts of America's depravity.

Berman's books are well researched non-fictional works where money is the determining factor for how things are done in America.
The worship of money is what sets America apart from the rest of the world.This is true from Americas earliest inception,even before independence.

[coalition_unwilling]

22. Read the Melville quite awhile ago and was struck by how it

anticipates the stylistic flourishes and structural meanderings of the great 20th-Century novelists like Nabokov and Pynchon. Novel is set on a Mississippi river boat. Definitely worth the read if you have the time.

[gulliver]

26. It's a lousy dream.

I really despise the idea of the American Dream. I guess if you aren't independently wealthy your life is a failure in some way. It doesn't get any more wrong-headed than that.

[HiPointDem]

27. +1. and we wonder why americans take so many anti-depressants.

[Kerthialfad]

11. Foreign workers

I wonder about the effect of foreign workers on the widening gap in income inequality today. If a company brings in a foreign worker, two things occur. First, there is an unemployed American who continues to be unemployed. Second, the foreign worker is paid less, so you are adding a lower paid worker to the economy. Seems like a no-brainier to me. But perhaps there another dynamic at work.

[RKP5637]

12. That's the way it's always seemed to me. Americans lose out and

the foreign worker loses out too in the big picture.

[shcrane71]

13. Welcome to DU!

I truly think we need to offer amnesty to the undocumented workers who have been here for five plus years, and then truly not allow economic refugees in from other nations. Providing green cards or allowing citizenship to the large undocumented workforce would curtail their exploitation, and that is good for American workers as it levels the playing field for jobs competition.

[Taitertots]

16. That is very closed minded thinking

A foreign worker comes to America and spends most of the money they earn, which creates jobs.

[The Wielding Truth]

20. Hello,Kerthialfad. Welcome to many conversations with like minded sane people.

[TBF]

14. The sad thing is that so many still revere this dream -

they still buy into it, they still think rich people are better than poor (you'll see it on this website with references to "prominent" folks), they still are focused on the individual. In the meantime, as folks dream about their potential lotto wins and the like, the reality is very stark. A mere one percent of our country is controlling over forty percent of the wealth. The problem is not that folks are greedy, or that they hate the rich, or any other individualism - the problem is the system. We will have this until we rid ourselves of capitalism.

[coalition_unwilling]

19. Another way to frame this: let's take 280,000 kids off food stamps (current

Ryan budget proposes that), so that we can continue low taxes for the wealthiest among us.

Let's allow children to go hungry (16 million American kids experience food security issues at least once per month now) so that our rich can keep getting richer.

Forget about capitalism, baby. We're now talking neo-feudalism (complete with 1%ers like Bloomberg openly boasting of having a 'private army').

[TBF]

25. Yup - you bet. It is going to get far worse. nt

[coalition_unwilling]

15. This quote says it all, imho:

"The chances of someone from the top who doesn't do very well in school are better than someone from the bottom who does well in school."

That describes the Big Lie behind the myth of the meritocracy and all in a single sentence.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

18. It's not a myth. It's a successful con job.

[Egalitarian Thug]

23. K&R for well predicted inevitability.

On the one hand it is good that at some people are beginning to notice this, on the other it is at least a 15 years too late.

I find that blatancy of this slow-motion coup to be the most disturbing aspect of this march toward corporate neo-feudalism.

[Zax2me]

24. A favorite American punching bag title for all time.

Go ahead, Google American dream myth.
Millions of links (covering opinions over the last 100 years) are standing by to tell you why America is can did and does suck.

From the left, right, center. Center left, center right.
You could fill the rest of your life reading articles/blogs/opinions on this.

Nothing new. Just rehashed. Most of it bullshit, most of that from the far right.
It all bores me.

[Quantess]

28. Sure, but different ends of the political spectrum have different reasoning.

I'm not bored of it yet.