COMMENT Retro kids
Alan McIntyre
Normally when my 12-year-old son emulates me, I’m flattered. But his recent decision to start dressing like me is a little disturbing, especially when his fashion choices are endorsed by his normally dismissive 16-year-old sister. I was middle-aged and my father dead and gone before I truly understood the allure of his Dunn & Company overcoats.
It’s not that Connecticut teenagers don’t test boundaries. They experiment behind closed doors with sex, drugs and alcohol like kids everywhere, but their risk taking rarely extends to visible things like clothes and hair; instead conformity rules. The uniform of a typical teenage boy in my town is supplied by Vineyard Vines, a preppy clothes company that offers a ‘Martha’s Vineyard’ lifestyle via whale-motif silk ties, creased chinos and crisp button-down Oxford shirts. For girls the equivalents are Lily Pulitzer floral print dresses and smart cardigans that wouldn’t have been out of place in a copy of Woman’s Own from the late 1950s.
I’m troubled not only because teenage rebellion is good for the soul, but also by what the ‘mini-me’ dress code says about the current state of American society. The inclination to dress like your parents is just one more visible sign that the American dream of social mobility is morphing into a nightmare in which the privileged few reproduce themselves biologically, economically, politically and culturally, while the rest of society struggles and fragments.
Equality of opportunity is a central tenet of American exceptionalism. When Florida Senator Marco Rubio recently declared he was running for president, his announcement speech focused on the story of his Cuban immigrant parents bar-tending and cleaning houses to give him the opportunity to go to college. In the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson contrasted the natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented in the new United States with Georgian Britain’s artificial aristocracy based on wealth and birth. For the current generation, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg epitomise the arc from college dropout to Forbes rich list which is buried deep down somewhere in the amygdala of the American psyche.
Being rich in the US has never been something to be ashamed of. As long as there are ladders of opportunity to climb, the height of the building doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, the reality no longer matches the rhetoric. Income inequality in the US is now at levels last seen in the heyday of the robber barons of the early 20th century. There is also now increasing evidence of a ‘Great Gatsby effect’ which shows that as income inequality grows, the ladders of opportunity get shorter and narrower and social mobility declines. This erosion of the American Dream isn’t going unnoticed. A Gallup Poll taken in 1998 showed that 81% of the US population still thought the ‘Average Joe’ could make it to the top of the heap, but by 2014 that number had dropped to 50%. As the ladders of economic mobility get increasingly rickety, the prospect of ever increasing inequality without the motivation of mobility to compensate raises the risk of real social unrest.
It also turns out that America’s self-image as the land of opportunity doesn’t stand up to international comparisons. If you are born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution in the US, there is now over a 30% chance that you’ll stay there, and only a 10% chance you’ll make it to the top fifth. In comparison, Scandinavians born at the bottom are over twice as likely to make it to the top (partly because the ladder is much shorter). In the US if your parents are at either end of the income spectrum you inherit 50% of their economic advantage or disadvantage, while in Sweden it’s only 20%.
Which takes me back to whale-motif silk ties and the emergence of a self-replicating economic elite. Academic research shows that high economic mobility requires four things: good education, strong families, healthy cohesive communities, and an income gap between rich and poor that doesn’t get too wide.
When you look at education in the US it’s clear that it’s now part of the mobility problem rather than a solution. Public schools are typically funded by local property taxes, so it’s hardly surprising that rich neighbourhoods have better schools, and as the rich get richer the education gap widens. Recent data showed that an affluent suburb of Chicago spent $21,000 per student on education, while a poor inner city neighbourhood nearby spent a mere $7,200. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. ‘Enrichment’ spending – which funds extracurricular programs and is funded by parents and charities – was $8,800 a year for kids in the top fifth of the income distribution versus $1,300 for those at the bottom. So kids who have already won the economic lottery by being born rich also get an enormous boost from a better education.
Unfortunately college does little to level this playing field. The economic returns to education spending in the US are among the highest in the world. The more you spend the higher the impact on your future income. While colleges try and develop meritocratic admissions processes in which cost doesn’t deter smart disadvantaged students, two factors work against them. One is that expectations are lower in bad schools, so there is often a self-reinforcing ambition deficit that is hard to overcome, even with generous financial aid.
The second factor is a legacy system at the most selective colleges that at the margin favours lineage over ability. Ben Bradlee, the legendary editor of the Washington Post who died last year, was the 51st member of his family to attend an Ivy League college and a fourth generation Harvard graduate. Maybe all the Bradlees won the genetic lottery and were born exceptionally bright, but more likely they were all born into privilege and stayed there.
Strong families are also a lot easier to develop in affluent communities. The correlation between broken families and economic hardship means that the chances of an African American boy raised by a single mother in a poor neighbourhood making it into the top 5th of the income distribution are miniscule. In contrast, the chances of that same boy ending up in jail at some point in his life are close to 30%.
Social capital also tends to get handed down from generation to generation. The intergenerational networks that arise from good social infrastructure like strong churches and youth groups lead directly to college recommendations and job offers. That also used to be true in solid middle-class towns, but as we are tired of hearing politicians explain, real incomes have stagnated for the middle class and the virtuous circle of a good education, strong families, social cohesion and economic mobility has been broken in many of those places.
There are still bright spots. The Federal Reserve 9th District centred on Minneapolis has the highest social mobility in the US. Why? Because the education system is relatively equal, the underlying economy is diversified and resilient, and many social indicators like divorce rates are better than the rest of the country. But the fear is that if the rich keep on getting richer and social mobility keeps declining, then the US will become an old money society (minus the dowager duchesses) and Jefferson’s fear of an aristocracy based on wealth and birth will become a reality on this side of the Atlantic.
I’m probably over-interpreting the desire of my son to wear smart clothes as a harbinger of impending revolution. If you’re lucky enough to be born into affluence why rebel? You know the quality of your education depends on your parents’ money and in the summer you get to socialise around a nice country club pool while you make friends for life; many of whom will end up in high places. Sure, you can party a little and take some risks, but what is there to rebel against? The problem is that everyone on the outside looking in on this bucolic scene may have different thoughts regarding rebellion and frankly they have the numbers on their side.
Maybe we need a large-scale Warren Buffett-style reset. Pay for your kids’ education but then give the rest of your money to charity. But it would be a lot easier if we just rebuilt the opportunity ladders in the US through better schools, stronger families and more cohesive communities. If we get that right, then maybe my grandkids will have the chance to wear ripped t-shirts and blue hair to the country club rather than worrying about how they’re going to man the barricades.
By Alan McIntyre | May 2015