The Decline of Equal Opportunity

In a recent Foreign Affairs article, “It’s Hard to Make it in America: How the United States Stopped Being the Land of Opportunity,” Dr. Lane Kenworthy of the University of Arizona attempted to produce an ambitious, comprehensive article on the decline of equal opportunity in the United States. Although the article attempts to cover a subject that cannot be reduced to five pages of text, Kenworthy highlights very compelling pieces of data to show that it actually is getting harder to make it in America.

Kenworthy covers a wide array of subjects in his piece, from changing family structure to educational access to worker compensation. He attributes a significant, although merely qualitative, effect to each of these contributors to declining equal opportunity in the country.

Here are some interesting stats that Kenworthy highlights:

• ·      An American born into a family in the bottom 1/5 of incomes between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s has roughly a 30% chance of reaching the middle 1/5 or higher in adulthood, whereas an American born into the top 1/5 has an 80% chance of ending up in the middle 1/5 or higher (with perfect equal opportunity, the chances of each of these would be 60%).
• ·      The US is below Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the UK in rankings of intergenerational mobility.
• ·      In Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland (where public universities are free), the odds that a person whose parents did not complete high school will attend college are between 40 and 60%, compared with just 30% in the US. 

These figures raise serious concerns. In the United States, we often justify inequality or small safety nets on the foundation that here, every person is the decider of his or her own destiny. That is, if they do not like their economic situation, they can change that situation through hard work. But, as Kenworthy’s article (and many other recent articles) highlights, America has been losing its claim to being the “Land of Opportunity” since the 1970s. If we accept this change, this requires either attempting to reverse that trend and working to restore opportunity, or ensuring that those who do not have access to higher education and high-paying jobs have a sufficient safety net to protect them from a situation not of their own choosing.