The very unique aspect of the American experiment was the ability to move up and down the social/economic scale.
This has been different from every other country. Think about it.
Now what has reduced our ability to move up and down?
Long term? Think 10 years. Divide ALL the wealth evenly at one time and let the laizze faire take over. Guess where we’ll all be in 10 years.
Part of the problem is the outsourcing of almost all basic industries other than software, healthcare and financial sectors. Combined with allowing almost limitless import of what is for all intents and purposes slave labor, this creates an outflow of money from the Middle Class to foreign countries and to the financial and tech sectors.
Financial and tech sector middle management and above already come from wealthy families, so you have two circulating paths for movement, one in the upper 10% income strata, and another for everyone else, with insufficient crossover between the two.
My family is an outlier, but shouldn’t be. My parents and two of us siblings are immigrants from Canada. Mom and Dad started a small business that never generated more than $150K per year in income. Oldest child pursued military and civilian aviation. I’m middle child and pursued public safety. Younger brother is U.S. born and pursued software engineering. All of us lived in high cost of living areas.
Parents are 85+ years old, us kids are in our 50s. We now represent four households each well over one million dollars net worth. Living within our means, stable marriages, single family real estate and buy and hold stock investing are all it took for each of us.
My theory on why families like ours are increasingly rare is the absolute travesty of public “education.” None of us learned anything about how to succeed in marriage, finance or any other aspect of real life from our school years. And today’s schools are absolute intellectual toilets compared to ours.
The main barrier to move up the economic scale these days is the education system.
Part of it could be due to financial manipulation and people or businesses with large amounts of money receiving the lowest interest rates, or in some cases being guaranteed not to fail by gifts from the public treasury (think 2008 “Too Big to Fail”). By keeping interest rates so low large companies can practically get money for free just as long as they turn a halfway decent margin.
This reminds us of Roman times when the Denarius was debased with non-precious metals while the real Denarius was issued to the ruling elite.