Tina Dupuy - Why Mobility in America Is in the Dumpster
May 29, 2012 We’re a species that has gotten around; we’ve wandered, pioneered and migrated to every corner of the world. The spear tip of technology is how we can get somewhere else: the wheel, the sailboat, the rocket. In short: we’re movers.
We are now as mobile as we’ve ever been as a culture. Our phones are not tethered to any particular location. Our keepsakes, like photos and letters, are all saved on devices smaller than your average drugstore paperback. The bitter visual of a breakup – the splitting up of a couple’s CD collection – no longer exists since you both have copies of the same MP3s. Your computer fits comfortably in your lap – everything else is in your pocket. We now have the ability to go anywhere and bring with us more things utilizing less space than at any other time in human history.
We have the ability – the freedom – to roam more now than ever before. And yet our upward mobility is standing still.
Jason DeParle in The New York Times wrote in January this year, “Countries with less equality generally have less mobility.” And as Occupy Wall Street successfully pointed out the top one percent “earn” nearly a quarter of the nation’s income. While they have enjoyed an increase in wealth and a decrease in taxes, the rest of the country has seen a flattening of their prospects. The U.S. ranks near the bottom in income inequality and therefore upward mobility.
Time noted, “The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project has found that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of the socioeconomic spectrum in the U.S., you had only about a 17 percent chance of making it into the upper two-fifths.”
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