The American Dream? Really?

Map of the Gini coefficient...purple countries are a mess! Image via Wikipedia

Great essay in the Canadian national newspaper, The Globe and Mail:

For many Americans, the recession began well before 2007, and it’s far from over. It’s become a lost decade of fading opportunity for workers, longer and more frequent bouts of joblessness and declining family incomes.

Obscured by the housing bubble and cheap credit, the well-being of working Americans was already threatened by powerful structural forces when the Great Recession hit. Technology supplanted routine work of all kinds, leaving millions with skills that employers no longer need. Offshoring of work to China and India destroyed millions of labour-intensive factory jobs. Low interest rates artificially pumped up wealth and consumption, but didn’t steer enough investment into the roots of the economy.

Now, more than eight million jobs are gone, and the country is looking at the stark prospect of several more years of unusually high unemployment. Roughly half of the 14 million unemployed Americans have now been out of work for more than six months.

And for the first time on record, family incomes are actually falling. New figures this week from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the median income for working-age households fell 10 per cent between 2000 and 2010, even as women worked more hours.

In 1912, an Italian statistician and sociologist named Corrado Gini created the Gini coefficient to measure differences in income.

Here’s a recent piece from The Atlantic on income inequality:

The U.S., in purple with a Gini coefficient of 0.450, ranks near the extreme end of the inequality scale. Looking for the other countries marked in purple gives you a quick sense of countries with comparable income inequality, and it’s an unflattering list: Cameroon, Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, Ecuador. A number are currently embroiled in or just emerging from deeply destabilizing conflicts, some of them linked to income inequality: Mexico, Côte d’Ivoire, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Serbia.

Canadians never had a “Canadian dream” so we/they don’t do a lot of hand-wringing over the loss of it. They’re used to higher taxes and lower salaries. They don’t have a constitution offering the promise — or the tantalizing lure of — happiness.

Here’s a powerful blog post about how utterly unequal salaries and wages have become in the U.S.

Here’s a lucid blog post from Open Salon on why Americans, still, remain shockingly docile in the face of this insanity.

I loved this post from The Washington Post:

But this is why I’m taking Occupy Wall Street — or, perhaps more specifically, the ‘We Are The 99 Percent’ movement — seriously. There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.

The organizers of Occupy Wall Street are fighting to upend the system. But what gives their movement the potential for power and potency is the masses who just want the system to work the way they were promised it would work. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans are really struggling. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans want a revolution. It’s that 99 percent of Americans sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy — work hard, play by the rules, get ahead — has been broken, and they want to see it restored.

As for the Wall Street protestors, writes William Rivers Pitt:

They’re staying put, with many more on the way – to New York as well as every major city from sea to shining sea –  and none of them are going anywhere else until people like you are taken from your citadels in handcuffs and made to pay for the ongoing rape of what was once quaintly called the American Dream…a dream that used to be something other than a dated metaphor, and can be something true and real and genuine once again, but only after we pave you under, and walk over you, on our way to a better, brighter future.

And here’s one of the smartest pieces I have ever read, originally published in a magazine written by academics, on how Americans keeping choosing to focus on gender as a safe(r) proxy for class when discussing the fallout of each recession. History matters!

Here are some photos of the protest on Wall Street, chosen for Freshly Pressed.

How do you feel about the American dream these days?

How’s it working for you?