Lost Opportunity

Alan Jenkins

July 17, 2007

Recent figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development bring home what millions of Americans already know: that the very promise of opportunity in America is fading for everyday people, with grave implications for everyone in our country.

Opportunity is one of America's strongest ideals, and one of our greatest national assets. It is the idea that everyone deserves a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential and that, when that happens, our entire nation prospers. Opportunity encompasses the value of mobility—the focus of the OECD figures—but also the values of equality, security, a voice in decisions that affect us, a chance to start over after missteps or misfortune, and a shared sense of responsibility for each other as members of a common society. The coming presidential election is the right time to demand a new commitment to opportunity and a new recognition that we're all in it together.

The figures from the OECD—an international think tank that measures economic and social indicators in the world's wealthy countries—show a strikingly low level of mobility in the United States, especially compared with other industrialized nations. The OECD found that economic upward mobility between generations is lower in the United States than in Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, and France. British kids born to fathers in the bottom fifth of U.K. national earnings have less than a 30 percent chance of ending up in that earning group themselves, while U.S. kids have more than a 40 percent likelihood of remaining stuck at the bottom.

The OECD research sadly reinforces the findings of The Opportunity Agenda's 2006 State of Opportunity in America , which surveyed several decades of public data, as well the 2007 update released in April of this year. For example, between 2003 and 2004 (the latest figures available), income grew nearly twelve times more rapidly among the top 1 percent of U.S. income groups than the bottom 90 percent, mirroring trends that began in the early 1980s. Between 2001 and 2004, the top fifth of U.S. households gained wealth, while the bottom four-fifths lost it. At the same time, the nation's colleges and universities, a major engine for social and economic mobility, became less affordable for working families. Between 2004 and 2006, for example, college affordability declined in 17 states, and need-based student aid badly failed to keep pace.

The data also show that racial barriers to mobility persist. The Opportunity Agenda's research showed that while white households experienced an average increase in income of over $20,000 between 1974 and 1994, before seeing those gains cut in half by 2004, African-American and Latino median household income lagged far behind that of whites at each measurement point, and increased to a smaller degree than for white households. By 2004, the black-white income gap was more than $20,000, with the Latino-white gap not far behind.

In other words, both equality and mobility are at risk in our country, along with other core elements of opportunity. And that's bad for all of us. In discussing the OECD report, a recent New York Times editorial quotes Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's argument that while economic outcomes need not be equal, "economic opportunity should be as widely distributed and as equal as possible." That economic truth echoes our country's moral belief that where you start out in life should not preordain where you end up, and that what you look like or where you come from should not determine the benefits, burdens or responsibilities that you bear in American society.

When those values are threatened, as they are today, it's time to take bold steps. In a presidential election cycle, it's incumbent upon all of us to ask what the men and woman seeking the presidency would do to reignite opportunity for everyone.

Research and experience point to multiple policies that can reestablish opportunity in America. They include significant increases in need-based college grants, job training (and retraining) geared to the globalized information economy, guaranteed affordable health care, incentives for mixed-income neighborhoods and integrated schools, and greater enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in the employment, credit and housing sectors.

Voters should push the candidates to stake positions on these policies. But, just as important, they should test the candidates' commitment to the core values of opportunity—via track record as well as rhetoric—and ask what new solutions each would bring to the opportunity crisis that our country faces today.