Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 - [30]

To their cost, American conservatives have forgotten Winston Churchill's famous distinction between left and right — that the left favors the line, the right the ladder. Democrats do indeed support policies that encourage voters to line up for entitlements — policies that often have the unintended consequence of trapping recipients in dependency on the state. Republicans need to start reminding people that conservatism is about more than just cutting benefits. It's supposed to be about getting people to climb the ladder of opportunity.

Inequality and social immobility are, of course, related. But they're not the same, as liberals often claim.

Let's start with inequality. It's now well known that in the mid-2000s the share of income going to the top 1 percent of the population returned to where it was in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. The average income of the 1 percent was roughly 30 times higher than the average income of everyone else. The financial crisis reduced the gap, but only slightly — and temporarily. [...] The top 1 percent owns around 35 percent of the total net worth of the United States — and 42 percent of the financial wealth.

The American Dream has become a nightmare of social stasis¹. According to research by Pew, just under 60 percent of Americans raised in the top fifth of incomes end up staying in the top two fifths; a fractionally higher proportion of those born in the bottom fifth — 60.4 percent — end up staying in the bottom two fifths.

This is the America so vividly described by Charles Murray in his bestselling book Coming Apart. At one end of the social scale, living in places with names like “Belmont,” is Murray's “cognitive elite” of around 1.5 million people. They and their children dominate admissions to the country's top colleges. They marry one another and cluster together in fewer than a thousand.

At the other end, there are places like “Fishtown,” where nobody has more than a high school diploma; a rising share of children live with a single parent, often a young and poorly educated “never-married mother.” Not only has illegitimacy risen in such towns, so has the share of men unable to work because of illness or disability or who are unemployed or who work fewer than 40 hours a week. Crime is rampant; so is the rate of incarceration³¹³². In other words, problems that used to be disproportionately associated with African-American communities are now endemic in the trailer parks and subprime^{33 slums inhabited by poor whites. You get born there, you stay there — unless you get sent to jail.}

What has gone wrong? American liberals argue that widening inequality inevitably causes falling social mobility. [...] But to European eyes, this is also a familiar story of poverty traps created by well-intentioned welfare programs. A single mom with two young kids is better off doing a part-time job for just $29,000 — on top of which she receives $28,327 in various benefits — than if she accepts a job that pays $69,000, on which she would pay $11,955 in taxes. Another good example is the growth in the number of Americans claiming Social Security disability benefits. Back in the mid-1980s, little more than 1.5 percent of the population received such benefits; today it's nearly 3.5 percent. [...]

The other main reason for declining social mobility [is] the disastrous failure of American high schools in the places like Murray's imaginary Fishtown.

Despite a tripling of per-pupil expenditure in real terms, American secondary education is failing. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, three quarters of U.S. citizens between the ages of 17 and 24 are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have inadequate levels of education. [...]

In international comparison, the United States is now somewhere in the middle of the league table for mathematical aptitude at age 15. [...] The proportion of 15-year-olds who are functionally illiterate is 10.3 percent in Canada. In the U.S. it is 17.6 percent. And students from the highest social-class groups are twice more likely to go to college than those from the lowest classes.

In a disturbing critique of Ivy League admissions policies, the editor of The American Conservative, Ron Unz, recently pointed out a number of puzzling anomalies. For example, since the mid-1990s Asians have consistently accounted for around 16 percent of Harvard enrollments. At Columbia, according to Unz, the Asian share has actually fallen from 23 percent in 1993 to below 16 percent in 2011. Yet, according to the U.S. census, the number of Asians aged between 18 and 21 has more than doubled in that period. Moreover, Asians now account for 28 percent of National Merit Scholarship semifinalists and 39 percent of students at CalTech, where admissions are based purely on academic merit.

As a professor at Harvard, I am disquieted by such tendencies. Unlike Elon Musk, I did not come to the United States intent on making a fortune. Wealth was not my American dream. But I did come here because I believed in American meritocracy, and I was pretty sure that I would be teaching fewer beneficiaries of inherited privilege than I had encountered at Oxford.