Income Mobility: What Ezra Klein says

This note by Ezra Klein on the political implications of false beliefs about income/class mobility is particularly on point:

It turns out that there's a bit of a paradoxical relationship between believing your country has a lot of economic mobility and your country actually having a lot of economic mobility. If you believe that your country is extremely mobile, you're likely to believe the results of the economic competition are relatively fair. As such, you won't want to slap the rich with particularly high tax rates and you won't be terribly concerned about spreading economic opportunity. After all, anyone can make it!

On the other hand, if you don't believe your country is terribly mobile, then you're less likely to believe economic outcomes are fair. And if you don't believe the outcomes are fair, you're likely to tax the winners relatively heavily and plow those profits into things like universal health care and free college. Policies, in other words, that spread opportunity more widely and thus make your society more mobile. Put like that, it sort of makes sense. If you believe your society is already economically mobile, you don't spend a lot of time trying to solve the problem of insufficient economic mobility. if you don't believe that, then you implement policies meant to increase mobility.

Click on over and read the whole note, including graphs from a recent Brookings Institution report on just how deluded Amercians' beliefs are.

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sales & marketing of the American Dream

That's no shit and the American Dream is sold around the world like coca-cola to get all of these new wage slaves to come here on top of it.

How about innovation/startups/new business stats? That's another thing that is peddled like McDonalds. They tout those few "immigrants" (who so often are not actually immigrants, maybe came over and small children to native born) who "made it big" in a start-up or whatever and peddle that around the globe again to get more wage slaves.