Opportunity in America: Does Education Promote Social Mobility?

Transcript

ISABEL SAWHILL: What I want to do is take a few minutes to set the stage and to argue that if you care about social mobility or opportunity in America, you have to care about education. As we all know, America is the richest country in the world, but as we also know now, over the past 30 years, the benefits of economic growth have not been as broadly shared as they were in some earlier periods of our history and income inequality has increased sharply over that period. Moreover, the poverty rate is as high now as it was in the 1970s. There have been ups and downs in the poverty rate, including an impressive drop in the late 1990s, but no really sustained progress on this front. Those facts are by now well known.

I start with them because what interests me is not just the facts but the way in which the American public has responded to them. The public in this country seems reasonably comfortable with a large degree of poverty and inequality, as evidenced by the fact that we have done much less than other advanced countries to address this problem. There are many possible reasons for this lack of interest in redistributive policies in the U.S., but I think that at least one of them is the fact that the public believes that America is the Land of Opportunity. In the volume being released today, the authors address the question of just how much opportunity we really have and what might be done about it.

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