Economy
How to Jump Start the American Dream
The odds that kids will do better than their parents have plummeted. One possible fix: Learn from the neighborhoods in which income mobility is still thriving.
It is a core tenet of the American Dream: the idea that if you work hard, America awards you the freedom and opportunity to live a more prosperous life than the one you were born into.
That’s how it used to work, at least. Of kids born in the 1940s, 90 percent did better than their parents. But this scenario has become increasingly rare in recent decades. “Absolute income mobility,” as economists call it, fell to a mere 50 percent for kids born in the 1980s, regardless of where their parents were on the income spectrum. In other words, the odds that the average Millennial will climb to a higher rung on the economic ladder than their parents are 50-50.