Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.
So when Sarah and I moved to New York, in
2005, we hired some people off Craigslist
to help us move our furniture into our new
apartment; including a guy from, I think,
Eastern Europe, and when I asked him why he'd
moved to the United States he said "In New
York anyone who can work can work", which
is like the best one sentence summary of an
efficient labor market I've ever heard.
Anyway when he asked what I did I told him
that my first novel "Looking for Alaska" had
come out recently; and he said "Oh, I wanna
work in publishing"; and I was thinking, you
know "Yeah, book publishing's a good star
to hitch your wagon to" and then we went back
to moving boxes.
Flash forward about a year.
I'm at a big publishing conference and a guy
wearing a suit walks up to me and says "Hey,
I moved you into your apartment, Looking for
Alaska!" and it was the guy from Craigslist
and sure enough he was working in international
sales for a huge publishing company.
And that's the American Dream, right?
People come to our fair shores because here
anyone who can work can work.
Our national self-understanding is supported
by anecdotes like this: from the Craigslist
furniture mover; to the impoverished child
turned steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, or Car-NAY-gee
depending on how pretentious you are.
But Hank, the actual data is somewhat less
dreamy.
Quick aside to all of you saying that I should
say "data are" because "data" is a plural
noun... come on.
Right but anyway 42% of American men raised
in the bottom 20% of incomes stay there.
In the UK that number is 30%; in Denmark,
it's 25%.
In fact by almost any measure, whether you
are born rich or poor in the United States
is a better indicator of whether you will
end up rich or poor than it is in Canada or
Europe or any country in the developed world.
When we talk about socioeconomic mobility
and equality of opportunity in the 21st century,
we're not really talking about the American
Dream.
We're talking about the Danish Dream.
Here's another metric that I think is really
interesting: Economic opportunities for women.
In the United States, women make 77 cents
for every dollar that men make in the workforce.
Just to be clear, that's horrifically unjust,
but it's also really economically problematic
because you don't want people to be paid according
to their sex.
You want them to be paid according to their
skills and contributions.
So in the US, women make 77 cents for every
Dude Dollar.
Canada is actually worse than us but they
have a little bit of a weird economy.
But in Australia it's 83 cents; in the UK
it's 84; in Sweden it's 85.
And in Slovenia, the world's most underrated
country, women make 97.5 cents for every dollar
that men make in the workforce.
Now Hank, the American Dream remains uniquely
"American" in one sense: we are far more likely
than residents of other countries to believe
that people are rewarded for intelligence
and skill, and we're less likely to believe
that coming from a wealthy family is key to
getting ahead.
Unfortunately, like a lot of dreams, what
we're dreaming isn't real.
Now Hank, I want to add that the same regulations
in redistributive tax policies that allow
for better equality of opportunity in the
rest of the world do limit innovation.
And that's definitely part of the reason why
hugely innovative companies like Apple and
Twitter and Google and In-n-Out Burger all
started in the US.
But my worry is that systemic inequality of
opportunity will prevent the most promising
future innovators from getting the opportunities
they need to succeed.
And I worry that the US will become progressively
less appealing to the smartest people with
the best skills.
I mean, the place where "if you can work,
you can work" won't be the US anymore, it'll
be Denmark or Slovenia.
Like, Hank, if you're a female computer programmer
today and you have both a Slovenian and an
American passport, you're probably still best
off working in the United States.
But if current trends continue, that may not
be the case in a decade.
And that's why systemic inequality of opportunity
is bad, not just for Americans living in poverty,
but for all Americans.
By the way shoutout to Slovenian readers of
Krive So Zvezde, I'm basically fluent in Slovenian.
Hank, I also wanted to say thanks for your
video on consent and abuse; it really did
make me proud to be your brother.
D'oh my god what is this, Esther Day?
I'll see you on Friday.
