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“In one well-known family, then, the daughter represented not merely an r of 0.5, but a sum of 2.5 over only three generations.” Page 152.
“A costumed Knight of the Swan challenged the Knight of the Golden Lion to battle.” Page 183. Photo: “The Challenge, Eglinton Tournament,” by James Henry Nixon.
“[Booker T. Washington] never attended school, though he sometimes went as far as the schoolhouse door with his white mistresses, carrying their books.” Page 187.
“‘I can see ye don’t know what it means to be up to yer neck in nuns.’” Page 206. Photo: Graduation at St. Joseph’s School, Petersburg VA.
“He begins as a ‘greenhorn,’ unable to speak English, but soon finds himself selling hardware from a pushcart on the lower East Side.” Page 232. Photo: Mulberry Street, New York City.
Preface to the Paperback Edition
BOOKS TAKE YEARS TO WRITE. MINE DO, AT LEAST. The Way Back was published in April 2016, but I had begun it well before that year’s election campaign. I hadn’t been thinking about Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Instead, I had Obama, Mitt Romney and the Republican Establishment in my sights.
I knew that change must come. Like blind and deaf wrestlers, our two political parties were locked in clumsy battle, as spectators shouted warnings that neither ever heard. What both parties missed was how the American Dream had faded. We had thought that this was the country where, whoever you were, wherever you came from, you could get ahead. More importantly, we had believed that this was a country where your children would have it better than you did. And we had been wrong.
When I began to write, Thomas Piketty had just published Capital in the Twenty-First Century, about the rise of income inequality. We had known that we were increasingly divided into different economic classes, but what caught our attention was Piketty’s claim that over time we would necessarily become more unequal still. The book was a publishing sensation, but we soon learned that Piketty had wildly overstated things. His arguments about the inexorable rise of people already in the top income stream rested on implausible assumptions, and he clearly didn’t know much about the United States. The evidence just wasn’t there, as I explain in the appendix. But though Piketty got some things quite wrong, he was correct in noting that we had in fact become more unequal, economically and socially too.
While great inequality is concerning, I thought the more serious problem was income immobility. For the first time in American history, people no longer expected their children to do better than they did, according to the pollsters. Looking back into my own family history, I saw parents and grandparents whose lives were scarred by hardships I could scarcely have endured. What must have driven them was the idea that their descendants would reap what they had sown. But what if they had not anticipated a payoff in the future? What if they had thought their children would revert to the misery of their grandparents? They would have given up.
That was my intuition, at any rate, and for an explanation I turned to neo-Darwinism. Evolutionary biologists such as W. D. Hamilton and Richard Dawkins asked us to take the “gene’s-eye view” of human action, and I thought this explained why mobility matters more to us than equal outcomes in our own generation. As I showed, it’s because our genes may be more heavily invested in our descendants than in ourselves. That seemed to me an original insight, one which explains why the social contract is front-end loaded, with family duties paid forward. We take from our parents, and without repaying them give to our children; and that tripartite contract is repeated over all generations, over all history. We are biologically biased in favor of future generations, so long as we have children. For there is one kind of social justice for families with children, and quite another for a society which like Cronus eats its children.
At the same time, there’s a dark side to neo-Darwinism, for it also explains why aristocracy is the natural default position of any society, why elite Americans would seek to shape our legal institutions in such a way as to secure economic privileges for their own children while constricting mobility for others. It now seems obvious that we have a privileged New Class composed of lawyers, academics, trust-fund babies and high-tech workers, clustered in the Acela corridor, in the “creative class” cities described by Richard Florida, and cocooned from contact with the lower orders. What’s only beginning to be recognized is how its members subscribe to a politics of immobility that prevents the children of the lower classes from rising.
That’s the theme of this book, and to drive it home I showed how the American Dream was alive and well in other countries. A comparison with the country we most closely resemble is particularly surprising, even shocking. The table on page 55 reveals how immobile our society is, compared with Canada, and the figures on pages 135 and 198 show how the difference is located in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of earners. In America, the rich pass on their economic privileges to their children, while in Canada there is much more downward mobility from the top. In America, poverty too is inherited, while in Canada the children of the poor have a good chance of getting ahead.
This difference in mobility couldn’t be explained by pointing to differences in national wealth, since the economies of the two countries are so similar. Other common excuses for American immobility also make no sense. Some have argued that the move to an information economy, with skill-based technological change, explains everything. But then it’s not as if highly mobile Canada is living in the Stone Age. As for free-trade agreements, Canada relies more on them than the United States. Welfare policies don’t explain anything much either, since America has one of the most generous welfare systems in the world.
There is more going on, however, and if Canada has succeeded where America has failed we should look to other differences that have something to do with mobility. And then emulate Canada. That would mean school choice, immigration policies designed to favor the native-born, a strengthened rule of law—all policies that Canada has adopted. They are also more deeply conservative than the corresponding policies in America. Here, the Democrats decry income immobility while supporting policies dictated by their base that limit mobility. Had Republicans taken the issue of economic mobility seriously, they would have called out Democrats for their hypocrisy. It was the issue on which the 2012 election turned, and the Republicans gave it away.
Having lived in both America and Canada, I’ve concluded that few North Americans know much about their own countries. Americans imagine that they live in an essentially capitalist and conservative country, as compared with Soviet Canuckistan. Canadians are apt to think of themselves as so much more progressive than their neighbors to the south. There’s a good deal of self-deception for both. Underneath the comforting images are very different sets of writings, a palimpsest of a liberal America and a conservative Canada. America has one of the world’s most generous welfare systems and very liberal immigration, tax and rule of law policies, while Canada has education, immigration, tax and legal institutions that Donald Trump admires. America’s conservatism is mushy and infected with waste and corruption; while Canada’s liberalism is that of the teenager who hangs out in hip neighborhoods, in jeans his mother pressed this morning, but who always returns home at night.
Socialist Ends, Capitalist Means
At a dinner in fall 2015, I heard a Republican congressman deride some of his Freedom Caucus colleagues as “right-wing Marxists.” Aha, I thought. That’s me. I saw an America divided by class, and thought we were in what Marxist-Leninists called an objectively revolutionary situation. Marx himself had wondered why one didn’t see English radicalism in the world’s most advanced capitalist society. That ran against