How to restore the U.S.'s economic mobility.

• Author: Buckley, Frank
• Position: Economics

"A class society has inserted itself within the folds of what once was a classless country, and a dominant New Class ... has pulled up the ladder o f social advancement behind it."

IN THE Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that "the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles." Today, the story of American politics is the story of class struggles. It was not supposed to be that way. We did not think we were divided into different classes. Neither did Marx.

The U.S. was an exception to Marx's theory of social progress. By that theory, societies were supposed to move from feudalism to capitalism to communism, but the America of the 1850s, the most capitalist society around, was not turning Communist. Marx had an explanation for that. 'True enough, the classes already exist," he wrote of the U.S., but they "are in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding them up to one another." In other words, when you have economic and social mobility, you do not go Communist.

That is the country in which some imagine we still live, Horatio Alger's America--a nation defined by the promise that whoever you are, you have the same chance as anyone else to rise, with pluck, industry, and talent. However, they imagine wrong. The U.S. today lags behind many of its First World rivals in terms of mobility. A class society has inserted itself within the folds of what once was a classless country, and a dominant New Class--as social critic Christopher Lasch calls it--has pulled up the ladder of social advancement behind it.

One can measure these things empirically by comparing the correlation between the earnings of fathers and sons. Pew's Economic Mobility Project ranks Britain at 0.5, which means that, if a father earns 100,000 [pounds sterling] more than the median, his son will earn 50,000 [pounds sterling] more than the average member of his cohort. That is pretty aristocratic. On the other end of the scale, the most economically mobile society is Denmark, with a correlation of 0.15. The U.S. is at 0.47, almost as immobile as Britain.

A complacent Republican establishment denies this change has occurred. If they do not get it, however, American voters do. For the first time, Americans do not believe their children will be as well off as they have been. They--like President-elect Donald Trump, who bucked the establishment--see an economy that is stalled, one in which jobs are moving offshore. In the first decade of this century, U.S. multinationals shed 2,900,000 jobs while increasing employment overseas by 2,400,000. General Electric provides a striking example. Jeffrey Immelt became the company's CEO in 2001, with a mission to advance stock price. He did this, in part, by reducing GE's U.S. workforce by 34,000 jobs. During the same period, the company added 25,000 jobs overseas. Ironically, Pres. Barack Obama chose Immelt to head his Jobs Council.

According to old-establishment Republicans, none of this can be helped. We are losing middle-class...