Social Immobility Erodes the American Dream by Fareed Zakaria

1. Social Immobility Erodes the American Dream by Fareed Zakaria Brianna Leverenz, Tyler Thornton, Alec Frisvold, Rachel Freud

2. Persona • Well-educated, male • Centrist (self-identified) but mostly seen as a liberal • Degrees from Yale (became editor and chief for school paper) and Harvard • Born in India and immigrated to the United States • Has many well-established contacts at colleges

3. Audience • Higher level of education (quotes many university sources) • People of voting age • Parents of young children who have to ability to try to change this • Passionate about this cause, one way or another • Up on current debates in the US • Politicians and people of influence who could help pass new bills to give more money to poor (rhetorical question)

4. Purpose • Wants to appeal to people to make an effort to change the ability of the lower class to be able to achieve a high social class • Bring attention to his cuase • Emphasize the difference between the lower and upper class in their ability to move up or down in society • The economic issue associated withsocial mobility

5. Argument • The lower classes are less likely to be able to achieve a greater level of social mobility and this is a flaw with American society • More subsidies to the poor esp. education and well being • Social mobility should be accessible to all social classes, not just the upper class

6. Diction If there’s one issue on which both the left and right agree, it is the crisis of declining mobility. The American dream at its core is that a person, no matter his or her background, can make it here. A few weeks ago, four economists at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeleyreleased a path-breaking study of mobility within the United States. And last week the Journal of Economic Perspectives published a series of essays tackling the question from an international standpoint. The research is careful and nuanced, yet it does point in one clear direction. The question is, will Washington follow it?

7. Diction For more than a decade, it has been documented that Northern European countries do better at moving poor people up the ladder than the United States does. Some have dismissed these findings, pointing out that the United States cannot be compared with places such as Denmark, an ethnically homogeneous country of 5.5 million people. But Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa points out in his contribution to the Journal of Economic Perspectivesthat Canada is a very useful point of comparison, being much like the United States. (The percentage of foreign-born Canadians is actually higher than the percentage of foreign-born Americans, for example.) And recent research finds that people in Canada and Australia have twice the economic mobility of Americans. (The British are about the same as Americans but much worse than Canadians and Australians. )

8. Diction What’s intriguing is that many of the factors that seem to explain the variation across countries also help explain the variation across the United States. The most important correlation in the Harvard-Berkeley study appears to be social capital. Cities with strong families, civic support groups and a community-service orientation do well on social and economic mobility. That’s why Salt Lake City — dominated by Mormons — has mobility levels that compare with Denmark’s. This would also explain why America in general fares badly; the United States has many more broken families, single parents and dysfunctional domestic arrangements than do Canada and Europe.

9. Diction The other notable feature in the Harvard-Berkeley study is the design of cities. Places that are segregated — where the poor live far from the middle class — do much worse than those that are more mixed. This probably has to do with geography; it’s hard to get to jobs when they are far away. It also might mean that people in poor neighborhoods end up in a self-reinforcing cycle of under-funded schools, high crime and social breakdown. A related finding is that places with high African American populations show low mobility for the white population living there as well. The economist Jeffrey Sachs suggested to me that this could be explained by the fact that in areas where there are substantial minority populations, people often resist making large public investments, which might turn out to hurt everyone who lives in the area.

10. Diction In any event, these factors, while important, might be difficult to change in any reasonable period of time. Social capital cannot be built in five years. Cities cannot be quickly redesigned to be integrated or create greater density [explain meaning in an urban planning context]. That leaves the last large factor in explaining the low mobility: public policy. And here, Corak explains, the United States is the great outlier. Simply put, the United States spends much less on the education and well-being of poor people, especially poor children, than any other rich country — and that retards their chances of escaping poverty.

11. Diction A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development points out that the United States is one of only three rich countries that spends less on disadvantaged students than on other students — largely because education funding for elementary and secondary schools in the United States is tied to local property taxes. By definition, poor neighborhoods end up with badly funded schools. In general, the United States spends lots of money on education, but most of it is on college education or is otherwise directed toward those already advantaged in various ways.

12. Diction There is debate about the effectiveness of certain early education programs such as Head Start. It may be that providing help to “at-risk families” — treating drug-addicted mothers for example — has a bigger impact on children than a specific enrichment program. Though, clearly, most of us believe that these enrichment programs work. Corak points out that the well-off in the United States spend nearly $9,000 a year on books, computers, child care and summer camps — nearly seven times what families in the bottom fifth of earners spend. In fact, this is part of what makes mobility low.

13. Diction/Sentence Structure • Repetition: mobility • children + their well being • Register: formal • Parenthesis: • -- = major emphasis on his main ideas

14. Overall Structure • very clear beginning middle end • starts with clear into and background, ends in a decisive argument • Explicit thesis that makes up the last paragraph, leaves no room for ambiguity and ends the article with a strong point • As a reader you not only learn general statistics about the current situation with social mobility in the US but also the author’s solution for it

15. Tone • Overall Tone: • factual and definitive • Very conciliatory towards the beginning • not left or right • Supportive when talking about mormons • Critical when discussing the current US situation for the poorer people • Doubtful when discussing the ability for the US to allow more social mobility until something else major is done • Complimentary when discussing the Head Start and other subsidized programs • Contemptuous when talking about upper class families • Very assertive when he states his thesis

16. Discussion Questions • Do you think that programs, such as Head Start, are effective at allowing a child to have greater social mobility? Why? • Zakaria states that “United States has many more broken families, single parents and dysfunctional domestic arrangements than do Canada and Europe.” why do you think this is? • How does the conservative evidence provided by George F.Will create a very different interpretation of the social mobility in the US than the much more liberal evidence that Fareed Zakaria stated?