Monday, 11 June 2012 00:00By Salvatore Babones, Truthout | News Analysis
(Photo: mini-66)There are places in the world where the majority of people are doomed to live no better than their parents and grandparents did. Places where a poor child from the slums might as well dream of being an astronaut as dream of having a decent middle-class job. Places where the children of the rich get even richer while the children of the poor stay poor.
Places like Burma and Kenya and the United States.
Well, at least if you're a poor Kenyan your son just might grow up to be president of the United States. For most poor Americans, even state senator is out of reach. You'd be lucky to find the money to send your child to college, never mind law school.
As that son of a Kenyan said in his most recent State of the Union address, America is becoming "a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by." The numbers back him up. Both executive compensation and the poverty rate are at or near all-time highs.
While Democrats have a reputation for caring about poverty and inequality, Republicans usually focus on the idea that in America anyone who works hard can succeed. America is the country of entrepreneurs. The rags-to-riches story is one of the foundations of our national identity.
The only problem is that it's not true - or, at least, it's not true anymore.
According to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD), the United States has some of the lowest rates of entrepreneurship in the world. Even at the top of the boom in 2005-2007, only two countries (Belgium and Norway) had lower levels of new business formation than the United States. The other 22 countries studied by the OECD all had higher rates of new business formation than the United States.
In fact, over 50 percent of Americans work for large companies of 250 employees or more. Only two other countries in the world have economies that are so dominated by large firms: Slovakia and Luxembourg.
We are not a nation of entrepreneurs. We are a nation of workers. And over the past forty years the American worker has gone from riches to rags, not the other way around.
For more than a century, from 1870 to 1973, the wage income of the typical American worker rose an average of 2 percent per year, as I have documented elsewhere. Since 1973, it has fallen. It has fallen most for the young. A typical American 30-year-old makes an astounding 27 percent less today than a typical 30-year-old made in 1973 (adjusted for inflation).'
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