Urycki: Author Paul Fussel wrote the acerbic book simply called “Class,” that lampooned Americans’ preoccupations with the subject. He says class is not about money; it’s all about style. And it’s best for people not to try to ascend to the upper class...

Fussel: Yeah, because you’ll never get it right. It’s too hard. You can’t just imitate the gestures. You have to feel it, deeply. You have to feel superior for the right reasons, and having money is not one of them.

Urycki: But it’s almost expected in the United States that one will do better than one’s parents. Political scientist John Green of the University of Akron says it’s rare for working-class Americans to show any allegiance to their economic peers.

Green: In fact, when most people talk about the American dream, central to that concept is this notion of upward mobility. So it’s true that in the 1930s and 1940s, many people would have been proud of the fact that they were working class and would have identified themselves that way. But relatively few of them wanted to stay that way permanently.

Urycki: Melissa Cox, a research analyst at the Brookings Institution, says Americans had good reason to be optimistic...

Cox: There was a bit of mobility and an interesting thing to look at towards the turn of the century was that we did have quite a bit of mobility in that sons were doing better than their fathers. So, they would grow up and have much better income than their fathers. But it tended to relate directly to the economic growth, so that everyone on the income ladder moved up a notch in a generation. So, for instance, you have a decline in agriculture because people in agriculture are shifting into kind of more industrial-type professions. You have that type of mobility, but it doesn’t really relate to what sociologists and economists would term “effort-induced mobility” or “equality of opportunity among the classes.”

Urycki: That growth in the economy that provided opportunity came to a sudden slowdown in 1973. That’s a pivotal year for class in America. The Arab oil embargo brought the United States to its knees, and at the same time, showed that American industry had grown too fat and complacent in the world market. For the first time, a generation of men began earning less than their fathers. Sociologist Dan Santoro of the University of Pittsburgh says the money has been going to fewer and fewer people.

Santoro: I think the overall trend, over the last 20 years or so, has been for the distribution of wealth in the United States to be moving toward the top. The middle class is falling. The gap between the upper class, the upper reaches of society and the middle and lower reaches is getting much wider.

Urycki: As women enter the workforce, many families were able to cope with flat or lowered earnings by doubling the amount of workers. Cox says salaries, though, began to spread out.

Cox: For example, in 1970, you have the CEOs of the top 100 companies in the U.S. earning about 40 times more than the average workers did in their companies. By 1990, they earned a whopping 1,000 times as much as their workers. So, there’s been a real growth of income at the very top.

Urycki: The Center for Budget Policies and Priorities did some government numbers crunching and issued a report that found the gap between rich and poor had indeed grown since 1979. The top 1 percent of Americans had more money to spend than the bottom 40 percent. A tax overhaul during the Reagan administration shifted more of the tax burden from the rich to the middle class and the numbers bear that out. Since 1979, after-tax income of the bottom 40 percent rose 13 percent, and after-tax income for the top one percent rose 300 percent.

Cox: Well, tax policies definitely have an impact on who is on the top and who is on the bottom. Without a doubt, the Bush administration tax proposals exacerbate the income inequality between the top and the bottom, which definitely has implications for class mobility in general. It does make it more difficult for people at the bottom to move up.

Urycki: Sociologists picture it as a ladder and say the class rungs in America are growing farther apart. The Census Bureau divides Americans into three classes: 20% at the top, 20% at the bottom and a continuing 60% in the middle, which doesn’t change. Sociologists tend to divide the group into five quintiles. But when buying power is calculated, economists say the middle class is actually shrinking. That makes class mobility more difficult. Much of Europe had more opportunity for class mobility in last year than the U.S. did.

Santoro: First of all, the class system is a relatively stable thing. There are increases and rates of upward social mobility depending on economic cycles. Right now, I think we’re in a cycle where we’re not seeing as much upward mobility as we have, maybe in the last 10 years, or that we saw back in the 1980s. A lot of the mobility is also downward. We need to remember that social mobility goes downward as well as upward.

Urycki: In the recent recession, the rich were hurt as much as anyone because the stock market drop meant a loss in their investment value. Some of the very poor did better than expected, indicating the welfare-to-work programs of the 90s are working and have kept people on the job. But the two-decade trend leaves questions about the American meritocracy.

Cox: The rhetoric and reality don’t really match up in terms of meritocracy. We see that about 37-42% of poor people stay at the bottom of the income distribution over the course of a generation. So, it’s much more stagnant in terms of income mobility than we would expect. America stands out from other countries and it is not because we are a uniquely mobile society, but because we have a stronger faith in meritocratic principles than citizens in other countries.

Urycki: Even a college education, once the ticket to advancement in the 1980s, has lost some of its power. While it once negated the effect of family background, a degree is now just a minimum requirement to get in the game. The oldest of class advantages still matters.

Cox: The evidence clearly suggests that you need to pick your parents well if you want to succeed. There’s quite a bit of immobility in terms of earnings, in terms of overall income and there is also a similar correlation between occupations of parents and children. For example, you find about 65% of the earning advantage of fathers is transmitted to their sons, which is quite high. Children of professionals are significantly more likely to become professionals as adults. And children of blue-collar workers are significantly more likely to have bluecollar occupations.

Urycki: Would you say that Americans want equality?

Cox: I think Americans want as much inequality as they feel is necessary to inspire effort and reward and just deserts. There’s definitely an idea among Americans that inequality, to a certain extent, is a very good thing to have. It does inspire effort and hard work to move up the income ladder. The problem is simply that we haven’t had the mobility to counteract the type of increasing inequality we’ve had. So, I think it’s time for Americans to reassess their idea of what is an acceptable amount of inequality.