Americans have an egalitarian approach to inequality: they want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else. (Source)
Americans have an egalitarian approach to inequality: they want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else. (Source)
I’m not quite sure what you are trying to say here.
If you work harder, you generally end up better off (materially) than someone who works less.
I have respect for Menand, and think he’s making several good points very concisely here. But historically speaking, I think this aphorism no longer rings true. I believe what we now call middle class values (not to be confused with the bourgeois values of another time, centered on social climbing as Menand hints at) have triumphed and that most Americans want and expect for themselves, in fact imagine themselves to have a right to, what they consider to be “reasonable” standards of prosperity. They are not trying to get richer than the neighbors, but only as rich as they think they deserve to be. Everyone used to want to be a millionaire, but now everyone wants to think of himself as “middle class.” The very serious problems we face, therefore, lie in defining what is “reasonable” prosperity, why we think we deserve it, and what measures of material exploitation are justifiable in attaining this prosperity.
Jonathan, I think you’re describing a (necessary) adjustment that (I hope) we’re only at the beginning of making, but the older mentality is the main reason we are at an impasse in the political sphere.
We Americans have enabled the concentration of so much wealth in the hands of so few in the last thirty years because we believe that becoming a millionaire is one of the fundamental aspirations that define us as Americans. Even if it turns out that we can’t be millionaires, there’s still the hope our kids can be.
But this mentality has led American society into having become increasingly stratified and immobile. One of the last places in the economically developed world to realize the American Dream is in America. (Joseph Stiglitz has written quite a bit about this.) So maybe that’s a good thing in some respects, but it’s not helpful for making realistic political and economic adjustments if most people persist in the older mentality.
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