An American recipe for class immobility

Returning from a two-week speaking tour to Finland, Norway and Sweden, I kept thinking about that scene early in Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning film "The Departed" where Leonardo DiCaprio's character is grilled about his personal background by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg, who want him to become an undercover agent for the Boston Police Department.

"Families are always rising and falling in America," says Mr. DiCaprio's character, quoting 18th-century writer Nathaniel Hawthorne.

But are they? Americans like to believe that class mobility is a natural consequent, if not birthright, of our caste-less, meritocratic and capitalist society. And in the United States today, families do still rise and fall.

The sad truth, however, is that America is becoming less economically mobile. In fact, right now American families are less likely to rise and fall from one generation to the next than are families in those evil "socialist" countries of Scandinavia I just visited, where a person's income is far less dependent upon his or her parents' income than it is here in the United States. In contrast to the U.S., Scandinavian countries are less class-anchored and more egalitarian and feature higher rates of political participation - all features that we aspire to have here in America but which have vanished in recent decades.

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