Lesley Perez, 24, is a New York City kindergarten teacher and earns just $23,000 a year. To save money, she lives with her parents. She is $35,000 in debt from college loans.
(4 of 5)
While there's no doubt that so far, technology has been a net plus in terms of the number of jobs in our economy, a growing group of experts believe that link is being broken. Two economists at MIT, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, have just published an influential book titled Race Against the Machine, looking at how computers are increasingly able to perform tasks better than humans do, from driving (Google software recently took a self-driving Prius on a 1,000-mile trip) to sophisticated pattern recognition to writing creative essays and composing award-winning music. The result, they say, is that technology may soon be a net job destroyer.
The best hope in fighting the machines is to improve education, the factor that is more closely correlated with upward mobility than any other. Research has shown that as long as educational achievement keeps up with technological gains, more jobs are created. But in the late 1970s, that link was broken in the U.S. as educational gains slowed. That's likely an important reason that Europeans have passed the U.S. in various measures of mobility. They've been exposed to the same Malthusian forces of globalization, but they've been better at using public money to buffer them. By funding postsecondary education and keeping public primary and secondary schools as good as if not better than private ones, Europeans have made sure that the best and brightest can rise.
There are many other lessons to be learned from the most mobile nations. Funding universal health care without tying it to jobs can increase labor flexibility and reduce the chance that people will fall into poverty because of medical emergencies--a common occurrence in the U.S., where such medical crises are a big reason a third of the population cycles in and out of poverty every year. Focusing more on less-expensive preventive care (including family planning, since high teen birthrates correlate with lack of mobility) rather than on expensive procedures can increase the general health levels in a society, which is also correlated to mobility.
Europe's higher spending on social safety nets has certainly bolstered the middle and working classes. (Indeed, you could argue that some of America's great social programs, including Social Security and Medicaid, enabled us to become a middle-class nation.) Countries like Germany and Denmark that have invested in youth-employment programs and technical schools where young people can learn a high-paying trade have done well, which is not surprising given that in many studies, including the Opportunity Nation index, there's a high correlation between the number of teenagers who are not in school or not working and lowered mobility.