Social class is ordered groupings of individuals that are usually based on wealth, educational attainment, occupation, income, or social network. In our society today social class is something that is very valuable to people. America is broken up into four different social classes, Upper class, upper middle, lower middle class and lower class. These classes create an inequality in American democracy. When you split people up into different categories it gives others more say over others. Most social class is inherited, if you are from the upper class that is where you will stay, and if you were born into the middle class somewhere that is most likely where you will stay. In America social mobility is not easy to achieve.
There have been many studies that have been done to look at the percentages of social mobility, to see who is moving up and who is moving down the social scale. There was a studied done by men and women Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. These people looked at about 40 million tax returns of the people that were born between 1971 and 1993. After they examined their tax returns they compared In 1971 a child from the poorest fifth had an 8.4% chance of making it to the top quintile. For a child born in 1986 the odds were 9%. (Mobility measured,http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america-no-less-socially-mobile-it-was-generation-ago-mobility-measured). As you can see over the 15 year difference there was only a 0.6% difference in who was able to move up from the middle class. There is a man named Gregory Clark from Princeton who looks closely at social class mobility. He came across that the effect of inheritance is almost nil in some Nordic societies, and family explains no more than 25% of an adult child’s status in America, which has always been less mobile. I feel as though social mobility has a lot to do with inheritance. Most people that are in the top quartile are going to stay there which lowers the chances of others moving up. It is less likely to come from a poor family and move up then it is to come from the upper class and move down. It is easy to lose all of your money then to get rich. This is just how our system is set up, it is set up to make it hard for people to make money. Like they say, you need money to make money.
“That’s what middle-class economics is -- the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, everyone plays by the same set of rules. We don’t just want everyone to share in America’s success, we want everyone to contribute to our success.”( President Obama’s speech) This quote is a clear example of what our system should display, this displays a real democratic society that we all say we are. The fact that this is not already happening shows that we are not truly a democratic nation. It is necessary to lower the taxes of the middle and the lower class and raise the taxes for the upper class. It does not make any sense to have the people making to most spending the least, we need to make it easier for the middle class go to college, if more kids can afford college more kids would go and they could have that education that could help them get to that upper class salary. Obama’s comments represent a real democracy,a fair chance and equality.
Social class mobility at this point is not possible for american. The system is set up in a way that makes it to hard to reach that upper class. There are solutions like taxing the upper class more and lowering the middle and lower class taxes. This would give everyone a fair shot to achieve social mobility for them and their children.