Morning Must-Read: James Surowiecki: Assessing the American Dream : The New Yorker

James Surowiecki: Assessing the American Dream: “As the economist Joseph P. Ferrie has shown, in the late nineteenth century U.S. society was far more mobile than Great Britain’s….

Andrew Carnegie [could] start as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory at a dollar-twenty a week and end up one of the world’s richest men. This legacy left a deep imprint on American culture…. That feeling has persisted: Americans are less concerned than Europeans about inequality and more confident that society is meritocratic. The problem is that, over time, the American dream has become increasingly untethered from American reality…. Salt Lake City and San Jose, have mobility rates as high as anywhere else in the developed world. There are also places in the U.S., like Mississippi, where mobility is lower than anywhere else in the developed world. So if you could figure out exactly what Salt Lake City is doing right, and apply that lesson elsewhere, you might be able to get people movin’ on up again.

Increasing economic opportunity is a noble goal, and worth investing in. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that more social mobility will cure what ails the U.S. economy…. Sweden has one of the highest rates of social mobility in the world, but a 2012 study found that the top of the income spectrum is dominated by people whose parents were rich…. More important… most people are… middle and working classes; public policy should focus on raising their standard of living, instead of raising their chances of getting rich…