In his new book, Dream Hoarders, the provocative and progressive voice of Richard V. Reeves says the 2016 presidential election revealed “some dangerous fault lines in America’s class structure,’’ having “tapped into white anxiety’’ about race, ethnicity and being left behind economically.
“There is one good reason why many Americans feel as if the upper middle class is leaving everyone else behind: they are,’’ says Reeves.
That class divide is destroying “the American dream of equality and fairness’’ and is harmful to the productivity of a nation envied for its opportunity and access to prosperity, says Reeves, who admits he is a member of the upper middle class. His book’s tongue-twisting subtitle is: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About it.
Reeves is a senior fellow in economic studies and co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Born in England, he became an American citizen in 2016. He and his American wife have three children and live in an upper middle class Maryland suburb of Washington.
Reeves writes that households with incomes above $112,000 are the hoarders: they live in a world separate from 80 percent of the rest of Americans in income, education, family structure, health and longevity, civic and community life. The “kind of selfish’’ upper middle class treats “tax breaks as an entitlement,’’ and excludes “others from opportunity to serve our own ends.’’
The top fifth of U.S. households had a $4 trillion increase in pretax income between 1979 and 2013; the remaining 80 percent had a total increase of $3 trillion.
Reeves questions whether the United States has a true meritocracy: “In a market economy, those with skills and attributes that are valued have a better outcome in life. We have a deeply unfair society if merit is developed highly unequally and largely as a result of the lottery of birth.’’
Inequality starts with what Reeves calls “opportunity hoarding’’ or what you keep for yourself—the three most powerful being exclusionary zoning in residential areas; unfair mechanisms influencing college admissions including legacy admissions; and unfair allocation of internships, which provide a step up to a better life.
Reeves’s seven proposals include ideas that ask the top earning 20 percent of Americans to make sacrifices; he argues that the upper middle class can afford to do so, and even more pointedly, cannot afford not to if we want a fair society.
His emphasis is on providing all children with opportunities for social mobility, beginning in the K-12 years. “The unfairness lies not in the competition itself but in the chances to prepare for it.’’
Here are Reeves’s proposals: