Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The crisis of middle-class America

A couple of months ago, the FInancial Times had a good article on The crisis of middle-class America. The most surprising fact in it to me was this...

"Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: ‘America is the best country in the world to be poor.’ That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe."

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