Riches to Rags : Getting Ahead in the Age of Downward Mobility

When I was in junior high, back in the early ‘70s, I promised Mom that someday I’d live in a house with a swimming pool and build her a cottage nearby. Wealth, pure and simple, was my earnest ambition as I trudged home from my private school, a heavy stack of books balanced on my bony hip. I was the token scholarship student in a class of 14 and, worse yet, the only one who had to walk to school.

My mother cheered on my plans for upward mobility. As I plotted it, my route out of our rented-home, used-car, one-parent existence would be direct: If I made straight A’s and never left the apartment without mascara on, it was only a matter of time before the upper class would beckon.

Doing better than your father and mother is a time-honored American dream. Parents invest hard cash and sweet dreams in their kids, believing that the next generation is destined to go one beyond their parents’ accomplishments: to go to college, if they stopped in high school; to own a two-story home, with land, if they lived in a suburban tract home, and, if they rented--as in my case--to own any home.

And even now, when the experts and the figures tell us indisputably that today’s young adults are the first generation of Americans to be downwardly mobile, society turns the deaf ear of denial and dubs us “yuppies.” For young families today, it takes two breadwinners--after taxes and adjusting for inflation--to achieve rough parity with a one-breadwinner family of the early 1960s. The single worker is even worse off. Today, a fully employed male aged 25 to 34 earns just 50% of what a male 20 years his senior makes; in the mid-1950s, such a worker earned 73% of the more senior male’s salary. The median age of first-time homeowners continues to move upward, and many members of my generation will never have the chance to buy.

We seem to be more comfortable bandying about the false stereotypes of shameless consumerism and unbounded narcissism of the young than facing the facts--and projecting the consequences--of a diminishing economic future. In the news media, column inches and videotape footage are liberally devoted to those frivolous Greeks on campus, to the latest crop of MBAs and their work-driven excesses, and to glib put-downs: “Don’t trust anyone under 30,” says 50-year-old Abbie Hoffman.

Not surprisingly, some members of my generation cling to the myth of upward economic mobility. Tom, for example, is a writer who can’t seem to hold an office job for more than a few weeks, but he is convinced that he’ll write the next “E.T.”--if only his wife can cover their living expenses until he hits the cinematic jackpot. And there’s Sheila, who spares no expense on silk scarfs, designer bath towels and turquoise-and-silver jewelry while despairing of ever buying a home or building a savings account.

In the past, upward mobility was achieved by climbing an economic ladder. But today, the rungs on that ladder have started to fall out. So young Americans are traveling in other directions. Having grown up with women’s liberation, racial integration and the epidemic of divorce, we instinctively understand the high human price exacted when people are forced into ill-fitting roles. The result is a tendency to perceive reality and morality in individual rather than collective terms.

As it turned out, my mother didn’t need my resources to construct a home of her own. Four years after I’d cleared yet another of her duplex apartments of my high-school cheerleading megaphone and college-era spiral notebooks, she became the proud owner of a two-bedroom nest of her own. At 60, she had achieved the fitful dream of her lifetime: homeownership, and with it, the upward mobility that her Depression-era parents had never enjoyed.

And now, at 30, four years after my mother’s official entrance into the middle-class--I am about to take the same step. My husband and I have just signed the papers for a loan on our first home. But to achieve this, we couldn’t stick around Westwood any longer, where rent for a two-room apartment cut our budget into ribbons every month. So we moved, far out of Thomas Bros.’ plotted terrain, to a cherry, peach and apple orchard in the country, to Carroll County, Va.

During our L.A. years, we came to understand that while jackpots do exist, it’s hard to plan your life around them. Our six years in Los Angeles helped us find ourselves: as writers and as a couple. We want children, and a backdrop of stability in our lives.

Our aging, Appalachian farmhouse is solidly constructed but fraying at the edges--buckling linoleum, carpet about my age--but we have four bedrooms and two baths. And there’s a tank that in the summer doubles as a swimming pool, if you aren’t allergic to frogs.

And, yes, Mom, someday there might even be a cottage. But more than likely, you’ll have to build it.