When the future 10th Earl of Weems attended his interview for admission to Christchurch

College Oxford in 1837, he was asked just one question,

how's your father? The American elite likes to think it does things differently.

Instead of family pedigrees, marriage announcements in the New York Times

list universities attended and degrees earned. These academic badges of honour are held up as

proof of the idea that anyone can make it so long as they have the right qualities.

Ronald Reagan said that all Americans have the right to go just as far as their dreams

and individual hard work will take them. This formula has been echoed by every

president since, including Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden.

But though the rhetoric of the American dream has stayed the same, the odds of realising it

have not. Biden and Trump were both born in the 1940s. The median child of that generation

had a 93% chance of earning more than their parents had.

By the time Obama was born, a boomer of the 1960s, that probability had already shrunk to 60%.

But a child born in the full optimism of the Reagan years, the 1980s, would have less than a 50-50 shot

of that goal. This is checks and balance.

I'm John Prado, the economist's US editor. Each week we take one big dean shaping American politics

and explore it in depth. Today is America a Maritokrasu.

The belief that people should advance according to their talents rather than birth or connections

is one of history's most revolutionary ideas. But the ideal that has inspired Americans since

Thomas Jefferson has lost its lustre. Social mobility has stalled.

Belief in the American dream has faltered, and populists on the right and the left see a country

captured by self-serving elites. Can America's Maritokrasu be mended?

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