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    Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
    Unavailable
    Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
    Unavailable
    Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
    Ebook234 pages3 hours

    Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It

    By Richard V. Reeves

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Dream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America.

    In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percentwe are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else.

    The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of opportunity hoardinggaining exclusive access to scarce resourcesis especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child.

    Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it.

    Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren’t the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrookings Institution Press
    Release dateMay 8, 2018
    ISBN9780815735496
    Unavailable
    Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It

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    Reviews for Dream Hoarders

    3.5/5

    39 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Good intentions waylaid by constant repetition, seemingly to stretch this out to beyond a magazine article. The premises are intriguing: that zoning changes for more dense and equitable housing and an end to unpaid internships and legacy admissions to college will resolve much of income inequality. I agree completely that the 20% of upper middle class people are advantaged by these - however, gerrymandering, racism and sexism are far worse crimes against the working class.Quotes: "Upper middle class families have become greenhouses for the cultivation of human capital.""Americans are more tolerant of income inequality than citizens of other countries, in part because of this faith that in each generation the poor run a fair race against the rich, and the brightest succeed.""We are becoming what one writer calls a "hereditary meritocracy.""Opportunity hoarding occurs when the upper middle class does not win by being better but by rigging the competition in our favor.""When the late Senator Ted Kennedy tried to clamp down on legacy admissions, a spokesman from Rice University defended the practice on the grounds that "objective merit and fairness are attractive concepts with no basis in reality."
    • 4/5
      Yes, the 1% are awful, but Reeves argues that the 20% are also a big part of the problem, hoarding opportunity in college admissions (legacies, 529 plans 90% of whose benefits go to the already wealthy, and expensive prep activities) and housing (restrictive zoning, the mortgage interest deduction). The top 20% have taken off in wealth from the rest of the country, even though the benefits are even more concentrated at the top; tournament-type high wages for professionals and assortative mating have led the 20% to detach from the bottom. The top 20% have the human capital to thrive in a transnational economy; “[t]he cities we live in are zoned to protect our wealth, but deter the unskilled from sharing in it. Professional licensing and an immigration policy tilted toward the low-skilled shield us from the intense market competition faced by those in nonprofessional occupations.” We have a culture of entitlement, based on our current status and our belief that it results from our own merits. This is both wrong and inefficient (e.g., fund managers from poor backgrounds perform better than those from richer backgrounds, probably because of how much better they have to be in the first place to get into financial services). We need downward mobility if we are to have upward mobility, but the 20% will resist that as fiercely as possible as long as downward mobility has such serious consequences for well-being. Right now we have a “glass floor” that often prevents less-meritorious children of the 20% from falling down—lower-scoring adolescents from that group are more likely to get a college degree, which protects them from downard mobility. Some fixes involve giving more to the 80%: better long-term contraception; home visits and support for new parents; better teachers at poorer schools; and equalizing college funding. The even harder lifts involve fighting exclusionary zoning and college legacy preferences, getting rid of the mortgage interest tax credit, equalizing taxation of income and capital gains, and creating a system to pay for unpaid internships—harder because they involve the 20% giving up advantages. (Apparently Oxford and Cambridge gave up legacy preferences without seeing a decrease in alumni giving; but I doubt we’ll see much of that in the US any time soon regardless.) On internships, power begets power, and favors those who don’t need to earn money while working towards furthering their later careers: My alma mater high school, an expensive private school in DC, produced more White House interns than Florida, Pennsylvania, or Illinois—but it’s also worth noting the reason we know that, since the high schools aren’t publicly listed—the reporter who published the analysis also went there, and two of her editors. For all these things, from admissions to zoning, practices that once served primarily racist goals (legacies against Jews, zoning against African-Americans) “have been softened, normalized, and subtly repurposed to help us sustain the upper middle-class status.”
    • 4/5
      This is an informative and compelling look at the growth of income inequality in the US, but it presents only part of the picture. To begin with what's new and different in this book, it looks at income inequality in a different focus. Instead of zeroing on the one percent as so many have done, Reeves focusses on the 19% -- those whose incomes come in between the 80th and the 99th percentile, a group that he describes as the upper middle class. The incomes of this group have grown much faster than incomes for the country as a whole (if less rapidly than the incomes of the 1%). Moreover, income gains have been bolstered and protected by other benefits, political and social in nature. The tax deduction for mortgage interest and the 529 college savings programs, for example, mostly benefit the upper middle class. The children of the 19%, on average, attend far better schools than most American children, and are far likelier to attend and graduate from college. This is not accidental, Reeves argues. Upper middle class parents are fiercely focussed on getting their children the best educations possible, by restrictive zoning and legacy admissions as well as by intensive home support. It's a compelling argument, and we -- most readers of this book are probably members of the upper middle class -- need to recognize that the deck is stacked in our favor. But it's also an incomplete argument. An excellent review of the book in "The Economist" points out the basic problem of focussing on the 19% rather than on the 1%, saying "Since around 2000 the incomes of the upper middle class, excluding the top 1%, have not grown by much, and the income premium earned by those with university degrees has plateaued." Over that period, the income of the 1% has soared: in fact, since 2009, the 1% has copped about 95% of ALL income gains. Politically, focussing on the barriers that the upper middle class has established to protect it's position is an admirable goal. But so is focussing on the massive income gains that the upper class -- if we may so call the 1% -- has wrested from the system. All in all, this book is well worth reading, but remember that the 19% is only part of the problem.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Thought-provoking because it hits close to home. Am I aware of inequities in our social system? Absolutely! Am I willing to do something about it at personal cost? Ummm....Reeves (a British immigrant) argues that America has become so stratified that we really are a class-based society as much as we are based on not being one. Here are the factors that contribute: "exclusionary zoning in residential areas, unfair mechanisms influencing college admissions including legacy preferences, and the informal allocation of internships." He's right on the mark. With those three practices in place the "haves" get more and the "have nots" fall behind. He acknowledges that there are many more factors, but those are the ones he has chosen to focus on here. He's not a socialist, but as a transplant he is struck by the lack of equal opportunity in America. The lifestyle the upper middle class (defined here as household income over $112,000) has earned begets inherent privileges passed on to their children that create a growing divide between those he terms middle class ($54,000), not to mention the lowest fifth on the continuum. They have better access to education, health care, enrichment opportunities, social and business connections. As for hoarding: "Opportunity hoarding takes place when valuable, scarce opportunities are allocated in an anti-competitive manner, that is influenced by factors unrelated to an individual's performance" (internships and legacies make sense here - it's not what you know but who) To fix this he proposed ideas that will need to change not just minds, but hearts: 1. Reduce unintended pregnancies w/ better contraception 2. Increase home visiting to improve parenting 3. Get better teachers for unlucky kids 4. Fund college fairly 5. curb exclusionary zoning 6. end legacy admissions 7. Open up internships. All possible, all challenging, some already being chipped away at. Lots to think about. This was published in 2017, so could already be updated and is more germane as it inherently involves issues of race too. An interesting observation by Reeves: "to be American is to be free to make something of yourself." He is advocating that everyone be allowed to start with equal building blocks.
    • 4/5
      An interesting take on wealth inequality in the 21st century and what to do about it. The top quintile of income earners are the topic of the book, and there is some convincing evidence that without policy action they will continue to outpace everyone else in wealth and access, although the specifics of setting up the problem are a bit repetitive. The last two chapters are the highlight, with multiple specific proposals for how to fix such a wicked problem. Community colleges, exclusionary zoning, and housing vouchers all get their moment, if you are interested in how federal and state governments could make a difference.