Clive Crook reasons from too little evidence, and so reaches dodgy conclusions.

The finding that would surprise most Americans is that the American dream is something of a fraud. Intergenerational social mobility–your chances of moving up from poverty, or down from great wealth–are lower in the US than in most of Europe. This is something I have written about before. Research suggests plenty of mobility in the middle part of US income distribution, but not much at the ends. The American dream is a kind of opportunity club, and the very poor and very rich aren’t members.

Why not? The American Idea exalts equality of opportunity over equality of outcomes. A related notion is that you must look out for yourself: society does not owe you a living. In anti-poverty policy, this expresses itself as a strong preference for conditional (EITC) or in-kind (food stamps) benefits over European-style welfare payments. My instincts are strongly in favour of this approach. The problem is, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are not neatly separable. In America, if you are born into a very poor family, your opportunities are shut down too–more than in other countries. In other words, anti-poverty measures that succeed up to some minimum may be a condition for membership of the opportunity club.

The idea that being born poor shuts down opportunities needs to be examined in more detail. The magical leap to the conclusion that anti-poverty measures that succeed up to some minimum are required is merely a bias. IMV the problem is the education system which exists to serve the desires of the educators rather than the students. The education system is a welfare system but the beneficiaries are those who work in it, to the detriment of the students, denying them opportunity. Very few poor students are so energetic, disciplined and brilliant to rise out of poverty on their own initiative, in effect educating themselves. We can admire those who do so - our Abe Lincolns reading by candle light in their rude log cabins - but too few can succeed this way.

The American left, it seems to me, is much more energised by the injustice of wealth than the injustice of poverty. It often appears that, in their view, the remedy for any social injustice is to tax the rich. Consider the energy spent on that issue in the past few years, and compare it with demands from the left for bigger cash benefits for the poor. (What demands, you might say?) Bear in mind that the US income tax system is already highly progressive by international standards. The American anomaly is not the way high incomes are taxed, but the way very low incomes are supported. (This was true both before and after welfare reform.)

I think that left-liberal equivocation over school choice–a cause that unites conservatives and many urban blacks–is another instance of this mindset.

This gets closer to something useful. It is the American left that has captured the education system for its own benefit while failing to educate poor children. They talk about concern for the needy, but their own needs come first, let the devil take the hindmost.