Professor Focuses on Urbanization
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Category Archives: Reporting
Urban Peripheries and Politics of the Slum
My article: Urban Peripheries and Politics of the Slum
The world is over half urban. In 1990, less than 40% of the global population lived in a city, but as of 2010, more than half of all people live in an urban area. By 2050, this proportion will increase to a staggering 70%.
The bulk of new urban population growth will be in the so-called Global South: Sub Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, with an increasing number of people across the class spectrum settling in peripheral and suburban areas in both megacities and smaller towns. The nature of that growth, however, will not follow a familiar pattern. Dr. Malini Ranganathan, an Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service and an expert on urban geography, says informality is the “new normal” of urbanization. This new kind of growth defies binary terms like “slum” and brings questions of equality to the forefront of the discussion on city planning and development, making the very concept of citizenship incredibly malleable and negotiable.
Ranganathan’s recent research focused on Bangalore, a city of over ten million people, where much of the growth is occurring in the so-called urban peripheries—the outskirts of town, where people are securing their claim to urban land through a series of negotiations and adaptions that while informal in nature are reshaping the very notion of “right to the city.” The discourse of the slum, Ranganathan explains, is incredibly limiting and doesn’t recognize informal land tenure. “We are referring to something akin to occupancy urbanism, where the people first occupy the space and then start to put in place the mechanisms of livelihood and the infrastructure. Many of these occupants might purchase what is initially considered farm land and then through negotiations and forming a relationship with bureaucrats are able to create a sort of an ambiguous ownership, which is in a sense advantageous to both the state and the inhabitants.” Much more noteworthy, however, is that while home owners associations in the United States are usually preoccupied (or rather, obsessed) with safeguarding property values, the ad-hoc neighborhood welfare associations she observed in Bangalore formed to make demands on the state. By banding together in groups, occupants gain the power to advocate for critical services such as water access and sanitation. As one of the residents described it, “The ‘we’ feeling has to be there.”
While informal urban growth seems to be especially prevalent in the developing world, it is certainly not foreign to the United States. Every day in American cities street vendors spread out their wares on sidewalks, food trucks serve lunch from the curb, and homeowners hold sales in their front yards. “Squatting” or adverse possession, as it is referred to legally, is becoming a little bit more prevalent, especially in cities like Baltimore and Detroit. “Baltimore is full of buildings artists have used over time to solve their problems,” says Fred Lazarus, president of the Maryland Institute, College of Art. “Many of them live illegally in buildings where they rent studio space.” All of these ground realities would require urban planning to be less top-down and more responsive. “The question remains about the extent these lofty goals can stir political action—how can the right to the city be institutionalized and to not rely so heavily on tech fixes. This issue is not just an environmental or technical issue but also a heavily political and social one. It is about social dynamics such as making public transit more accessible, new sustainability initiatives, and providing more affordable housing,” says Ranganathan.
Ranganathan also discussed a recent shift in the discussion on urban inequity. ”Urban inequity is now front and center on the urban policy agenda. Inequality is proving to be bad for development, period.” At the most recent World Urban Forum, the theme was Urban Equity in Development—Cities for Life. The concept paper of the forum argues that, “unequal cities are all-around inefficient, politically volatile, unsafe, and unsustainable, and just plain bad for human development.” The recognition that inequality is detrimental to overall human well-being is a notable shift away from decades of mainstream development policy guided by trickle-down economics and top-down ideas meant to simply offer band-aid solutions to the have-nots while simultaneously focusing on them as the problem. More importantly, the notion that growth and equity are antithetical is fast losing ground: “The OECD dismissed the assumption that the benefits of economic growth automatically filtered down to the poorest in society. The Economist has just affirmed that inequality has reached a level which makes it inefficient and bad for growth. By the same token, the IMF has recognized that inequality slows down economic growth, weakens the demand and contributes to financial crises.” When Henry Lefebvre wrote about the “right to the city” in 1968, he was referring to far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources. Right to the city is a common rather than an individual right; it relies on collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. It is the right to inhabit the city, the right to produce urban life, and to right of inhabitants to remain unalienated from the urban life. Yet, on a practical level, making these lofty ideals a reality requires political commitment. Until the time the powers in place wake up to the trenchant realities on the ground, informal settlements and their safety issues and environmental hazards will continue to exist and workers who build glitzy skyscrapers in global cities will still only be able to live in them while working on their construction.
American University’s School of International Service Stories and Newsletter
American University’s School of International Service Stories and Newsletters
Anne-Marie Slaughter: Focus on Care at Home and Abroad
Renowned scholar and President of the New America Foundation, Anne-Marie Slaughter, visited SIS as part of the Dean’s Discussion lecture series. Titling her talk, Revaluing Care, at Home and Abroad, Dr. Slaughter spoke about a broad range of issues, domestic and foreign. The revaluing of care is a reference to a feminist theory called ethics of care; one of the relevant tenets of that theory is valuing actions in the private sphere equally to those in the public one.
In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter published an article in The Atlantic entitled Why Women Still Can’t Have It All; she wryly remarked that, to this day, this article keeps being referenced as the article amongst the myriad of pieces she has authored in her 20+ year academic career. In outlining the evolution of her thinking since the article was published, Dr. Slaughter said, “I don’t think the problem alone is discrimination against women, although that is not to dismiss that as an ongoing problem facing women, especially low-income women.” The severe underrepresentation of women in positions of power is, in a sense, baffling considering the much-rosier statistics of women graduating college. “The deeper problem that unites the many facets of the symptoms we see is less about women per se and more about not valuing the kind of work that women have traditionally done. We don’t value care; we value competition and consumption.”
“There is a deep unconscious bias on the part of men in the academy. We need more women in senior professorial positions. So much of advancing in the academic requires being selfish and saying ‘no’ as what is valued are big ideas and a body of scholarship. This often works against women who mentor students and are asked to contribute to the community.”
Dr. Slaughter suggested that until we are able to value care as much as earning an income and until we learn to support care-givers, not much headway can be made. She has been using Twitter (and the hashtags #wherearethewomen and #foreignpolicyinterrupted) actively to raise the profile of women in international affairs. “There is a deep unconscious bias on the part of men in the academy. We need more women in senior professorial positions. So much of advancing in the academic requires being selfish and saying ‘no’ as what is valued are big ideas and a body of scholarship. This often works against women who mentor students and are asked to contribute to the community.”
Taking her care vs. competition framework to a grander scale, Dr. Slaughter said, “We should place an equal weight on human interest and government interest. What happens to people in a country should be of as much value as what happens politically.” Referring to the ongoing civil war, she stated, “I have been very passionate about the need to do more in Syria.” Invoking the principle of “responsibility to protect” is relevant in the case of Syria which is committing crimes against humanity on its own territory. “Syria is the Rwanda of our time. An estimated 150,000 people have already died in this conflict; the entire region surrounding Syria has become majorly destabilized.” Dr. Slaughter expressed outrage and dismay that Assad is still allowed to operate from the air, a capacity she feels could have easily and swiftly been disabled by intervention. “I wish the President had used force as soon as the chemical weapons use by Assad, with the approval of international bodies.” Talking about Russia, Dr. Slaughter felt that Putin is being given way too much power by the second-Cold-Water rhetoric. “His approval ratings are not that great at home,” she added.
You can watch a video of her talk here.
The Global War on Tribal Islam: An Interview with Akbar Ahmed
Originally published here
Also here
“After 9/11, I dedicated myself to creating bridges of understanding between different cultures and faiths. The relationship between the West and the Muslim world seemed to especially be fraught by much misunderstanding,” says Professor Akbar Ahmed. For his latest book, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam, Professor Ahmed focused on tribal areas: The peripheral areas between states and on the communities living between borders. Ahmed provides an exhaustive survey of tribal cultures across North and East Africa, Yemen, and Southwest and Southeast Asia. The title of the book is a metaphor; the thistle was how Leo Tolstoy described the tribes living in the Caucuses in his book Hadji Murad because, like the flower, they were thorny and prickly. The drone, on the other hand, is a symbol of globalism and the epitome of technological advancement.
In The Thistle and The Drone, Ahmed explores in-depth tribal history, culture, code of honor, and tribal Islam, an Islam that is very different in nature from more mainstream branches of the religion. Drawing on 40 case studies that Ahmed and his team of student researchers interviewed and analyzed, Ahmed couches his discussion in the dichotomy between center and periphery.
The first main finding of the book is that terror towards the West is very much perpetrated by tribal people. 90% of the 9/11 hijackers were from Yemeni tribes. The rhetoric used by Osama bin Laden and many others has always been very tribal in nature, Ahmed suggests. Thus, he says, “we [the West] are fighting one kind of war when it is an entirely different kind of war to them.” The second major point is that Ahmed believes that there is a way that the tribes can be pacified via peaceful and diplomatic means, citing the example of the Aceh in Indonesia or the relations between Scotland and England.
The central argument of The Thistle and the Drone is that “war on terror” is ultimately a war between a central government and a periphery. In Ahmed’s view, the “center” is nearly always in direct conflict with the tribal societies—a war of the state vs. its domestic antagonists, if you will. These tribal societies are often fighting against modernity or increasing encroachment upon their territories and way of life– the Rohingya in Burma, the Tuareg in Mali, or the Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example. “These tribes already have turbulent relations with the central government, which has failed to bring them into the nation, and the war on terror has only exacerbated this tension.” In addition, their own fellow Muslims often look upon the tribespeople as backward as well. This central vs. periphery tension is something Ahmed sees as fixable but not through the use of drones in the war on terror. “Drones have in essence become a symbol of Western arrogance. A far cry from the surgical-precision weapons they are described as, they have devastating moral costs. We often don’t hear about what it is like to live in an area where drones are buzzing overhead all night long—how often the women and the children suffer…”
Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: An Interview with Dr. Christine Chin
Professor Christine Chin came to write her ground-breaking book, Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City, somewhat reluctantly as sex work a subject she was not initially interested in and one that is fraught with contention in feminist scholar circles. “My first book was about domestic workers in Asia; my second was about global cruise ships. Even though I kept hearing about sex workers, I was not interested in conducting research on the topic initially. One of the reasons was that the debate amongst feminists on how to understand this phenomenon was divided between abolitionists and those who felt that sex workers had agency and that it was a valid choice, with the dominant perspective being the abolitionist. I did not want to get into this debate as I felt it was too binary and picking a side was incredibly limiting.”
Dr. Chin instead allowed what was coming in from the field to shape her line of inquiry—for example, news reports of immigration raids were suggesting that not all of the women in the industry had been trafficked. “I started to dig into this somewhat reluctantly, but I also saw how the literature up to this point was so rigid and so…almost morally rarefied; it was very focused on sex trafficking and I felt that there was an unrecognized spectrum of experience that could only be seen by letting the women tell their stories.”
Utilizing an ethnographic method, Dr. Chin interviewed a number of sex workers from all over the world–including Asia, the Middle East, and Russia–living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, shattering many of the prevailing views on the industry, and turning her research lens on non-trafficked women who willingly migrate to major global metropolises for sex work. Uncovering a wide spectrum of experiences, including the nature of the migration (serial, where women shuttle back and forth between home and a city vs. circular, where the women move within the global cities of a region and then move to another region), whether the workers moved with the aid of a syndicate or independently, and the motivation for their involvement in the industry, Cosmopolitan Sex Workers paints a complex picture of the structural forces of globalization at play and how the women very keenly understand and respond to them.
When I sat down with Dr. Chin to discuss her book, she outlined three of the key findings of Cosmopolitan Sex Workers. Firstly, migration for sex work is being globalized via an interconnected web of global cities that are nodes on this new frontier. For example, there are Senegalese women in Paris and Eastern European women in the Middle East—in other words, the same forces at play as a result of globalization are impacting this industry in predictable ways as well. The clients these women serve also travel to these destinations driven by the same economic motivations. Second, the common assumption that the workers are the “poorest of the poor,” is often not true. Some of the women are college graduates and/or come from middle class families. The women enter the business for a variety of reasons. For example, to assist their families, save money to start a business, get an education abroad, enjoy a certain more consumptive lifestyle, or simply earn income while travelling. These are the same reasons most workers migrate, regardless of their profession. From the women’s perspective, and the reason Dr. Chin prefers to use the term “sex work” rather than “prostitution,” sex work is work. Dr. Chin underlines the fact that doing this strictly for survival purposes is not always the case; for many of the women, this is a very calculated choice based on a careful consideration of their ability to earn income doing work that is commonly associated with—and available to–migrants, more specifically domestic work or other blue-collar labor. Sadly, the math weighs heavily on the side of sex work, which could earn them something akin to ten times as much as what they could bring in otherwise. Women’s monthly incomes (post-syndicate “taxes”) range between several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars. Thus, the impetus lies somewhere between a familiar, pragmatic strategy and an imperative.
Sex trafficking USA routes via anti-trafficking organization The Future Group
Finally, Dr. Chin reflects on how neoliberal globalization facilitates the occurrence of the relatively new phenomenon of non-trafficked sex workers. Some of the women contract with syndicates or facilitating groups—one of those syndicates is explored in-depth in the book. Morphing from a traditional Chinese secret society or a triad to a new model of a transnational corporation, it reflects the environment of the global city. Whereas organizations such as this one previous dealt in debt bondage and extortion, the newly “cleaned up” climate of the global cities rendered those feudal vestige industries obsolete, if you will. This is a horizontal organization that conducts a lot of “legitimate” business, such as investing and as a business organization also responds to the needs of its clients. What are those needs, you might ask? Predictably, fair-skinned women are in high demand, as are African women who are perceived to be “exotic” in Europe. To quote one of the members, “they want to make this a five star city; we will give them five star women.” Women who contract with such syndicates pay agreed-upon fees and a percentage of their income in return for syndicate-arrangement of their travel documents, transportation, board and lodging, and personal security. The spaces for the sex work are very varied as are the hierarchies of what was “in,” in other words: The physical characteristics of the women controlled where they could work and what prices they could command. Most of these women come into the cities under the auspices of either a tourist or a student visa. Though it deserves mentioning that some actually were receiving legitimate educations and not just using the visa status as a cover.
“The political economy of colonialism is not that terribly removed from the political economy of globalization and the sex industry illustrates that these ‘shadow economies’ are not afterthoughts or side effects but something that is inherently built into the system.”
“The political economy of colonialism is not that terribly removed from the political economy of globalization and the sex industry illustrates that these ‘shadow economies’ are not afterthoughts or side effects but something that is inherently built into the system,” Dr. Chin says. This system, in parallel with the same structural forces in place under colonialism, is highly gendered and racialized. Dr. Chin explains, “The book shows the gradations, the nuances of something that was previously thought to be very binary. I wanted to show that the women are responding, and rather astutely so, to structural forces at play. They understand the hypocrisies inherent in the system—the fact that their occupation is morally-condemned, yet at the same time, work such as being a domestic servant is so incredibly low-paying and subjects them to abuse as well.”
The Sectarian Myth: Iraq Ambassador Lukman Faily Speaks On The Situation In Iraq
My article
“The reality in Iraq is very different from that portrayed in the international media,” affirmed the Iraq Ambassador to the United States Lukman Faily in a talk at American University on February 18th. The focus on violence and the identification of sectarianism as the root cause of Iraq’s violence creates what he called a “sectarian meta-narrative,” that is far too simplistic of a paradigm and one that has plagued not just Western media portrayal of the region but also Arab media rhetoric as well. “It is easier to define a country in binary terms; to find simple, sellable elements to hone in on in the media. Violence has long stopped being sectarian in nature since about 2006-2007.” Ambassador Faily defied all the conventions of a typical “ambassador speech,” electing to speak frankly on the many misconceptions surrounding Iraq’s democratic transformation.
“Dictatorship changes the fabric of society.” Upon my request to further expound on this, the Ambassador stated that, “the longer and more ruthless the dictatorship, the longer it takes to shake off that coat, if you will. The state is there for the needs of the dictator so the people no longer associate themselves with the state. In a sense, people dislodge themselves from the state, which is why, for example, we saw the looters when the regime collapsed. The years under Saddam were detrimental to the Iraqi society. People began to associate the sanctions with the US because they were so removed from the state as a concept.” Psychologically, he explained, there is a need for cleansing after living so long in those circumstances. “Dictatorship demoralizes people, it makes for a more inward-looking, self-centered community and the longer it lasts, the more adverse the effect.” Placing Iraq more in the context of the Arab Spring movement, Ambassador Faily described the mindset of the people as “I want change, but I am not sure what the new social contract should look like.” People are after a new social contract, he suggested, but the weak civil society institutions in place, and the total dearth of NGOs and other community organizations, mean that the foundations are still not there and the role of the citizens is still unclear. “This is a young democracy and more people participation is needed.” This also necessitates the need not just political reforms but for social and economic ones as well.
Ambassador Faily then offered a very theoretically-rich construct to apply to the state of Iraq—the dichotomy of nation building vs. state building. “People often conflate nation with state, but this is a bit more complicated in Iraq. The state as a concept is very clear, but the definition of what it means to be an Iraqi is evolving.” What is the nation, he asked, especially in a society as heterogeneous as Iraq, where people can define themselves by a plethora of factors such as region/province, religious, or ethnic identity. He outlined several questions, including, “Do we rebuild the national character or the state institutions?” and “Do citizens have a stake in the nation or in the state?”
In addressing the current economic climate in Iraq, the Ambassador stated that the adverse impact of past sanctions was severe damage to the economic infrastructure. The current rate of economic growth is 9-11%, with steady increases in oil production and income levels. Unemployment, however, remains the same due to an over-reliance on oil production. Since oil as an industry is not very labor-intensive, he explained, it employs less than 1% of the population. “The core structure of the economy has to be managed better, with less reliance on subsidizing certain sectors.” Iraq also hopes to maintain a long-term investment relationship with the United States.
Old Rivalry, New Age
On December 12, 2013 the World Affairs Council-Washington, DC hosted an event on Russia’s role in the international community entitled “US-Russia Rivalry: Old Rivalry, New Age?” moderated by Anya Schmemann and featuring Dr. Fiona Hill of Brookings and Dr. Donald Jensen. Four years later, the reset in U.S.-Russian relations has been reset many times over to a much icier territory with issues like Russia’s support for Syria and a crackdown on opposition creating an increasingly tense atmosphere. Ms. Schmemann began by posing the question of how the U.S. should view Russia, in light of the American media’s frequent portrayal of Russia as a rather recalcitrant rival. Dr. Jensen responded that Russia’s primary goal is to reassert itself as a great power. “Russia is neither a friend nor an enemy, but it is not a partner either. It is a country we can cooperate with on issues of common interest.” Russia often defines itself by taking the “non-American position,” he continued. Russia respects strength and this makes the task of diplomacy very complicated but not impossible. “While they respect the U.S., they have taken the measure of the man and feel they can maneuver the U.S. in positions to Russia’s advantage. The national security/great power preoccupation of the Kremlin parallels the realist approach of many U.S. foreigner affairs thinkers so in a sense there is a natural fit between the two countries’ agendas, but there is also a disconnect.”
The discussion then turned to Russian domestic affairs and how much influence, if any, the United States has on them. Dr. Hill believes that that influence is little if not entirely none. “What we have with Putin is that the Russian political system is highly personalized, somewhat of a “one boy” network—everyone at the top is in one way or another related to Putin. There is a very tight web of informal networks.” While Dr. Jensen agreed with this, a small point of contention was on whether there is a growing ideological divide between the U.S. and Russia. Dr. Hill believes that Putin is promoting a return to traditional family values. She noted that Putin’s recent poslanie was very much an indication of the conservative direction in which Russia is moving. “In his poslanie, Putin very much admitted he is a conservative politician who believes in a conservative agenda to move the country forward. That means an anti-Western, anti-individualist, communitarian point of view with a strong role for the Russian Orthodox Church.” Dr. Hill suggested that Putin has been contextualizing Russia as an unique civilization in his speeches—and that a return to traditional Russian Orthodox family values is what would move the country forward. “The Russian Orthodox Church has proven to still be an entity that can mobilize hundreds thousands of people on the streets. In a place that still has a great deal of discomfort with same sex relations, Putin is, in a sense, expressing what is already in place and reaching out to other European countries with similarly conservative stances.” Dr. Hill suggested that this new ideological stance, which Dr. Jensen does not believe is present, is a stand that is a reaction against the decadence of the West and that Sochi is a battleground of sorts for this ideological divide.
Dr. Hill identified three trends in place in Russia that are affecting domestic affairs at the moment. First, the Russian economy has slowed down. For over 10 years, the Russian economy has been growing at 7-8 percent, creating a lot of expectations for the continuation of this burgeoning; these expectations now have to be seriously tempered in view of the current 1-2% rate growth. Russia is across the board a commodities and natural resource-based economy, Dr. Hill suggested. This also makes Russia very vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations. The big problem is moving into “value added products.” “Putin keeps laying out that Russia wants to diversify its economy, but they cannot do that, in fact, it would be foolish to do so as this is not their comparative or competitive advantage. All that would happen would be to subsidize industries that would not have a long term success.” Russia’s trade relations tend to be dominated by energy and there is growing concern that the Gasprom-model is changing and grinding down, which is why the thrust is moving away from Europe and courting China. Dr. Hill pointed to the armaments industry as still one of Russia’s most vibrant manufacturing sectors. “7 million people still depend on the industry for jobs. This is why we see Putin really trying to push this forward and find more buyers for Russia’s arms. He addressed this in the poslanie—in a sense, making himself personally responsible for finding markets to sell these products.”
The second trend is the rise of Russian nationalism–anti-immigrant and anti-migrant sentiments are taking hold, much as they are in the rest of Europe. The anti-migrant feeling is also directed towards people moving into Moscow from other cities, more specifically toward the Muslim population from the Northern Caucus area. The third trend is the decline of Putin’s popularity. Dr. Hill stated that Putin’s approval ratings have plunged from the high marks of 80% to 60% to now as low as 40% in terms of actual voter turnout strength. Both panelists opined that Putin’s tightening of power is spurred by fear of rivals and insecurity. Dr. Hill asked the question of whether it is possible to have Putinism without Putin. She suggested that a political re-entrenchment is taking place to put the political instruments in place for the successful continuation of the system. The highly-personalized/charismatic leader model of the Russian political system necessitates that public approval does not ebb as this is what bestows the leader legitimacy, she added.
The Young And The Penniless: 25-35 Age Group Vulnerable To Poverty
My Article For Voice Of Russia
WASHINGTON (VOR)— Much ado has been made about the purportedly entitled Millenial generation, but the reality of most young people’s lives is more akin to an urban dystopia than an utopia.
Few topics in public discourse are more plagued by pervasive myths and misconceptions than poverty, especially about how and to whom it happens. Poverty, Dr. Mark Rank points out, is a surprisingly commonplace experience. “The question for most Americans is not whether they will experience it at some point but when.” Dr. Rank and long-time collaborator Thomas Hirschl of Cornell University are releasing a new book in February 2014 entitled Chasing the American Dream: Understanding the Dynamics that Shape Our Fortunes. It explores the shifting nature of the American Dream—how tenuous it has become, how has the concept morphed over time, and how economically viable it is. Dr. Rank describes the methodology in the book as based on a “large longitudinal panel of data from 1968 to 2009 and from it, we generated a life table of the likelihood of experiencing particular economic events, thus quantifying the measure of ‘economic insecurity.’ The book also includes interviews with 75 people, as a way for us to study their responses on the question of the American dream.”
Mark Rank’s research indicates that nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period ($23,492 for a family of four), and 54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line). Yet, the group of young adults aged between 25 and 35 seems be especially susceptible to financial peril. As the figure below illustrates, almost 40% of young adults spend at least a year living below 150% of the poverty line. “Young adults have always been at the greatest risk for economic instability as this is typically a low point in their income earning ability,” Dr. Rank explains. But undoubtedly their economic hardships have been compounding in recent years.
The way that Dr. Rank measured the variable of economic security was living below the poverty line, loss of job, or being on some sort of public assistance program, like welfare or food stamps. The employment status of young adults was a large contributing factor to their economic insecurity. Fewer Americans aged 18 to 29 worked full-time for an employer in June 2013 (43.6%) than did so in June 2012 (47.0%), according to Gallup’s Payroll to Population employment rate. Fewer young adults with a college degree now hold a full-time job than did so in June 2012 (68.9%) and in June 2010 (67.9%). Similarly, fewer young Americans without a college degree have a full-time job now than in June of the previous three years. And as Dr. Rank’s research indicates, unemployment in that age group is the highest of any age group.
According to a Pew study, since 2010, the share of young adults ages 18 to 24 currently employed (54%) has been its lowest since the government began collecting these data in 1948. And the gap in employment between the young and all working-age adults—roughly 15 percentage points—is the widest in recorded history. In addition, young adults employed full time have experienced a greater drop in weekly earnings (down 6%) than any other age group over the past four years.
And what about the white picket fence part of the American dream? Home ownership is becoming less and less attainable to young adults, even in cities with high concentrations of upwardly mobile young people like Washington, DC.
According to the research of William H. Fray from Brookings, while homeownership across all age groups fell by 3 percentage points to 65 percent from 2007 to 2012, the drop-off among adults 25-29 was much larger — more than 6 percentage points, from 40.6 percent to 34.3 percent. Declines in homeownership for those ages 40 and older over in that five-year period were more modest.
The District of Columbia, with its high share of young adults, had the lowest homeownership rate across all age groups at 41.6 percent, followed by New York at 53.9 percent.
Being young puts one in a precarious economic position, but being non-white seems to especially exacerbate the problem. “If you are white, there is a fairly large chance that you will experience economic instability at some point in your life. If you are African-American or Hispanic, this chance now becomes almost a certainty. In the 25-60 bracket of white respondents, a very significant percentage—80%– had experienced one or more economically calamitous events. In the 25-60 age group of non-white respondents, 90% had experienced the same economic insecurity,” Dr. Rank explains.
So what does this all say about the attainability of the American dream? Dr. Rank thinks that concept, while not entirely rendered null, has certainly morphed. “The American dream is no longer about making it big or making a lot of money. Our respondents felt that it now meant leading the kind of life that you want and makes you happy. They also pointed to it being the idea that if you work hard, you should be able earn a decent living and be in a secure economic position. The third component was the importance of having a hope for the future, a certain optimism that one’s children and ensuing generations would fare as well or better.”