Class, race and the chances of outgrowing poverty in America

In late-20th-century music, the elusiveness of the American Dream is a recurring theme. From Stevie Wonder’s ode to a boy “born in hard time Mississippi” in 1973 to Bruce Springsteen’s anthems to the working class in factory-shuttered towns in the 1980s, frustration with people’s inability to outgrow their circumstances is rife. The timing of the peak of that genre is no coincidence: whereas nearly all American children born in 1940 could still expect to do better than their parents, only two in five could by 1984.

Last week J.D. Vance, who was born that year, reprised the theme as he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for vice-president. He promised “all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and every corner of our nation”, to be a vice-president “who never forgets where he came from”.