So first, the good news: The notion that income inequality has caused harm in America has finally broken into the hubs of elite opinion. The sort of socio-political tastemaker who not so long ago denied the problem, has moved on to dissembling about it instead. That’s progress, of a sort.

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 Reeves Brookings Institution Press, 240 pp., $24.00

Dream Hoarders, a book by Brookings senior fellow Richard Reeves, is the latest entry into the debate. Reeves accepts that the United States has become a land of vast economic divides. But having established some common ground with the Occupy Wall Street worldview, he steers the conversation in a direction any plutocrat would love—away from Wall Street, CEOs and the owners of capital. The real problem, Reeves tell us, lies with the upper-middle class.

Reeves’s argument is seductive because it starts with some understated truths. He’s right to say that the top fifth wields a disproportionate amount of political muscle, and benefits from a bevy of tax breaks, subsidies and privileges that undergird what he calls a “glass floor” beneath them. Tax shelters, such as the mortgage interest deduction, offer savings to the rich, while zoning restrictions bar poorer families from the neighborhoods where the upper-middle class clusters. This group is also embedded in social networks that open a backdoor to success, whether through legacy admissions to selective colleges or parental connections that lead to an internship. All of these mechanisms quietly and effectively transfer wealth and power from one generation to the next.



But Reeves is less worried that only a small portion of people enjoy such affluence. In fact, Reeves seems broadly untroubled by inequality, per se. His priority in Dream Hoarders isn’t combatting inequality but improving “relative mobility”: the process by which someone can move up in economic rank, even if that means bumping someone else down a notch. “Downward mobility is not a wildly popular idea, to say the least,” he writes. “But it is a stubborn mathematical fact that, at any given time, the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population.” That may be true, but it’s not a “stubborn mathematical fact” that only 20 percent of the income distribution should be able to afford comfortable, prosperous lives.

Reeves underlines his point by making clear that he’s uninterested in the kind of social democratic policies that foster greater equality in European countries like Sweden and Finland. “America’s problem is not that we are failing to live up to Danish egalitarian standards,” he writes. “It is that we are failing to live up to American egalitarian standards, based on fair market competition.” The main challenge, he stresses, is to “narrow gaps in human capital formation” so that the “contests” people compete in will be truly fair. “The problem is not that society is too competitive,” Reeves informs us. “It is that it is not competitive enough.” Society has grown unfair, he surmises, partly because the upper-middle class is engaging in “anticompetitive ‘opportunity hoarding.’”