I read a philosophical paper on the topic of two conceptions of social mobility once. I wish I could find it, since it was very good.
The two metaphors were something like this:
Imagine ten prisoners in a prison with ten locked doors. They each have a key to unlock their door, but in doing so will prevent anyone else from being able to unlock their door. Are these people free to leave the cell?
The paper then discussed two ways of answering the question. One answer is yes: each person has the ability to leave the cell. The other is no: since they can't all leave, most have to stay, that in fact, they're not free to leave. Conservatives tend to agree with the former, liberals the latter, and it's an obvious metaphor for how people view social mobility.
Of course, both conceptions are true, they're just different ways of attacking the problem. Fortunately, this sort of wishy-washy, fantasy land philosophical debate can be tested with real data. And this is where I think the conservative side of the argument begins falling apart. Yes, there is socioeconomic mobility. Yes, people do change class. Yes, sometimes individual efforts pay off. No, that's not an effective or reasonable way to create policy for an entire group, nor can you do anything about racial or gendered disparities that way. In other words, it closes the book on trying to achieve any moral goals.
But I brought up data: is America socioeconomically mobile? It certainly is to some extent. However, it's also much poorer than nearly all other developed nations. It's also getting worse, it's getting less mobile.
You see, the kind of analysis presented is one that's treated as though the economic world is in a vacuum. It's not. Maybe the
reason people are a bit more skeptical of individualist, work yourself to success philosophy is it's demonstrably less and less possible to do so. But articles like this take the blame and place it all on a few students at universities. Maybe there are much,
much deeper causal explanations for why people feel this way than some random shift in universities.
It's like the author sees someone with a cold and tells them: the problem is that you keep spasming your chest muscles to violently exhale air. Stop spasming your muscles and you won't have the problem anymore.
His critique felt very tired and unoriginal, I've heard most of those critiques before. Stuff
like this seems more interesting, as it attempts to contextualize and understand college campuses on a deeper level. This actually breeds insight, instead of being a bunch of empty quips repeating the stories he's been reading since 2006 about conservative fears: which they are fears more than they are realities.