Susan Stokes
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Susan Stokes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That is, if you live in a place where the gaps are really, really large and you're sort of on the bottom of...
you're going to view your chances of ascending as perhaps less plausible than in a country where the gaps aren't so large and there's more possibility of upward mobility.
The possibilities we have, you know, stories of rags to riches and we have a kind of national self-image as a place where people can work hard and make their way up.
But in fact, income class mobility or social economic strata mobility in the United States is not very good.
We actually have a country in which it's not that easy to, even if you work very hard and save and do all the right things, you often will be set back by things like medical debt or bad luck of some kind to where all that hard work is for naught.
So it's the source of a great deal of frustration now.
You know, the political world can channel that frustration in different directions.
And one of the things that we see, and this is a longstanding aspect of American political culture, is we have politicians who direct our frustration at the lack of upward mobility or competition for jobs at certain groups, ethnic minorities, racial minorities, immigrants.
where instead of their pushing for maybe a more equitable kind of tax burden, a more progressive tax system, they can be people who would benefit from such a system, their kind of attention can be directed toward
a kind of anti-immigrant sentiment or resentment against racial minorities, or it's been well documented in this country that there's a fair amount of resentment against a sort of mythical idea of a woman who's upwardly mobile because she's had access to education that others haven't had.
So our young people face enormous challenges.
I have three sons myself, and I know how it looks to them.
They're facing uncertain job market.
There's a lot of uncertainty about the impact of AI on the structure of the labor markets.
There's a lot of uncertainty about climate change and the impact that it may be having.
And of course, the economy and the threat of inflation, which is something that we're
Americans didn't face very seriously until after the pandemic.
Inflation was something that we didn't struggle with for several decades.
So it's a very uncertain time.
And I think what we see is that young people have different reactions to these uncertainties.
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