Every day for 40 years, Bill McGill caught the 34 bus before sunrise. Reared on a north Mississippi tenant farm, rising at 4.30am was second nature. Besides, clerking at a Memphis dry goods wholesaler was lightyears better than hoeing cotton, like he did as a boy on the farm. But when McGill woke up on Monday, 20 December 1982, things were different. On that cool, sunny winter day, the 65-year-old donned a tie and fedora and drove his prized lemon-white Ford LTD into downtown Ashland — with his nine-year-old grandson in tow. I know this because that kid was me, and I still remember our task: a final mortgage payment on my grandfather’s American Dream at the First Tennessee National Bank.
In one generation, then, my grandfather went from a tenant farmer’s shack to a craftsman bungalow. Nor, of course, was he alone. Across the 20th century, such intergenerational leaps in class were commonplace. In 1950, 60% of American men (and 55% of women) experienced some form of upward mobility. This was once the American Dream — asymptotically achieved. On a graph, an asymptotic line moves ever closer to its axis. Dr Prasad Senesi, a mathematician, explained this concept to me. Senesi told me, in mathematics, “we are asymptotically approaching an ideal”. But, asymptotic can also mean in everyday life “incremental growth”, or as he told me “every day you are a little bit better than the day before”.
In 1982, when my grandfather retired, he earned $11,000 ($36,000 in today’s money). For decades, he and my grandmother scrimped and saved towards middle-class security. They owned a home, sent a child to college, and saved for retirement. Theirs was an asymptotic route to the middle class. Yet in 2025, my grandfather’s asymptotic path is no more. Nine-tenths of American children born in 1940 would, as adults, earn more in real dollars than their parents. That number falls to 50% for kids born in 1980. These days, my grandfather’s path takes an average of 4.5 generations. Social mobility in modern America is harder than at any time since 1850 — and this trend holds across the Western world. Those born poor remain so, while the upper class maintain their station. Yet, the gap is most distinct in America: fewer than 10% of low-income children rise to become top 25% earners.
This story of class stratification, long blighting the less educated, is now slamming into white-collar professionals. As one University of Pennsylvania sociologist has found, only “a few professions” — jurists, scientists, engineers — have remained stable in their status and income since the 1850s. A globalised, hyper-capitalist economy demands ever-more specialised talents to reach and then maintain financial security.
In today’s winner-take-all culture, Richard Florida’s “clustering forces”, or when the creative classes flock to knowledge-economy metropoles, are now pricing the white collar out of their American Dream. Home prices, the key indicator of living standards, now average $1.39 million in America’s “superstar cities”. Since 2000, median home prices have nearly tripled everywhere else. The problem of a model where there are “those who create and those who serve them” is that the number of the former grows smaller while the latter spirals upward — this is my grandfather’s asymptotic path in reverse.
Today, nearly 40% of Americans hold a college degree. In this cognitive arms race, the winners are those with advanced degrees in increasingly esoteric, technical arenas. In generations past, Senesi’s 2007 dissertation — “Finite Dimensional Representations of the Twisted Loop Algebras” — would have translated swiftly into middle-class stability. But the Gen Xer took a rather more twisted path.
A PhD in mathematics from the University of California-Riverside led to a post-doc at the University of Ottawa, then finally a tenure-track gig at the Catholic University of America in. When that tenure arrived, nearly 15 years after he’d begun college, Senesi first thought he’d made it. Soon enough, though, doubts burrowed in. “Life was a grind,” he tells me. “I loved thinking about beautiful things. But I asked myself at what cost to my wife, kids, and family? They have dreams too.”
Senesi’s own American Dream began at the end of a five-mile dirt road in Tecumseh, Missouri. In 1975, his countercultural white parents adopted Hindu names and left Los Angeles for affordable quietude in the hardscrabble Ozarks. Rocket fuel for his imagination, Senesi wallowed in the mountains, describing its pitch-black skies and what he calls the “cacophonic symphony” of bugs.
The family grooved to the remoteness, albeit in different ways. While his mum practised Eastern meditation, Senesi himself used the silence to reflect on the cosmos. “I would walk in the woods for two hours,” he says. “Accidentally, I had this ability to think deeply about simple things.” Fascinated by the stars, Senesi joked, he went to college for astronomy, before moving on to chemistry and “bottoming out” in maths.
In graduate school, he fell for Thao-Nhi, an officemate and fellow mathematician. The daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, she had emigrated to the US at 17. The pair bonded over their shared love for maths — and asymptotic philosophy. As he explains, that means aiming for “low, incremental growth towards a platonic ideal” rather than trying to rush from “alpha to omega” in one fell swoop.
But Senesi came of age when the old post-war certainties were crumbling away, and when success was now much harder than his asymptotic graphs implied. Certainly, that was clear in the mathematician’s chosen field of academia. In the creative class mecca that is Washington D.C., median home prices soared from $68,000 in 1980 to $426,000 in 2024. The married professors struggled to afford a 1,500 square foot fixer-upper. To make this liveable for his two kids and mother-in-law, Seneisi remodelled every inch and stud of his dank, dark “Temple of Doom” basement filled with cobwebs and assorted varmints. “I studied to take the electricians exam to get certified to rewire it,” he recalls. “The home went from 1,500 square feet to 2,500 square feet. But it consumed our lives.”
Nor were things much easier at the office. To “think deeply about simple things” came at the cost of two-hour commutes, zero family vacations, constant home repairs, and nagging guilt when splurging for the rare dinner out. Finally, Senesi was forced to admit being both a tenured professor and a family man was impossible. He isn’t wrong. In 1992, after all, the National Science Foundation estimated American universities needed 800 math PhDs annually. Today, nearly 2,000 Math PhDs graduate each and every year. Of course, gruelling competition is great for innovation and economic growth — but it’s not a formula for human happiness.
My grandfather’s world of asymptotic progress is no more. Even those with advanced degrees experience what is, at best, oscillatory progress. High-paying jobs and entire economic sectors are reshaped or undone by technological innovation, causing midcareer reinventions. The creative destructive forces of market capitalism catalyse enormous leaps in GDP and long-run “progress”, but we simple, fallible humans are wired for the short-run. The mental and emotional turmoil stirred by the unknown and uncertainty is the tinderbox for Right-wing populism’s fire.
“My grandfather’s world of asymptotic progress is no more.”
Senesi, like so many educated professionals, therefore performed a mid-career pivot. Like the oversupply of math PhDs, professional reinvention catalyses dynamism and innovation, but oscillatory progress exacts a toll. “I need my brothers and sisters to carry me along,” he explains of his new career in cybersecurity. “25-year-old me would not have understood the fundamental importance of community. As I grew older, I realised how much I needed a community of support. The best math is done in the same space, where spontaneous, low-level conversations occur. This is the fine thread that holds this experience together.”
Truth be told, every human is a “team guy”. Dr Justin Callais, the chief economist with the Archbridge Institute, a D.C. think tank, told me that Senesi’s “fine thread” is utterly crucial for human thriving and social mobility. What Callais calls “community bonding” is more crucial as you move down the income ladder. For those at the bottom, social connections across class lines are the secret sauce of social mobility. In this, Callais is merely building upon the work of sociological giants, James Coleman and Raj Chetty. In the Sixties, Coleman found that poor kids who attended schools with middle-class kids, emulated their norms and behaviours. Today, Professor Chetty claims that cross-class friendships boost social mobility “more than anything else”. To him, sustained exposure to a middle class milieu is not about a job offer, rather it, “shapes your aspirations. It shapes the things that you think about, the career paths you think about pursuing.”
Chetty’s findings are confirmed in my grandfather’s hometown of Ashland, Mississippi where social mobility has all but disappeared. Bill Stone has witnessed the fine thread of Ashland’s community unravelling under the weight of economic forces. “I don’t know how young people afford to live,” the former state senator and two-term Ashland mayor tells me. “$35,000 homes are now $75,000. Investors are buying up all the homes. Rent, too, is rising. Two-bedroom homes that once cost $300 a month now set you back three times that.
Spiralling costs hit community bonds hard in a county where the median income is just $24,800, something Stone has witnessed first hand. When he ran for the state senate, back in 2008, he would campaign at little country stores where folks would hang out. “But,” he says, “they’ve all died: both the stores and the people.” The results are clear right across the region’s civic life. A generation ago, community leaders built water and natural gas systems, which were rare for small towns in a poor state. Today, the local churches are shuttering and the rural fire departments are understaffed. Stone sighed and admitted, “Our biggest challenges [today] are the divisions in the community, there is no sense of community.”
Sure, stable working-class incomes, unions, and the like matter greatly. The demise of those makes social mobility harder than in my grandfather’s era. But making what is difficult into the Herculean is the collapse of community and cross-class connections under the weight of economic forces. Today, the poor are born in that station — and stay there.
Eight miles separated my grandfather’s home from the First Tennessee National Bank. During that December morning drive, I wonder if he thought of his old plow mules, or the distance he had traversed from his farmer’s shack to that day. But my grandfather was always present in the moment, focused on the things that mattered most to him. His asymptotic life gave him an inner peace to think deeply about simple things.
