There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

Professor Alston conducted a similar visit to the United States and several other countries between 2017 and 2019. In the U.S. he noted the roughly thirty million people living in relative poverty. He observed that, unlike other Western and European countries (including the UK after World War II), the United States did not enshrine citizens’ access to health care or housing as a basic right. In an October 2019 interview with the International Bar Association, Professor Alston stated his conclusion that “in terms of social mobility, the sad reality of the ‘Great American Dream’ . . . is that statistically the U.S. is less [socially] mobile than almost any other developed country.” There were so many impediments to moving from a low-income group to another in the U.S.—ranging from poor health and inadequate health care to unequal access to food, limited job opportunities in blighted regions, and the consequences of accidents and sheer bad luck—that it was almost impossible to do it alone.