Labor Day might as well be called American Dream Day. It’s a useful time to assess the state of American workers: are they better off than they were a year ago? A decade ago? Are they optimistic or pessimistic about their futures?

And the answer is always complicated, contradictory and, like everything else, politically divisive. Unemployment is down. But the average number of weekly hours worked is also down. Real wages, adjusted for inflation, have been stagnant for lower-income workers for years, while highly paid workers have seen their incomes grow steadily year by year.

That we know.

But American Dream discussion isn’t just about numbers, though. It’s really about social mobility. In other words, is it as easy as it used to be for Americans to move “up the ladder” based upon their skills, persistence and hard work?

On the surface, the answer may seem obvious: Why would so many people be willing to risk everything to come here? Mexican workers will make painful and dangerous treks across the desert to reach what they perceive to be a land of opportunity. Haitians will board leaky boats, cross ocean expanses and swim to shore just for the chance to live and work here.

And, for many immigrants, the social mobility is almost instantaneous, at least compared to the third-world living standard they left behind.

But, is this still a land of opportunity for most native-born Americans? Can they indeed climb that ladder to a better life?

The statistics don’t provide much comfort. Today, The Economist magazine tells us, the American Dream isn’t strictly American. The rate of upward mobility is about the same in France, Germany, The Netherlands and Britain and other industrialized countries as it is in the United States.

Yet, 40 percent of Americans tell opinion pollsters that they have either attained or will attain a position in the top 10 percent of U.S. earners. Optimism seems alive and well. Yet an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released last week found that 71 percent of Americans feel the U.S. economy is on the wrong track.

Conservative columnist David Brooks has written perceptively about what he says has become a “crystalline meritocracy.” The word “meritocracy” does have a nice ring to it, implying that people get what they deserve.

But, it is, Brooks writes, a mixed blessing. In an increasingly complex, information-age economy the children of lawyers tend to become lawyers, and the children of doctors tend to become doctors.

Not literally, of course. The most reliable constant in our society is that the sons and daughters of highly compensated individuals become highly compensated individuals themselves. High family income is the chief indicator of future high family income.

Education is the entry key to the meritocracy, writes Brooks. And, successful education requires three things: family, stability and encouragement. And those are not common in neighborhoods where more boys go to prison that college, where father figures are absent, where poverty is chronic, where crime and fear are pervasive and where schools are substandard and underfunded.

Clearly, in America, children do not compete on anything resembling a level playing field.

As Brooks writes, “Now, the upper class doesn’t so much oppress the lower class. It just outperforms it generation after generation.”

Where children do not grow up in loving, stable, secure homes that stress educational achievement and opportunities for growth, they are less able to compete in school and college. When that happens, in the crystalline meritocracy of America, they too often end up without skills, without education, working in dead-end jobs for bottom-of-the-barrel wages.

Yes, the American Dream is alive and well this Labor Day. But we kid ourselves if we think it is equally available to all.