Via The Dish: Evidence that upward mobility - the chance that people can rise in income from one generation to the next - is declining. Something to consider as we begin to consider social welfare policy:
Americans love to believe that anyone can get ahead, that they can
build a better life than their parents had, simply by working hard
enough. The evidence suggests, however, that this is less and less the
case. Just working hard will no longer suffice, especially for Americans
who haven’t been born with wealth or particular talents. More and more,
education has become the key to moving up—from poverty into the middle
class, from the middle class into affluence—or to holding onto the
middle-class lifestyle in which one was raised.
There is also growing—though still nascent—evidence that from one
American generation to the next, mobility is declining. It’s getting
harder, that is, to work your way into a higher income level than the
one into which you were born. A son’s adult income in the United States
is about half dictated by how much his father made, a percentage that is
nearly as high as in any country in wealth-by-birthright Europe,
according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
In Europe, family connections and the circumstances of one’s birth are
considered crucial determinants of success, a consequence of the
entrenched aristocracies in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent,
Italy and France.
This is far from the up-by-the-bootstraps, Horatio Algeresque
self-image that most Americans hold dear. In the United States,
immobility is a way of life, especially for the very rich and the very
poor. Brookings Institution economist Isabel Sawhill estimates that 40
percent of children born into the topmost or bottom income quintile
won’t budge as adults from where they began. Katharine Bradbury, a
senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, agrees. “Most of
the long-term poor are stuck at the bottom; most of the long-term rich
have a strong grip on the top; and each of these two groups is somewhat
more entrenched than the corresponding groups 20 years earlier,” she
concluded in a research paper last spring.
