#intergenerational mobility

A Look at Intergenerational Mobility for Colleges in California

The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility

This chart shows that your parents’ income determines your future

And this is worse in the USA than most industrialized coutries due to it's high level of income inequality.

Children raised in low-income American families will likely also have very low incomes as adults, while children raised in high-income families can anticipate a much bigger jump in income, according to a report — “Economic Mobility in the United States” — released Thursday by researchers at Stanford University. It was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., and the Russell Sage Foundation, a nonprofit research center in New York City that focuses on social sciences.

And the wage gap for people from different backgrounds is significant: The expected income of people raised in well-off families in the 90th percentile — that is, the top 90% of the national median household income — is about 200% larger than the expected income of children raised in poor families (in the 10th percentile) and about 75% larger than that of children raised in middle-class families (in the 50th percentile). What’s more, people raised in middle-class families will earn close to double what children from lower-income families earn in adulthood.

“We have this notion in America of equality of opportunity and where you start shouldn’t influence on where you end up,” says Erin Currier, director of Pew’s financial security and mobility project. “This data shows that that does not translate to reality. A family’s economic circumstances play an exceptionally large part in determining a child’s economic prospects later in life. Families and kids raised at the bottom are least likely to attend preschool, high school, and attend and complete college, or have any savings to help their children. They get into this vicious cycle.”

Intergenerational mobility in 1 chart

Poor artists are usually from richer families than affluent doctorshttp://t.co/znBwFebs1c pic.twitter.com/1PQeBmONgL

— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) November 18, 2014

"While the imagined prospect of upward mobility for those in the lower part of the income distribution shares little in common with the generational dynamics of the top 1 percent, the latter may well continue to be an important touchstone for those in, say, the top fifth of the US income distribution ... For them the “American Dream” lives on, and as a result they are likely not predisposed, with their considerable political and cultural influence, to support the recasting of American public policy to meet its most pressing need, the upward mobility of those at the bottom."

"The summer issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives will feature a collection of articles on inequality and the top 1%, some of which are now being circulated by the authors. The paper by Tony Atkinson and his coauthors, “The top 1 percent in international and historical perspective,” is available in this post, and Greg Mankiw has posted a copy of his paper, “Defending the One Percent“, on his blog. My contribution to the collection is based on the notion that the inequality literature has paid little attention to the intergenerational consequences of increasing top 1%Here is the close to final draft: Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility. But if you just want a quick read, an excerpt from the conclusion follows. Either way, feedback is—as always—welcomed.' [Miles Corak]

Economics for Public Policy, June 18, 2013: Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility, by Miles Corak