Interesting article by Jason DeParle in the New York Times entitled, Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs.
On average, the U.S. is still doing o.k. in terms of absolute wealth when compared to other countries because, as a country, we are wealthier. In terms of social mobility, our poor stay poor and our rich stay rich. The middle class is fairly fluid. The stability of who is rich might have something to do with the magnitude of the wealth — it’s harder to fall from such heights and harder to climb them as well. Whereas in a country where the gap between rich and poor is more compressed, it might take less money to cross into or out of the top percentiles. The stability of the poor is more troublesome and might have something to do with how thin the safety net is. Our poor kids tend to start lower and further behind than those in Western Europe and Canada.
You’re missing the eugenic aspect of this phenomenon. We are on a path that was predicted 20 years ago in “The Bell Curve”.
When you’ve got “assortive mating”, where college grads marry college grads, and poor people… well, you know what they do, or don’t do… you are creating stratifications in society based on intelligence and other factors (willingness to work, respect for authority, I cold probably come up with many more).
Liberals are quick to look at the benefits that wealth bring to the rich, but never want to look at who the rich are, where they came from, and what behavioral factors they have that they WILL transfer genetically to their children.
And they certainly don’t want to look at these same factors that drive poverty.
It seems to me that, if anything, “assortive mating” and behavior based social stratification is increasing. Expect the class structure and its offshoots like inequality to increase as a result.
To the extent these traits are being passed along from parents to children, I doubt the vector is genetic. Probably more of a behavioral teaching/modeling kind of thing.
Doug, I think that twin studies show that you are wrong (studies of twins separated at birth). They most certainly are heritable.
But even if you are correct, what would that prove? That there are upper class values that you can follow to be successful?
I’m sure you similarly have a deep abiding concern about the relative disparity in leisure time. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2007/03/the_theory_of_the_leisure_class.html
It’s definitely a subject of interest to me. In 2010 Germany, it looks like poor people are time strapped (pdf).
An interesting page on the historical hours of work in the U.S. — generally getting shorter over time. Dramatic drop, not surprisingly, for slaves once they were free. Turns out the legal right to stealing labor from people makes you want them to work longer hours.
Of course, not all work is created equal – closing a deal on a golf course isn’t quite the same as assembly line drudgery, for example. Work spent at trial is generally far more entertaining than researching a brief. I’m not sure how you control for that kind of thing.
One thing I’ve noticed for myself is that, after a busy stretch at work, once I do get a good block of time off, I don’t really have much idea how to spend it. It takes me a little while to become reacquainted with non-work activities of interest.
There is good evidence that rich people are folks who care more about making money. (DUH!).
a study of “people who had started their higher education in elite schools” hardly demonstrates that there is economic mobility in this country, as people who attend “elite schools” tend to be upper-middle to upper class in the first place.
I think that it does. You had people who were “elite” by way of schooling, but their interest in money (and, ultimately, how hard they worked as a result) were what determined their ultimate financial status.
People like Doug think that the children of the rich have advantages from being rich, and certainly going to an elite school is one of those advantages. Even so, it was how hard they worked that determined if they became richer than their peers. Simply wanting more money was the motivation.
See, I don’t think folks like George W. Bush are outliers — I think he’s an illustration. Policy preferences completely aside on this one, he went to the best schools because of his family. He got appointed to boards where he made big money because of his family. So, yeah, I think connections are a big factor in whether the same individual makes significant money or ends up middle management somewhere.
I don’t doubt that there are opportunities for connections at Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School. That’s certainly what they are selling.
But I think the point of that study is that, even graduates from schools like that experience a diversity of results. Nobody gets where Dubya did unless there is hard work involved.
Reading his book, he says that he floundered until he got serious about being successful.
Here are two for you, Doug:
Even movie stars prefer spouses with similar levels of education to their own.
Another paper showing how “assortive mating” is what is really driving inequality.
You know, Doug, you being the educated husband of an educated wife, I DEMAND that you get a divorce and marry an uneducated welfare mother, in the name of decreasing inequality.
I know this might be “out of context”, but “serious about being sucessful”?
Not “serious about working hard”?
That just cracks me up. Apparently, “working hard” and “being sucessful” were mutally exclusive concepts for ole Dubya.
If “Dubya” got one single thing on the basis of his own hard work or intelligence, I’d… oh wait, he did get to be a collegiate cheerleader, so he must have gone above and beyond to hone his awesome megaphone skills. Sorry.
at best, that study proves that if you’re already rich and are determined to become richer, you can. (note that it doesn’t say that those who were less determined didn’t remain rich.) and it definitely does not say that if you start out poor, you have any chance of ever becoming rich.
Mary –
Yeah, someone like that could never learn to do something like pilot a jet fighter, or get better grades than Al Gore.