Elisabeth Jacobs and Liz Hipple: Are Today’s Inequalities Limiting Tomorrow’s Opportunities?: "An individual’s place on the economic distribution is supposed to reflect individual effort and talent, not parental resources and privilege. Yet this perspective ignores the mounting evidence of the myriad ways that poverty and economic inequality foreclose equality of opportunity...
...Miles Corak found that in countries where inequality is high... there is a strong relationship between a parent and a child’s economic outcomes. Conversely, in countries where inequality is lower such as Norway and Denmark, the relationship between a parent and child’s economic outcomes was not as strong.... Raj Chetty found that mobility varied dramatically across the United States and that high inequality was one of the factors correlated with low mobility.... Relative (or rank) mobility compares a child’s rank in the economic distribution to the child’s parents’ place in the distribution at a similar point in the life cycle.... Absolute mobility compares a child’s economic well-being to his parents’ economic well-being at a similar point in the life cycle.... A number of studies find that relative mobility has remained fairly stable—and low—in the United States over recent decades, Harvard’s Chetty and his co-authors have found that absolute mobility has declined since 1940.... Structural changes to the labor market, persistent discrimination, and the importance of parental financial resources in young adulthood prevent the full and effective deployment of human potential....
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