Today, nearly half of American children born to parents with low incomes grow into adults with low incomes, and 40 percent of children born to wealthy parents become high-income adults. In the United States, which has based much of its social safety net on educational mobility, the ability to do better than one’s parents by completing more years of schooling did indeed rise between 1947 and 1977, but it has decreased sharply since. [...]
Upward mobility has always been the exception to the rule — children born to families in the bottom income quintile have about a 6 percent chance of making it to the top income quintile in their lifetimes — but unfortunately it is a fantasy on which United States welfare programs are now based. Never has pulling oneself up by one ’s bootstraps been more plainly a cruel action than when prescribed as a policy regime for large swaths of the population. [...]
Using data from tax records, economist Thomas Piketty shows that both capital income and earned income have grown for the richest families to the extent that in the America of 2010, like the Gilded Age Europe of 1910, the top 1 percent owns the same share of income as the bottom 50 percent, and the top 10 percent own the same share as the bottom 90 percent. [...]
The difference between Dickensian England and the present-day United States is that few rich people recognize that they have won the birth lottery. Instead, as political scientist John Gerring has noted, “poverty” is ascertained as a national crisis, a disease. [...]
Wealthy parents have the luxury of time to impart knowledge essential to understanding science and social studies to their children beginning in early childhood through exposure to travel, museums, and even simple excursions like going to the supermarket or the post office. [...]
Childhood has been reconceived, not as a time to compensate for the alienated labor of adult life, but a time to prepare for adult life. The rapidly intensifying stratification not just among the rich and poor in America, but even among those within the top 1 percent (the top 0.01 percent have gained more than the rest of the top 1 percent, which has concrete consequences in rich and middle-class parents’ perceptions and behavior toward their children), means that rich and middle-class families accurately perceive the cultivation of their children, the constant search for the competitive edge, as essential to ensuring their children access as adults to the knowledge professions rather than offshored and devalued vocational work.
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