So, about those 'diminished levels of upward mobility' ...

I think mass incarceration may neutralize any benefits.

 

And here I thought this was going to be about upward mobility in the newsroom. Mine's stagnant because I was dumb enough to go into this biz. I suspect for a lot of the upper 20, lower 30 crowd, chasing dreams and being anything you want to be has led to underpaying, underwhelming jobs and low mobility.

 

Teenage parenthood too.

 

That's gone way down.

 

Incarcerations, good point; teen parenthood, not exactly something holding black or Hispanic males back. That's just YF's little threadjack binky, I guess.

Also of note, Obama and Ryan and others are talking about the environment of the 2000s and especially post-2008. That's when blue-collar jobs were being reduced and then disappeared in bulk in one fell swoop during the crash. Study appears to go through the 1980s, but every child would have been through the educational system by then.

Will be interesting to track what happens with children of the 1990s and 2000s, I think you'll see a slowing of social mobility as middle-class/lower-class incomes have fallen and those public schools have offered less and less.

 

To keep a little perspective, here's a snapshot of how the quintiles themselves have changed.



And though it doesn't register in terms of upward mobility, the real success story has been those in the Top 1 percent have improved their station.

 

That last graph ends in 2009. The top 1% have done VERY well for themselves in the last four years.

 

Absolutely. The gulf has widened considerably since then.

 

We are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

 

Here is the conclusion to the Times article:

For all the continuity over recent decades, the authors emphasized that parents appeared to cast a longer shadow over their children’s lives, in some ways, than before. As inequality has risen, pushing the rungs on the income ladder further apart than they once were, the average economic penalty of being born poor has grown over time.

“It matters more who your parents are today than it did in the past,” Mr. Chetty said.

That seems to be in direct contradiction to the headline and to the conclusion they are trying to push. It almost makes me think they engineered their reading of statistics to come up with the most attention-grabbing conclusion.

But academics would never do that, so never mind.

 

They explain the criteria. The bottom fifth now (well, at the time of the last available statistics used) has the same chance of moving into the top fifth as previous members of the bottom fifth did.

The portion you cite is in reference to growing inequality, so that those who do remain in the bottom fifth - which is still most - are less well off than those who previously remained in the bottom fifth.

 

I can't see how to read the statement "It matters more who your parents are today than it did in the past" and not take it to mean that social mobility is more limited.