Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams http://www.amazon.com/Limbo-Blue-Collar-Roots-White-Collar-D...
EDIT to add: $25.52 for a Kindle book (Ain't No Makin' It)?! So the people who would be interested in perhaps reading it are screened out from affording it. Insanity.
What's your basis for claiming that? It doesn't jibe with available data. See:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/011110-51...
or
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/dangerous-dema...
or
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents...
Quote:
The key findings of this study include:
There was considerable income mobility of individuals
in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period
as over half of taxpayers moved to a different income
quintile over this period.
Roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom
income quintile in 1996 moved
up to a higher income group by 2005.
Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 – the
top 1/100 of 1 percent –
only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005.
Moreover, the median real income of
these taxpayers declined over this period.
The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged
from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).
Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most
taxpayers over the period from 1996 to 2005. Median
incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after
adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds
of all taxpayers increased over this period. In
addition, the median incomes of those initially in the
lower income groups increased more than the median
incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.For some reason, you cherry picked the one study that looked at all incomes in one of the most prosperous periods in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the... does a good job of summarizing a number of studies that show that the US ranks as one of the least socially mobile countries in the world.
No one is arguing that people make the same amount their entire career. That's not what social mobility is. The fact is, the US has one of the lowest levels of intergenerational social mobility, and that exceptions to the rule are held up as evidence of The American Dream in action. It's not impossible to end up better off than your parents (in relative inflation adjusted terms), but that's the exception, and it's usually due much more to luck than hard work. Millions of americans work hard and end up exactly where their parents were.
The fact is, most people end up in the same socioeconomic class as their parents. There are exceptions to the rule, but upward social mobility happens so infrequently in the US, that it's perfectly reasonable to model that as almost never happening. It's not impossible, it just almost never happens. The bigger problem is that the few counterexamples are used as anecdotal evidence to say "if everyone else would have just tried as hard, they'd be better off too". That's simply not true.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. But you seem determined to intentionally misinterpret what I'm saying, and this conversation isn't doing anything to benefit me, so I'm bowing out.
It's a fair assumption to say that bright kids from "tough backgrounds" are less likely to succeed. That's not on an individual level, but on a national level it's certainly true. For most, these are kids who saw their parents work hard and get nowhere. That's a special kind of demotivation that's difficult to shake by the time college rolls around. It's also why there's almost no upward social mobility in the US.