There were a lot of pedigree shout-outs Tuesday night in the State of the Union address and the responses, generally in reference to humble beginnings.
From President Obama:
It’s how the daughter of a factory worker is C.E.O. of America’s largest automaker â€" (applause) â€" how the son of a barkeeper is speaker of the House â€" (cheers, applause) â€" how the son of a single mom can be president of the greatest nation on earth.
And later on:
And this son of a factory worker just found out he’s going to college this fall.
Then from the Republican reply of Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers:
My dad drove a school bus and my mom worked as a part-time bookkeeper.
So frequent were these genealogical citations that when Mr. Obama mentioned “Mad Men,†Jacob Weisberg of Slate tweeted:
These are moving, memorable examples of people who rose above the station they were born to. But part of the reason these examples are so impressive is that they happen so rarely. And in the future, they might become rarer still.
Recent research from economists at Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Treasury Department (as reported in an article by my colleague David Leonhardt) looked at intergenerational economic mobility across the country. It found that while there have been modest gains in absolute living standards, the likelihood of someone escaping the socioeconomic class that person were born into has remained stagnant.
Children of single parents seem especially unlikely to climb the income class ladder, as are children who grow up with married parents but still live among a lot of single-parent families. (One of the best ways to escape the economic fate of one’s low-earning parents, meanwhile, is to go to college.)
The authors note that the interaction between stagnant mobility and increasing inequality means your parents’ earnings have especially big consequences for your own economic future:
Although rank-based measures of mobility remained stable, income inequality increased substantially over the period we study. Hence, the consequences of the “birth lottery†â€" the parents to whom a child is born â€" are larger today than in the past. A useful visual analogy … is to envision the income distribution as a ladder, with each percentile representing a different rung. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children’s chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed (rank-based mobility has remained stable).
In other words, it has actually become increasingly impressive over time for the son of a barkeep or single mother or school bus driver â€" or other parent likely to have low earnings â€" to rise to a highly paid position like head of state, executive or legislator.
Addendum: A few months ago, Pew’s Economic Mobility Project developed an interactive tool that allows you to see the chances of surpassing your parents’ income and socioeconomic class, based on family structure and other demographics like race. Definitely worth checking out.
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