http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june14/mobility_01-24.html
One of the trends that we have seen, as I just mentioned, is that inequality has increased. And conventional wisdom is that greater inequality might make upward mobility more difficult. One way to picture that is think of the income distribution as a ladder, and the rungs of the ladder or the percentiles of the income distribution, while inequality has been increasing, that means the rungs of the ladder have grown further apart.
And so you might have thought, intuitively, that's going to make it harder for kids to climb up that ladder if they are starting from a low position. That turns out not to have happened. And so perhaps one hypothesis that other things have changed at the same time. Over the past several decades, we have had significant improvements in civil rights, expanded access to higher education, and a number of other anti-poverty efforts that might have offset that detrimental effects of other forces in the economy.
One of the trends that we have seen, as I just mentioned, is that inequality has increased. And conventional wisdom is that greater inequality might make upward mobility more difficult. One way to picture that is think of the income distribution as a ladder, and the rungs of the ladder or the percentiles of the income distribution, while inequality has been increasing, that means the rungs of the ladder have grown further apart.
And so you might have thought, intuitively, that's going to make it harder for kids to climb up that ladder if they are starting from a low position. That turns out not to have happened. And so perhaps one hypothesis that other things have changed at the same time. Over the past several decades, we have had significant improvements in civil rights, expanded access to higher education, and a number of other anti-poverty efforts that might have offset that detrimental effects of other forces in the economy.