The following are brief excerpts of a startling find in Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence (another must read). Start on LOC 580 on the Kindle in Chapter 2 (who does page numbers anymore?). I'm going to type the most important fact in all caps because it blew my fucking mind:
"Most of what we know about long-term income-mobility trends in the US during the previous half century comes from the University of Michigan's Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal study of more than nine thousand families from across the continental United States begun in 1968. PSID is the world's longest running "panel survey" of nationally representative households."
"PSID's snapshot was absolutely clear in one respect: it enabled scholars to discover that they had previously underestimated, to a significant degree, the extent to which, in the words of Gary Solon, "income status is transmitted from one generation to the next."
"In 1992, Solon wrote a paper on income heritability (IH), using PSID data, to show previous estimates of 20% IH to be low. He found that it was 40% or higher."
"In 2001, Bhashkar Mazmuder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child income over a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like 50-60%."
"HE FOUND THE NOTIONAL HERITABILITY OF INCOME TO APPROXIMATE THE LITERAL HERITABILITY OF HEIGHT. Most strikingly, Mazmuder found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than height and weight."
"I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass index."
Horatio Alger can kiss my ass.
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