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unhinged
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'although most kids born into the poorest fifth of american families will make it to a greater income level as adults, nearly four in ten will not. even those who manage to improve their status economically don't improve it by much: sixty percent of persons born into the poorest fifth will remain in the lower two-fifths as adults, meaning that at most they will move from poor or near-poor to lower middle class. only one in ten will make it into the top fifth of earners. on the other end of the spectrum, nearly a third of all persons born into the top quintile will remain there, and about six in ten will remain in the top two quintiles - in other words, the upper middle class at least - while only one in ten will fall from the top to the bottom. for those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, only 0.2 percent will climb to the top one percent of earners (meaning hard work doesn't make you rich) while about eighty-three percent of those who started at the top one percent will manage to remain at least in the top ten percent as adults. so while some will go from rags to riches or riches to rags, the influence of parental status on one's own status is strong. poor families are ten times more likely to remain poor than to move into the highest income quintile, and those who start out rich are five times more likely to remain there as to fall into either of the lower two quintiles of earners. as for wealth, research that examined families from the 1980s through 2003, discovered that about three-fourths of the responsibility for where an individual ends up in terms of wealth is explained by the wealth of one's parents.' - tim wise
meritocracy my ass
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181003
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