An Education in Class

Thank God The Nation is a privately funded magazine. Otherwise, there would never be articles like this one. The United States is a class-based society? Today in America, one's birth largely determines one's future. We may quibble about the exact threshold over which a nation must pass to be described as a class society, but the latest research on income mobility is startling. As economists Isabel Sawhill and Sara McLanahan state in the fall volume of the journal they edit, The Future of Children, the American ideal of a classless society "is one in which all children have a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they were born." In sum, they write, "the association between one's parents' income and one's own should be small." ... Now, based on new data gathered in the past few years, some economists, led by Bhashkar Mazumder of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, argue that 60 percent of a son's income is determined by the level of income of the father. Read the abstract in this link, if you dont want to read the entire document. It is very telling. You won't read that stuff in a pubicly funded medium.