Growing Up Wealthy

Wealth and income inequality in the United States have been getting a lot of attention of late. A few months ago, a viral YouTube video showed that the top 1 percent of Americans now control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Earlier this year, a study suggested a link between wealth and longevity: the more money you have, the more years you’re likely to enjoy on earth.

No matter how extreme the inequalities, defenders of plutocracy can always be counted on to offer justifications for the status quo. The upshot of most of these arguments is this: people deserve what they have and it is unfair for the government to take it away. The more talented, the harder working, the more industrious, the more tenacious among us justifiably wind up with millions while others make do with less, or with next to nothing. And the rich-poor gap, its apologists tell us, is good for those at the tail end of the distribution: the lower income brackets will benefit from the industriousness of the wealthy by being employed by them, by enjoying cheaper, better products, by sailing in a tide that lifts all boats. As long as markets are kept open and all are left free to pursue their dreams, every child in America will have a legitimate shot at living a secure and successful life. Or so the story goes.

But sociological research in the past few years has amassed a mountain of countervailing evidence. Yes, some people defy the odds and rise from rags to riches — and others sink from the heights of their noble birth to poverty. But for the most part, your chances of success in life are a function of the circumstances of your birth. So say the editors of a recent book, From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage. As inequalities have grown in the past thirty years, “the differences in the capacities of rich and poor families to invest in their children also have become more unequal.”

 

So some youngsters’ life prospects are bright while fellow citizens of similar or superior talent and motivation are, at best, middling. This is an old story. What’s new is the size of the gap, the degree of influence family wealth has on the life prospects of children. As Sean F. Reardon writes in “No Rich Child Left Behind,” an Opinionator post at the New York Times, college completion rates and test scores are startlingly related to the financial standing of a child’s parents.

So, is there a problem here? 

Is this not the way they have intended it to be from the very beginning?