What your 1st-grade life says about the rest of it -- Washington Post

In 1982, two researchers from Johns Hopkins University began a study on 790 first-graders in Baltimore. Though the study was only intended to be a couple years long, it was extended and extended for 25 years. The study tracked the children each year, examining the course of their lives with respect to their socioeconomic background. This article provides a narrative of the researchers, as well as a few respondents' stories of success.

This quotation from the article provides an interesting synopsis of the study's findings:

A mere 4 percent of the first-graders Alexander and Entwisle [the researchers] had classified as the “urban disadvantaged” had by the end of the study completed the college degree that’s become more valuable than ever in the modern economy. A related reality: Just 33 of 314 had left the low-income socioeconomic status of their parents for the middle class by age 28. ... The families and neighborhoods these children were born into cast a heavy influence over the rest of their lives, from how they fared in the first grade to what they became as grownups.

 The fact that those two things, families and neighborhoods, could have such an obvious impact on the success of a given child is a testimony of the inequalities in both parenting and in regards to the effects of growing up in a certain location within a city.

It is important to note, though, that the article is framed in terms of hope for getting out of the cycle of poverty. The stories here are all of children who were disadvantaged, but managed to succeed. While those are certainly the more uplifting, idealistic stories, they are the outliers. The bulk of the low-income children did not wind up living the "American dream," as we would like to believe, and therein lies the problem. We need to find a solution to help the children who were destined not to succeed right from the beginning of their lives.


Read the full article here: What your 1st-grade life says about the rest of it

Why talk about inequality?

Inequality is rampant in today's society. In fact, it has been rampant for centuries. But why should we bother to write about it?

Americans like to think and talk about the "American Dream" -- the idealized notion that anyone can have money and a house and a stable life if they are willing to work hard to achieve it. That is not possible in all cases, though. Most kids have the same chances as their parents did to achieve upward mobility, according to a study led by Raj Chetty of Harvard. The odds of moving up on the income scale have not gotten any better over the last 50 years.

As cited by the Washington Post, the average wealth in the United States is between $250,000 and $300,000. However, median wealth in the US, which is not susceptible to outliers, is only $45,000. There are a lot of rich people in the US, but there are even more people who are poor. These are the people who are striving to be upwardly mobile, but something is stopping them.

In his article The Intergenerational Transmission of Context, Patrick Sharkey discusses upward mobility. On average, it takes seven generations for a family who is earning 50% of the median income to work their way up to median income, as demonstrated in Sharkey's graph below.

Seven generations is not the American Dream. Seven generations is the effect of social structures that don't allow for upward mobility or equality of opportunity.

This is why we need to talk about inequality. Something is preventing people from being upwardly mobile, and we need to change that if we want to have a fair society.