Stephanie Mencimer presents the results of a 30-year study showing that most poor kids end up as poor adults:
Of the nearly 800 school kids [Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander has] been following for 30 years, those who got a better start—because their parents were working or married—tended to stay better off, while the more disadvantaged stayed poor.
Out of the original 800 public school children he started with, 33 moved from low-income birth family to a high-income bracket by the time they neared 30. Alexander found that education, rather than giving kids a fighting chance at a better life, simply preserved privilege across generations. Only 4 percent of the low-income kids he met in 1982 had college degrees when he interviewed them at age 28, whereas 45 percent of the kids from higher-income backgrounds did.
Perhaps more striking in his findings was the role of race in upward mobility. Alexander found that among men who drop out of high school, the employment differences between white and black men was truly staggering. At age 22, 89 percent of the white subjects who’d dropped of high school were working, compared with 40 percent of the black dropouts.
This study isn’t particularly new or surprising. In a post last month taking rich conservatives to task for professing sympathy for poor children but not poor adults, Matt Bruenig reminded them that the entrenchment of class status across generations is well established in social research:
Not all poor kids wind up as poor adults obviously, but you can’t seriously look at these aggregate figures and not see pretty straightforward life-cycle class continuities. If poor children are sympathetic for some reason owing to unluck, then it’s hard to understand why poor adults seem to elicit so much disdain and disparagement when it’s clear that the unluck of being born poor doesn’t disappear at age 18.
Perusing another new study of wages, Neil Irwin discusses how the link between economic growth and poverty reduction fell apart sometime in the mid-1970s:
[I]f you adjust for the higher number of hours worked, over the 1979 to 2007 period (selected to avoid the effects of the steep recession that began in 2008), hourly pay for the bottom 20 percent of households rose only 3.2 percent. Total, not per year. In other words, in nearly three decades, these lower-income workers saw no meaningful gain in what they were paid for an hour of labor. Their overall inflation-adjusted income rose a bit, but mainly because they put in more hours of work.
Recent Dish on the stagnation of socio-economic mobility here.
The Dish 