Richard V. Reeves and Katherine Guyot, Brookings
One of the most striking social science findings of recent years is that only half of today’s 30-year-olds earn more than their parents. Raj Chetty and his coauthors showed that rates of absolute mobility—that is, the share of children with higher inflation-adjusted incomes than their parents—declined from around 90 percent for children born in 1940 to just 50 percent for those born in 1984. For many people, mobility does consist of doing better than your parents did, in absolute terms. This seems to have become steadily harder to achieve for those born into middle-class families in particular from 1950 onward. The challenge is to learn from these historical trends in order to secure a better future for the middle class.
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