![]() ![]() ![]() In a society with equal opportunity, every person would have a 20% chance of landing on each of the five rungs and hence a 60% chance of landing on the middle rung or a higher one. Think of the income distribution as a ladder with five rungs, with each rung representing a fifth of the population. To assess equality of opportunity among people from different family backgrounds, we look at relative intergenerational mobility - a person’s position on the income ladder relative to her or his parents’ position. It isn’t ironclad proof, but it’s the best we can do. If we find that a particular group fares worse than others, we suspect a barrier to opportunity. There is no straightforward way to measure opportunity, so social scientists tend to infer from outcomes, such as employment or earnings. ![]() How does the US compare to other rich democratic countries?įAMILY BACKGROUND AND UNEQUAL OPPORTUNITY.Family background and unequal opportunity.Americans growing up in less advantaged homes have far less opportunity than their counterparts from better-off families, and this opportunity gap hasn’t narrowed in recent decades. When we turn to family background, however, the news is disappointing. 4 The gap between whites and nonwhites has narrowed as well, albeit less dramatically. Today, women are more likely to graduate from college than men and are catching up in employment and earnings. One of the country’s major successes in the past half century has been its progress in reducing obstacles to opportunity stemming from gender and race. There’s more than a grain of truth in this sentiment. On the night of his election in 2008, Barack Obama, the country’s first African American president, began his victory speech by saying “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible … tonight is your answer.” This view became especially prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the economy was shifting from farming to industry and Horatio Alger was churning out rags-to-riches tales. That, in turn, would move us closer to equal opportunity, even if full equality of opportunity isn’t attainable.Īmericans have tended to believe that ours is a country in which opportunity is plentiful. 2 Pursuing that goal requires providing greater-than-average help to those with less advantageous circumstances or conditions. We should aim, in Amartya Sen’s helpful formulation, to maximize people’s capability to choose, act, and accomplish. What we really want is for each person to have the most opportunity possible. Moreover, if parents knew everyone would end up with the same skills and abilities at the end of childhood, they would have little incentive to invest effort and money in their children’s development, and that would result in a lower absolute level of capabilities for everyone. In fact, if we think about it carefully, few of us truly want equal opportunity, as it would require massive intervention in home life and probably also genetic engineering. Society can’t fully equalize, offset, or compensate for these influences. Our capabilities are shaped by genetics, developments in utero, parents, siblings, peers, teachers, preachers, sports coaches, tutors, neighborhoods, and a slew of chance events and occurrences. Equal opportunity requires that each person has equivalent skills, abilities, knowledge, and noncognitive traits upon reaching adulthood, and that’s impossible to achieve. Yet true equality of opportunity is unattainable. Data source: Pew Research Center, Trends in American Values: 1987-2012, p. The chart shows the share choosing agree completely or agree mostly, with don’t know responses excluded. Five response options: agree completely, agree mostly, disagree mostly, disagree completely, don’t know. Agree our society should do what is necessary to make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to succeedĮstimated share of US adults. ![]()
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