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Dad's income a predictor of his kids'
A young boy rides on his father's shoulders in New York City.
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Sarah Gardner: Attention, procrastinating offspring. It's may be too late to mail off your Father's Day cards if you want to get them to Dad before his special day on Sunday. And while you're counting all the things you have to thank him for, Krissy Clark from our Wealth and Poverty Desk has one more for the list.
Krissy Clark: Rachel Salinas just popped in to a drugstore in downtown L.A. to find a card for her dad.
Rachel Salinas: Very dad-like. Nuts and bolts and screws making out the name "Dad."
As for what to write inside? Salinas says she'll thank her dad for the intangible stuff.
Salinas: Values and strength and wisdom and the desire to achieve greatness.
But there's also something very tangible our dads pass on to us, according to Erin Currier at Pew's Economic Mobility Project. And she doesn't mean our noses.
Erin Currier: For those of you who feel that you are economically secure, you probably do have your fathers to thank for that.
Currier has calculated that about 60 percent of Americans whose fathers’ incomes were in the top fifth, stay in the top two-fifths themselves. And the same is true at the bottom. About 65 percent of those from the bottom fifth don't make it past the bottom two-fifths by the time they're adults. In other words?
Currier: Those who are born at the bottom of income distribution are the most likely to remain at the bottom, and those who start at the top are highly likely to stay at the top.
Miles Corak is an economist at the University of Ottawa. He's compared the U.S. to other rich countries, and found that Americans have less mobility across generations than Canada, Australia, and most of Europe.
Miles Corak: It does brush up against a vision that Americans hold of themselves where talents and energies determine outcomes.
The good news is that Americans are still likely to make more money than their dads. They're just not as likely to move to a different rung on the class ladder.
I'm Krissy Clark for Marketplace.
Valid points as far as they go, but they do not acknowledge the softer influence of "expectations." Anyone who has managed a variety of people knows that there are those who seem to be programmed as victims - they won't get ahead because circumstances are against them, whether they didn't go to the right school, didn't go to college, they're the "wrong" race, gender, orientation - there is always an excuse for those who are taught to make them. That is not to say that there are not harder challenges for some than others - life is not always fair, as we know - but I think victims are taught to accept their own devaluation, whereas others are confident that they can prevail. Fortune favors the positive thinker. They may not make it into the top fifth in one generation, but they can move forward. Likewise, "victims" fall further. As with many things, it is partly nature and partly nurture.
This is just a guess but I think this has a lot to do with what college you get into. The top tier get the best education but even more important they network and make friends with other people in the top tiers. They hear about and get invited to apply for the best jobs. This applies down the line. You hear from your college buddies try here. With maybe a name drop you get the job. The problem with the bottom tier is they may be smart but their K-12 schools may not have been very good and they have a harder time getting into and paying for college.
I think we are moving back to the time when the rich went to University to find out who would be a good employee or business partner and who is the rich idiot.
