We have a lot less mobility at the top and the bottom of the ladder. People who are born, for example, into a middle income family have about an equal shot at either moving up on the economic ladder or moving down. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a fair amount of opportunity. “What our research is showing is that there is less intergenerational mobility or opportunity to achieve the American dream than many people believe in the U.S. So, I think right now, given that these inequalities, these gaps between the rich and the poor are larger than they have been for many years, it’s a particularly timely point at which to assess how many opportunities people actually have.
So even though the rewards for success and the penalties for failure in the economy are now very large, as long as everyone has fair shot at those rewards people are reasonably tolerant of inequality. This has been less troubling to many people than it might otherwise be, because of their belief that we have a lot of opportunity. “We have had, for a number of decades now, growing inequalities in income and wealth in the United States. Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America, by Ron Haskins, Julia Isaacs and Isabel Sawhill Isabel Sawhill, co-director of the Center on Children and Families and co-author of Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America examines how upwardly mobile we really are. Research shows that more and more young, middle class families are struggling to reach the levels of economic success that their parents enjoyed. Economic inequality across American households has been growing for a number of years.