Chpater 10 of the CQ Reader addresses questions of Wealth and Inequality (some such issues I addressed in my response to Chapters 9&11). A commonly heard idea is that life in America today is determined by a “lottery of birth,” meaning that those who are born into privilege are given a disproportionate chance at success when compared to the majority of the public not endowed with wealthy ancestry. The discussion in this chapter, namely in the section “Are parental background and inheritance becoming more important for success?” ran counter to many of the ideas that I had before reading about social and economic mobility in the country.

One reason that America has been heralded as a great nation is that there exists the possibility of upward mobility. Feasibility of realizing the “American Dream” made the United States more equitable than Western European nations, wherein wealth followed a crushing inheritance system, and inequality was assured with rigid class structure. Or so the story goes. It was my belief going into this reading that the United States was perhaps more equitable, but not nearly so permissive as the myth would suggest. In fact, contrary to systems in countries like Britain, where education and rigid de facto class separations serve to administer inequality, in the United States wealth disparity is (I believe) historically related to racial divides and ensuing systemic inequality. Though inheritance and concentration of wealth among the few is an important factor, so too is the inability to garner resources enough to move into a higher income bracket. Piketty claims that, “Wealth, inherited or not, is a huge advantage in becoming even wealthier,” and I tend to agree. Without resources to advance oneself in critical ways—such as getting an education and moving into more “desirable” areas—it is hard to imagine that someone can make it out from the bottom of the American economic system. I will not pretend to know what the solution to combatting this problem is. Perhaps taking a look at the systems implemented in other countries, like Sweden, as mentioned in the chapter, would be beneficial in policy development in the future. Questions of distribution of wealth, independent from income (such as tax and welfare benefits) is a characteristically touchy subject in the United States, but is increasingly important in a time where, “the top 1 percent owns about half of all global wealth and the bottom half less than five percent.”

The chapter brings up the fact that the stagnation of upwards mobility is a falsehood, citing statistics from Harvard economist Raj Chetty who found that, “upward mobility in the United States has not slowed and is actually similar to its level a generation ago.” Though perhaps this is true, to me it begs the question of what kind of nation the United States is attempting to be. Upward mobility a generation ago was at a high of 9%, and if the study is to be believed, then ~9% is where we remain today. The poorest members of our society are thus overwhelmingly condemned by statistics to remain in the underclass—is this the American way? It seems odd to me that discussion of income inequality is a debate of statistics when there is the glaring, underlying issue that the systems in place tend often to promote, if not a lottery of birth, at least a card game in which some are dealt a full hand, while others must fold.