Unequal Chances : Family Background and Economic Success

by Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert; Melissa, Osborne Groves

• ISBN13: 9781400835492
• ISBN10: 1400835496
• Copyright: 2008-01-03
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Is the United States "the land of equal opportunity" or is the playing field tilted in favor of those whose parents are wealthy, well educated, and white? If family background is important in getting ahead, why? And if the processes that transmit economic status from parent to child are unfair, could public policy address the problem? Unequal Chances provides new answers to these questions by leading economists, sociologists, biologists, behavioral geneticists, and philosophers. New estimates show that intergenerational inequality in the United States is far greater than was previously thought. Moreover, while the inheritance of wealth and the better schooling typically enjoyed by the children of the well-to-do contribute to this process, these two standard explanations fail to explain the extent of intergenerational status transmission. The genetic inheritance of IQ is even less important. Instead, parent-offspring similarities in personality and behavior may play an important role. Race contributes to the process, and the intergenerational mobility patterns of African Americans and European Americans differ substantially. Following the editors' introduction are chapters by Greg Duncan, Ariel Kalil, Susan E. Mayer, Robin Tepper, and Monique R. Payne; Bhashkar Mazumder; David J. Harding, Christopher Jencks, Leonard M. Lopoo, and Susan E. Mayer; Anders Bjouml;rklund, Markus Jauml;ntti, and Gary Solon; Tom Hertz; John C. Loehlin; Melissa Osborne Groves; Marcus W. Feldman, Shuzhuo Li, Nan Li, Shripad Tuljapurkar, and Xiaoyi Jin; and Adam Swift.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
The Apple Does Not Fall Far from the Tree	p. 23
The Apple Falls Even Closer to the Tree than We Thought: New and Revised Estimates of the Intergenerational Inheritance of Earnings	p. 80
The Changing Effect of Family Background on the Incomes of American Adults	p. 100
Influences of Nature and Nurture on Earnings Variation: A Report on a Study of Various Sibling Types in Sweden	p. 145
Rags, Riches, and Race: The Intergenerational Economic Mobility of Black and White Families in the United States	p. 165
Resemblance in Personality and Attitudes between Parents and Their Children: Genetic and Environmental Contributions	p. 192
Personality and the Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Status	p. 208
Son Preference, Marriage, and Intergenerational Transfer in Rural China	p. 232
Justice, Luck, and the Family: The Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Advantage from a Normative Perspective	p. 256
References	p. 277
Index	p. 297
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