On social inequality

a 1979 Carnegie study ("Small Futures: Children, Inequality, and the Limits of Liberal Reform", Richard de Lone principal investigator) found that a child's future to be largely determined by social status, not brains.

Consider Bobby and Jimmy, two second-graders, who both pay attention in the classroom, do well, and have nearly identical I.Q.s. Yet Bobby is the son of a successful lawyer; Jimmy's works infrequently as custodial assistant. Despite their similarities, the difference in the circumstances to which they were born makes it 27 times more likely that Bobby will get a job that by time he is in late 40s will pay him an income in the top tenth of all incomes in this country. Jimmy had about one chance in eight of earning even a median income.

Now, more than two and one-half decades later, the projected inequality of fates of Bobby and Jimmy's second grade successors is even greater. For a variety of reasons to be here explored, inequality in the United States has increased to the extent that the gap between the rich and poor is larger now than at any point in the past 75 years--greater than that of any industrialized nation (see Edward N. Wolff's 1995 Top Heavy: A Study of Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America, Twentieth Century Fund, and his "The Rich Get Richer: And Why the Poor Don't").

Federal Reserve figures for 1989 found the wealthiest 1 percent of American households (with net worth of at least $2.3 million each) owning nearly 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and the top 20 percent of American households (worth $180,000 or more) own more than 80 percent.

In 1974, when income inequality was at its lowest point, the top 10 percent of U.S. households had incomes 31 times that of the poorest 10 percent and four times greater than median-income households.

Twenty years later, these numbers had inflated to 55 times the poorest and six times the median.