Intergenerational Mobility Quotes

The idea that America is the best place in the world to start out poor, so long as you are willing to work hard, no longer seems to be true. One way of proving that is to ask how accurately your family's income when you were growing up predicted what your own would be. If the American dream were alive, your family's income would not predict your own that well…. Well, on that measure, America is now less the land of opportunity than France, than Germany, than Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The only other rich economy that the U.S. outscores in this respect is — you guessed it — the UK. Abolish the estate tax and America will be a serious contender for the bottom of the opportunity league.

The children of the unemployed achieve less in school and appear to have reduced long-term earnings prospects.

For most Americans, their primary aspiration is to achieve a better life... To earn a livable wage in a good job. To have the time to spend with family and do the things they enjoy. To be able to retire with security. And to give their own kids a chance to do as well or better than themselves.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.

The No. 1 issue in the Hispanic American community is 'How do I leave my children better off than myself?

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

I would say to you that Americans of Hispanic descent want desperately to give their children the chances they never had.

You have a huge demographic shift that's happening in America. Globally.

Social mobility is much less today in America than it historically has been, and it is almost as low as England, the lowest of the industrial countries of Europe.

Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.

In England, more than in any comparable country, those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor, and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege. For those of us who believe in social justice, this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible.

People move because of the wear and tear of anxiety. Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. Because of the impression that the future is blocked up, that *they* might do all right but not their children. Because of the feeling that nothing will change, that happiness and prosperity are possible only somewhere else.

You know, I think of the global economy as an inverted triangle, resting on the shoulders of the American consumer. And if the American consumer cannot have enough disposable income in order to maintain a standard of living that creates more opportunities generation after generation, that's bad for everybody.

Our parents’ incomes play a larger role in our personal economic fortunes than is true for other peer countries.

An important factor influencing intergenerational mobility and trends in inequality over time is economic opportunity.

When I get out across the country and listen to people, the resentment that I see and the frustration that I see is that we have a generation of people who are fairly convinced that their kids are not going to have a better quality of life or a better future than they will.

The percentage of American 30-year-olds in 1970 who were earning more than their parents had earned at 30? Ninety-two percent. Isn’t that amazing? That, in a nutshell, is what we call the American Dream. And what’s the percentage now? It’s somewhere around 50 percent

I think the Brexit vote in Great Britain informing this populist movement of nationalism is kind of a global thing, and I think it's no particular political party's fault. People have been left behind, and in America, we're used to going forward. It's always like we're going to be better; the next generation's going to be better.

France has the least social mobility of any developed country. The social elevator no longer works. It's broken.

Labour ministers often look puzzled when reports show that Britain has one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world. They just don't get it. They see poverty, inequality, fairness, as all about income. For the past 12 years, they have relied on tax credits to solve this. But tax credits do not solve poverty: they mask it.

I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Canada. I left when I was three. My parents went to Miami, and that's where I grew up.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

America being behind France in upward mobility is a little bit like France being behind America in Croissants and Afternoon Sex.

In America especially, if you're Chinese and you work at a restaurant, there's a certain connotation among the Chinese immigrant community: It's the first generation that opens restaurants as a way to survive. You open to support your family so your kids can become doctors and lawyers.

I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.