Being poor in America really sucks

11-18-2011

By Kevin Drum/Mother Jones

There's voluminous evidence demonstrating that income inequality has skyrocketed in the United States over the past few decades and is now higher than in virtually every other developed country. This might not be all that bad if income mobility had also increased, but a number of recent studies have shown just the opposite: at best, mobility is no better than it's ever been, and it might actually have decreased a bit. Generally speaking, the rich are a lot richer than they used to be, and unless you start in an upper middle class family to begin with, the odds of ever joining the ranks of the rich have gone down. But why? The Pew Economic Mobility Project gives us a clue today. The chart on the right compares four big English-speaking countries on a single measure: vocabulary test scores of five-year-olds. You'd expect that children of highly educated parents would do well and children of poorly educated parents would do badly. And you'd be right. (more...)

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