In the highly thought-provoking The Death of Horatio Alger economist and scourge of the Bush administration “Paul Krugman”:http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/ has found unlikely support for his concern about the increasing stratification of US society in Business Week. The original “Business Week article”:http://www.everyvoice.net/blogs/kevin/archives/000046.html has been copied into someone else’s weblog since BW only provides the current week’s issue online for free.
A recent survey cited in the BW article found sons from the bottom three-quarters of the socioeconomic scale were significantly less likely to move up in the 1990s than in the 1970s – for example among those whose fathers were in the bottom income quartile, only 10 percent were in the top quarter in 1998 compared to 23 percent in 1973.
There’s (a lot) more discussion about equality of opportunity and equality of outcome at “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001040.html (which is where I found this link originally).
