And yet, as Prof. Matthew O. Jackson of Stanford observes in his compelling new book, “The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs and Behaviors,” the data demonstrates that “many people’s perceptions of mobility and reality are mismatched.”

Professor Jackson points out that 84 percent of Americans answer in the affirmative when asked whether they agree with the statement “If I work hard, I can improve my life.” But the United States ranks toward the very bottom of the scale of something called “intergenerational earnings elasticity,” a measure of how tied your future financial potential is to how rich your parents are. It is probably not unexpected that Denmark does better than we do on this measure of social mobility, but a child born in Pakistan has a better chance of escaping from poverty than one brought up here. Closer to home, by this measure, the United States “has more than double the immobility of Canada.”

Interestingly, across national geographies, inequality and immobility are quite tightly correlated. But correlation is not causation, and, as Professor Jackson convincingly shows, simplistic and expensive proposals to reduce inequality like a guaranteed minimum income are unlikely to make a meaningful dent in immobility.

But why can’t money buy you mobility? “The Human Network” is most fascinating and convincing in addressing this question. Professor Jackson has been studying how networks operate for over a quarter-century. In particular, he has focused on the implications that stem from “the general tendency of people to interact with others who are similar to themselves.” He shows that “the entrenched networks of information and norms” that underpin this inclination are the primary force behind immobility. Inequality, he concludes, can be viewed “as a result and not as the root cause.”

One study Professor Jackson highlights demonstrates how money alone will not solve immobility. In the 1990s, selected public housing residents were provided with two different kinds of free rent vouchers: those that could be used anywhere, and those that could be used only in low-poverty neighborhoods. The positive impact on the lives of the children in the latter group was powerful in terms of whether they went to college, which one they attended and their income level. Many of those with the unrestricted vouchers decided to stay put and just reduce their rent bill. The data shows this strategy to have imposed a significant cost to their children’s financial future.