If you’re suffering from Ice Bucket Challenge fatigue, here’s another video worth watching: the dying American dream, perfectly illustrated in Lego bricks.

The expanding wealth gap in America has been well-documented in the years since the recession. Data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the wealthiest households in the U.S. were worth nearly 40 times as much as the poorest households in 2005, accounting for both debts and assets. By 2011, they were worth 87 times as much.

As troubling as that seems, the three-minute video posted by Richard Reeves, an economist with the Brookings Institute, he captures an even more pressing concern — the startling difficulty that the country’s poorest households have at ever working their way up the income ladder.

“We can have a long argument about the gap between the rich and the poor,” Reeves says. “But I think we can all agree that we don’t want to live in a society where where you’re born determines so strongly your chances in life of where you end up.”

Here are some of the highlights (see the data behind the video here):

One out of every three children born into a poor household — defined as a dual-income family earning less than $31,500 — in the U.S. will remain stuck in poverty. They have a less than 20% shot at making it to the middle class, and only one in 10 will make it to the top rung of the income ladder.

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Black Americans start out with even a bigger disadvantage. A mere 3% of black children born into poor households will make it to the top, while more than half will be stuck in poverty.

View photos Source: Brookings Institute More

For white Americans, the outlook is significantly brighter.

View photos Source: Brookings Institute More

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