As I noted the other day, Greg Mankiw (pdf), in his defense of the one percent, seems oddly oblivious, among other things, to the extent to which America has changed since he was young. We are a much more unequal society now, and as a consequence arguably one with a lot less intergenerational mobility too.

I argued this impressionistically — but it turns out that Miles Corak has a paper for the same volume making the argument with lots of evidence. For example, here’s data on “enrichment expenditures”, defined as “the amount of money families spend per child on books, computers, high-quality child care, summer camps, private schooling, and other things that promote the capabilities of their children”:

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Not only do the affluent spend much more on their children, but the gap has grown a lot since Greg and I were young. Maybe all that spending is wasted — but I doubt it. We have become both a more unequal society and a society with more unequal opportunities.

There’s a lot more in the Corak paper, by the way. I was especially struck by the comparison of mobility in the US and Canada. I wasn’t surprised that America has less mobility, and certainly not that in America it’s hard to escape the bottom decile. But it turns out that in America it’s also much easier to stay in the top decile — hardly the image of a meritocractic society, unless you believe that America’s top decile is genetically superior to Canada’s.

Anyway, we are not the society we once were — and baby boomers should realize that.