In the past several decades, income inequality in the United States has increased dramatically. Over the same period, year-to-year variation in individual incomes—or income volatility—has increased more modestly, while Americans’ economic mobility—movements up or down the economic ladder—has changed little.
Inequality and equality can take many forms: equality of opportunity is desirable, but equality of outcomes (like money income) might not be, if the inequality motivates entrepreneurial activity and hard work that benefit society as a whole. Some advocate focusing not on income inequality but on poverty.
On the other hand, the greatest increases in inequality have come at the top, with implications for policy and politics, as most of the country’s resources are concentrated in fewer hands. Tax policy, asset-building policy, and policies directly affecting low-income working families are among the most salient levers.
Post-War Growth in U.S. Income Inequality
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Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking Up from the American Dream (Research Report)
Gregory Acs
A middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime. A third of Americans raised in the middle class (between the 30th and 70th percentiles of the income distribution) fall out of the middle as adults. Marital status, education, test scores and drug use have a strong influence on whether a middle-class child loses economic ground as an adult. Race is a factor only for men. There is a gender gap in downward mobility from the middle, but it is driven entirely by a disparity between white men and white women.
A Detailed Picture of Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital (Research Report)
Austin Nichols, Melissa Favreault
Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we consider how parental education relates to four outcomes in the children's generation: education, lifetime earnings, health, and wealth. By focusing on parents' and children's ranks, we characterize relative mobility in terms of distributions of outcomes and can see patterns that even a relatively disaggregated analysis, like a quintile-based transition matrix, can obscure. Our results show relatively high intergenerational mobility except at extremes, where very low-ranked parents are much more likely to have very low-ranked children and very high-ranked parents are much more likely to have very high-ranked children.
Rising Tides and Retirement: The Aggregate and Distributional Effects of Differential Wage Growth on Social Security (Research Report)
Melissa Favreault
Recent growth in wage inequality has important implications for Social Security solvency and benefit distributions. Because only earnings below the taxable maximum are subject to payroll taxes, concentrated wage growth among higher earners generates less revenue than more evenly distributed growth. Social Security's progressive benefit formula increases benefit payouts when shares of workers with low wages grow. We use a dynamic microsimulation model to examine aggregate and distributional consequences of alternative scenarios about future wage growth. We find that relatively modest changes in assumptions about wage differentials generate marked changes in projected Social Security benefits, poverty, and long-term financing status.
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