Is Success Inherited or Learned?

By EmmaZahn on Sun, 03/16/2014 - 12:32pm |

There are two routes to success. It comes easy to those whom were borne of it, they already know how to get along and they’re surrounded by positive role models and key connections their whole lives. But success can also be learned and what it takes to get there can be earned. Despite all the handwringing over America’s recent lack of social mobility, I still believe that where there’s a will, there’s a way. It might just be that it’s harder now.

And it is a fact that it is harder than ever to fall out of the upper echelon. If upward mobility is hard, downward mobility is nearly impossible. I think this is what actually underlies so much class resentment these days – the fact that a regular person cannot miss a beat but a spoiled screw-up kid will seemingly never run out of chances or fail to find a net beneath him.

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http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2014/03/16/is-success-inherited-or-learned/

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Some months ago, there was a lot of buzz--mostly on the right, I think--about studies showing that the ease or rate of upward mobility hadn't changed as was commonly said by folks on the left. It was something like that.

The problem with these conclusions--again fuzzy and from memory--was that, even if true, the starting differential between the super wealthy and everyone else was much greater. You could still climb the ladder, but it was much higher than before.

Probably have a bunch of this wrong, but it was something like this.

by Peter Schwartz on Sun, 03/16/2014 - 9:09pm

RAJ CHETTY: That's exactly right, Jeff.

So, the way to think about that is because the rungs of the ladder are further apart, to go back to the analogy I was just using, who your parents are, if you happen to be by chance born to parents at the bottom of that ladder vs. the top of the ladder, that is more consequential today than it was in the past, precisely because the ladder is now expanded.

So if you are born to parents who happen to be at the 20th percentile, instead of the 80th percentile, that is a much bigger gap today than it was 30 or 40 years ago. And so the consequences of the fact that we have relatively low levels of mobility in the U.S. are much more serious today than they were in the past. And so we should be more concerned about the fact that mobility is quite low today.http://www.netnebraska.org/node/896159

by Peter Schwartz on Sun, 03/16/2014 - 9:14pm

Is Success Inherited or Learned?

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