Dalton Conley, Rebecca Glauber, Center for American Progress
- Conventional wisdom considers the United States to be a land of equal opportunity where the possibility for upward economic mobility is limitless. With hard work, everyone has a chance to move from rags to riches in a generation. To date, this “American Dream” premise has almost exclusively been tested in terms of income mobility—that is, tested by looking at the extent to which the income of parents compares to the income of their children. Most recently, the Brookings Institution, in their comprehensive report, “Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America,” affirmed previous research that African Americans lose relative income status while whites do not.
Yet the American Dream measured against another metric, inequality in wealth, or what you own rather than what you earn, may reveal a much starker picture of economic
mobility. Our analysis in this paper indicates that inequality in wealth is much greater than income inequality in the United States. This report argues that to fully understand a family’s economic well being and the life chances of its children, we not only must consider income and education but also accumulated wealth.
