Kevin Drum: Being Smart Isn’t Always Enough to Make it in America

Kevin Drum: Being Smart Isn’t Always Enough to Make it in America:

Via James Pethokoukis, here’s an interesting tidbit of income mobility data from a new Brookings report by Richard Reeves and Kerry Searle Grannis…. If you have high cognitive ability, you have a 24 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult. That’s not too bad. But if you come from a high-income family, you have a 45 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult. Same smarts, different outcome…. Better schools, more extracurricular opportunities, different skin color, bigger networks of connected friends, higher odds of going to college, and the simple ability to get in the door all give richer kids a huge leg up…

And, of course, this has significant costs not just for those whose upward mobility is blocked but for everybody else as well. Chang-Tai Hsieh et al. find that between one-fifth and one-sixth of all American economic growth since 1960 is driven by the fact that the race- and sex-discrimination gates keeping the right people from getting the jobs were reduced.