Issue The gap between rich and poor Introduction What do you want to be when you grow up? A journalist for The Economist newspaper wrote an article about how the job that you end up doing could be influenced by what job your parents do, and even by what your grandparents and more distant ancestors did. 1. Get interested If you were trying to create a perfect society, you would probably decide that the most hardworking or competent people would get the most exciting and well-paid jobs. But we do not live in a perfect world. Sometimes, the job that someone is able to get is not just down to how hard he or she works or how skilled he or she is. Strangely, sometimes the jobs that people end up with are affected by what jobs their parents do. Many people think that s unfair, because after all you can t help who your parents are or what they do. Why should some people get the most highly paid jobs simply because they were lucky enough to have well paid parents? Fair or not, researchers have proved that the jobs your parents have could affect the job that you do when you grow up. In fact, some people have wondered whether this effect runs even deeper: are people more likely to get well-paid jobs if their grandparents, or their greatgrandparents, or even their great, great, great-grandparents had well-paid jobs? The problem with trying to work out whether that s true, is you need to work out the connection between people who lived a very long time ago and their descendants today. You need to do some really clever detective work to find out how things in the past affect the present. And the best clue, it turns out, is your surname.
2. An example article about this issue Here is an article written by an Economist journalist about this issue. On the left, we have shown how the article was written, so you can see how to write a good article yourself. Do you agree with the journalist s opinions? The link between wealth and family background The gap that exists between rich people and poor people in Britain has been getting bigger and bigger. The 26,000 best-paid people in Britain, which is about the same number of people as fit in a small football stadium, earn more than half a million pounds a year. That means they have more than 20,000 pounds to spend each month. But there are almost seven million people in the country who only earn 10,000 pounds a year. That s a really big difference. First the journalist explains what the article is about. This gap in wealth is something that lots of people think is unfair. What makes people really angry is the idea that some richer people might not deserve to make as much money as they do: perhaps they are successful because of the advantages they start off with in life, like the school they went to for example, not because they worked hard or are really good at something. One unfair advantage that people wonder about is family background; how much does being rich or poor depend on the family that you're born into? People in universities are spending a lot of time trying to work out just how much someone s family background affects how wealthy they become. One way to work that out is to look at how much people earn and compare it to how much their parents earn. When researchers did this, they found that people whose parents have highly paid jobs are more likely to end up with highly paid jobs themselves. Next the journalist explains the topic of the article in more detail. An American researcher called Gregory Clark wondered whether that effect went even further back. Could your chances of career success be affected not just by your parents, but by their parents, and by their parents parents? That sounds odd, doesn t it? It seems weird that someone you never met who may have died long before cars were invented, let alone iphones could have an effect on you. But that s what Mr Clark wanted to find out. The problem was how to work out whether this connection between people s jobs and their ancestors jobs existed. Mr Clark had to think a bit like a detective, using clues to answer his question. He couldn t just interview people from the same family: he wanted to go back hundreds of years, so most of the people he was interested in were already dead. Looking at historical records like death certificates was his only choice.
What he did was look for rare surnames. When you are looking at lots and lots of names in a list, it is easier to spot someone with an unusual surname like Micklethwait than someone with a common surname like Smith. Then he looked to see whether people with these unusual surnames popped up in good jobs or bad ones across the centuries. What he found was that people from the same families don t tend to move up and down a lot as the years pass. If someone who was alive in 1800 was in a highly respected position, then his descendants are likely to be in a good job today. Mr Clark found that this sort of effect can last for anywhere from 300 to 500 years. So maybe you should start digging into your own history, by looking at websites like Ancestry.co.uk, to find out what people from your family did in the past. It may matter more than you think! The journalist s opinion: I think Mr. Clark s research helps to show that the gap between rich and poor people is unfair. If a person s family background has a significant impact on whether they end up wealthy, that shows that it s hard to control whether you end up rich or poor as it s partly affected by things that you can t do anything about (like the family you are born into). It s not fair that some people should be much poorer than others partly for reasons they can t control. The journalist finishes his article by giving opinions. Because it's unfair for something people can t choose to influence how their lives turn out, the government should do more to stop people s family backgrounds from affecting the jobs they are able to get. One way to do that is to look at the advantages that a child gets from having a rich family (like being able to go to an excellent, expensive school) and make sure that poor children get the same opportunities to even things out (for example by making sure that free schools are just as good as the expensive ones). That should help make sure everyone has the same chance of getting the best jobs, regardless of how wealthy their family is. Do you agree?
3. Work out your opinion Here are two different points of view on one of the issues in the article. Which do you agree with? It doesn t matter if there is a big gap between rich and poor The important thing in a society is not the gap between rich and poor, but whether everyone is getting richer. Even if the gap is getting bigger, what really counts is whether people s lives are getting better. Some of the differences between rich and poor are down to advantages that people have as children. But not all of them. It is still possible for talented people to get to the top in whatever field they choose. Even if you think the gap between rich and poor is a problem, reducing it is difficult. You could tax rich people more (make them give more of their money to the government), but then they will just leave the country, which doesn t help anyone. It does matter if there is a big gap between rich and poor Gaps between rich and poor do not reflect people s skills, they reflect advantages they have been handed on a plate. That is unfair. There are lots of hidden problems caused by gaps between rich and poor. There is evidence that people in countries that are more unequal have worse health problems, for example. It may be hard to solve problems of inequality but it is certainly not impossible. Countries in Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland) have a smaller gap between rich and poor than Britain, for example, so they must be doing something right.
4. The article from The Economist newspaper Here is the grown-up version of the article, which was published in The Economist newspaper in 2013. Nomencracy Surnames offer depressing clues to the extent of social mobility over generations THE Great Gatsby curve is the name Alan Krueger, an economic adviser to Barack Obama, gave to the relationship between income inequality and social mobility across the generations. Mr Krueger used the phrase in a 2012 speech to describe the work of Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa, who has shown that more unequal economies tend to have less fluid societies. Mr Corak reckons that in some places, like America and Britain, around 50% of income differences in one generation are attributable to differences in the previous generation (in more egalitarian Scandinavia, the number is less than 30%). Even that may paint too rosy a picture. Mr Corak s work draws on recent studies that compare income levels between just two generations: fathers and sons. That is out of necessity; good data covering three or more generations are scarce. But reliance on limited data could lead to overestimates of social mobility. Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis, notes that across a single generation some children of rich parents are bound to suffer random episodes of bad luck. Others will choose low-pay jobs for idiosyncratic reasons, like a wish to do charitable work. Such statistical noise makes society look more changeable than it is. Extrapolating the resulting mobility rates across many generations gives a misleadingly sunny view of long-term equality of opportunity. Mr Clark suggests that family history has large effects that persist for much greater spans of time. Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300-500 years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum. Mr Clark confronts the lack of good data by gleaning information from rare surnames. You can tease mobility trends from surnames in two ways. One method relies on past links between certain names and high economic status. In a 2012 paper, for instance, Mr Clark examines prosperous Swedes. The unusual surnames of 17th-century aristocrats and the Latinised surnames (such as Linnaeus) adopted by highly educated 18th-century Swedes are both rare in the Swedish population as a whole. By tracking the overrepresentation of those names in elite positions, he is able to work out long-run mobility rates.
As late as 2011 aristocratic surnames appear among the ranks of lawyers, considered for this purpose a high-status position, at a frequency almost six times that of their occurrence in the population as a whole. Mr Clark reckons that even in famously mobile Sweden, some 70-80% of a family s social status is transmitted from generation to generation across a span of centuries. Other economists use similar techniques to reveal comparable immobility in societies from 19th-century Spain to post-qing-dynasty China. Inherited advantage is detectable for a very long time. A second method relies on the chance overrepresentation of rare surnames in high- or lowstatus groups at some point in the past. If very few Britons are called Micklethwait, for example, and people with that name were disproportionately wealthy in 1800, then you can gauge long-run mobility by studying how long it takes the Micklethwait name to lose its wealth-predicting power. In a paper written by Mr Clark and Neil Cummins of Queens College, City University of New York, the authors use data from probate records of 19th-century estates to classify rare surnames into different wealth categories. They then use similar data to see how common each surname is in these categories in subsequent years. Again, some 70-80% of economic advantage seems to be transmitted from generation to generation. Mr Clark s conclusion is that the underlying rate of social mobility is both low and surprisingly constant across countries and eras: the introduction of universal secondary education scarcely affects intergenerational mobility rates in Britain, for example. This consistency, he suggests, shows that low mobility may be down to differences in underlying social competence. Such competence is potentially heritable and is reinforced by the human tendency to mate with partners of similar traits and ability. Bob s your uncle, unfortunately This is a distressingly fatalistic view of opportunity. Studies using the few multi-generation datasets that exist offer a slightly more encouraging picture. A Swedish analysis of the city of Malmo, using data covering individual families over four generations, finds a meaningful relationship between a child s educational attainment and that of his great-grandparents, more evidence that a look at just one generation leads to overestimates of mobility. By subjecting the same data to a surname analysis, Mr Clark calculates that 60% of income differences in Malmo are attributable to economic advantages in previous ones lower than his own rate but still higher than Mr Corak s single-generation estimates. Painstaking work by Jason Long of Wheaton College and Joseph Ferrie of Northwestern University provides another perspective. They have spent the past decade poring over census returns from America and Britain, identifying families with children in one count, tracking down the same children as adults in another, and thereby building up a multigenerational dataset. An analysis of three generations shows that in both America and Britain the effect of high (or low) incomes in one generation lasts for at least two more. Yet their study also suggests it is possible to break patterns of immobility. Although American and British mobility rates had converged by the middle of the 20th century, America s social order was
considerably more fluid than Britain s in the 19th century. The past has a tight grip on the present. But in the right circumstances, it can apparently be loosened.