) - Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension,
and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television,
the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming
toWednesday Nite @ the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you
Professor Timothy Smeeding.
He was born in South Buffalo, New York,
went to Canisius High School, which is a Jesuit school.
It's the same school that Tim Russert went to, he tells me.
He can tell you more about that.
And then he graduated from Canisius College
and then got his PhD here
at UW-Madison in 1975 in economics.
He then spent time on the faculty at Bowdoin, Stan--
- [Tim] Bowdoin. - I blew it.
Bowdoin, Stanford, Utah, Vanderbilt,
and the Maxwell School of Public Policy
at Syracuse University before coming back
to the University of Wisconsin.
Tonight, he's going to talk about one of the great things
in mathematics and public policy: inequality.
Remember, this is the land of the free and the home of the brave,
and we aspire to great equal opportunity in this country.
One of the tough things, I think, about being a sociologist
or an economist, my wife is a sociologist,
is sometimes you have to collect data that tells a story
that doesn't always match the national myth.
I'm looking forward to hearing what Professor Smeeding
has to say tonight about all that.
Please join me in welcoming him toWednesday Nite @ the Lab.
[audience applauding]
- I'm Tim. [audience laughs]
- Hi, Tim.
- That's it.
I'm an extinguished professor of public affairs
and ego comics in the La Follette School.
I came in 2008 to direct the Poverty Institute,
I did that to 2014.
And my work is on inequality and mobility.
And so, that's what I'm going to try and talk about,
like I said, I can't beat Rocks for Jocks next week,
the geologists, but I'm hoping to do better
than the vice presidential debate.
[audience laughs]
All right, so here is the questions I want to ask.
What do we know about the methods by which
intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage
work through the life cycle?
Kids can't choose their parents.
Some end up lucky, others don't.
And what can you do about that?
Because if some are really advantaged and others disadvantaged
you don't have equality of opportunity.
So, how does inequality affect opportunity
in intergenerational mobility?
That's, you know, I'll define that in a minute.
That's IGM, that's where a child, an offspring,
ends up compared to where his or her parents were.
And if we don't like that, what can we do about it?
And this is a topic of some concern,
except for I can't imagine, Hillary mentioned 17 things
she wanted to do the other night,
and this had to be one of them.
But Donald couldn't spell it.
[audience laughs]
All right, now, Americans care a lot more about
inequalities in opportunity than in outcomes, okay?
We want kids to have a chance.
We don't mind if somebody worked their butt off and,
honestly, without big tax losses and other things,
earned their way to the top.
We wish our children could have the same opportunity
and they could grow up to be, you know,
Bill Gates or whoever else is your hero, or his or her hero.
I think that's great.
But the mobility is determined by two things.
First of all, the differences in opportunities.
Then you have to take advantage of the opportunities.
Quite often some kids miss the boat,
they don't take advantage, you're in a good school,
you get pregnant, you have a baby
before you finish lots of other things in your life,
and it's a much harder row to hoe.
So, part of it is differences in taking advantage.
Not enough low income kids take advantages of opportunities.
We need to do more in that.
But the problem is that if you ask me
what the two biggest forces are,
first it's parents and parenting,
and then, secondly, it has to do with money, essentially.
And connections, which go together.
Parental education is another important indicator.
So, we're going to look at those things, all right?
There's two kinds of intergenerational mobility.
One has to do with just relative mobility.
And it's a tough thing because it says that,
well, from one to 100, where was your father or mother?
Say they were an 80, okay?
Where's your kid going to end up?
An 80, a 20, a 95, something like that.
But the thing is it's a zero sum game
because when somebody moves up, somebody else moves down.
So, part of what we talk about, 'cause it's easier,
is relative mobility, it's your position in some sort of
a distribution of well-being as compared to your kids.
And so that's one thing.
And then there's something called
absolute intergenerational mobility.
What that means is, will my kids be better off than I am?
That's a really important question.
I'm better off than my father, a World War II vet,
a union carpenter he was,
but I wonder if my kids will do as well as I did.
Now, a lot of people in America are worried about that now.
Particularly people who have found that their jobs
and their way of life is moving away from them,
they've been laid off from what they did
for 20 and 30 years, and they're worried because their sons
or daughters thought they'd follow them into the mill
or into the union or into the whatever,
and they're not doing it, so that's a big concern.
I think a lot of the Trump concern has got people
who make $70,000, $80,000 on average who are behind him,
but they're worried that
their kids aren't going to have that same chance.
So, that's another worry.
So, this is where this sort of plays out.
Now, there's two ways to look at intergenerational mobility.
One is the way that we've always done it.
What you have to do if you're going to fulfill any of this,
if you're going to see how well kids are when they grow up,
you have to start with parents, and you know what the parents are.
Then you have to wait until the kids grow up.
And when they grow up, you see where they ended up.
If you do it that way, you're always looking backward,
you're never looking forward.
You're always saying, you know,
we observe a parent in the '60s or '70s,
the kid grows up to be 40 and, you know,
in 35, 40, 45 years, and then we observe them,
and that's all great but the experiences of kids
who grew up 40 years ago isn't the same experience
as the kids who are growing up today.
So, another way to do it is to say, okay,
we learned something from who got ahead and who didn't
in the traditional way.
Why don't we talk about the attributes, institutions,
policies that today's kids need in order to succeed
because it's today's kids who we're making policy for.
We're trying to decide to improve their schooling,
we're trying to give them opportunities.
So, looking forward turns out to be important.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about both.
Now, don't get your panties in a wad here.
[audience laughs]
This says children's destination depends on
some linear regression,
the log of income or the log of socioeconomic status.
That beta tells you the relationship
between the parents position, or a parent's SES,
and a kid's SES, okay?
It's just one simple number, okay?
It could be .4, .6, .5, but it tells you in society
the average relationship between parents and kids, okay?
And it's a persistence coefficient.
The higher it is, the less mobile a society you've got.
So, if every kid, if that coefficient was one or .9,
that would mean, you know, that you started out
at some rank and you ended up at a 90% chance
of ending up in the same rank when you grew up,
and, therefore, there wasn't much mobility.
If that coefficient is .2 or .3 or something like that,
well, now it sounds like, you know,
there's a lot of movement in this society,
a lot of chance to get ahead and so forth.
So, that's what we're looking at.
That's the only equation in the paper.
[audience laughs]
There'll be a quiz in the morning.
[audience laughs]
So, these estimates have a lot of range
of outcomes and ages and whatever, and they bounce around.
But almost every study like this that's ever been done
finds bunching in the corners.
So, if you started out at the bottom,
your chances of ending up at the bottom
are disproportionately higher.
If you started out at the top, your chances
of ending up at the top are disproportionately higher.
Now, you don't get that from this one coefficient,
so that's part of the issue,
you have to look at matrices and so forth.
And if you went back and you took the original mobility,
I mean, suppose you took a sample of parents in the 1970s,
and you followed them and their kids for 40 years.
You missed about 40 million immigrants, what the hell?
11 million undocumented since 1980, and you missed anybody
who's been incarcerated because we don't count them.
They're somewhere off in jail, okay?
So, if you start in the past and go forward,
you're stuck with whoever you had at the start,
and you miss important dynamics in society.
That's another reason I don't like this perspective.
So, now this is kind of a Gatsby curve.
This is in a book I did with a couple other guys.
Here's those betas, the betas are over here.
And something called a Gini coefficient.
Just realize that the further to the right it is,
the more inequality you've got, okay?
So, if you're over there,
you've got a higher Gini coefficient, you've got more inequality.
If you're over here, you've got more equality, okay?
And you see things, there's no perfect correlation.
And you see bunching, you see things that, well, gee,
you see things like all these countries tend to have
high mobility and low inequalities, Scandinavians.
Well, the range of outcomes is much narrower,
their institutions are much more equalizing.
Then you go in the middle and you find Germany and Denmark,
their inequality is about the same, okay?
But one is much more mobile than the other
because it's got a lower beta, okay?
And then you go over here and you see the U.S. up there
versus, let's say, Canada and Australia,
and you have societies that are high inequality,
but those Canadians and also Australians
have way more mobility than the U.S.
So, this is sort of what you have to pick apart.
And there's a book from Russell Sage,
that I don't want you buy or read,
called From Parents to Children.
So, they're related but there's not a one to one correspondence.
This is essentially what I just said.
There's some high inequality countries
that have high mobility, Australia and Canada,
while others do not, like the United States.
Some of the medium inequality countries differed,
Germany and Denmark.
And the low inequality countries,
Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
Now, it's very interesting, if I asked you
which country had the biggest percentage increase
in inequality over the last 20 years,
how many of you would guess Sweden?
It's true, they started from a low base,
but they've had a lot of inequality.
They've rolled back their welfare state,
they've liberalized their markets.
A lot of people are doing really well.
I mean, their bottom is still pretty good,
but their top end is running away there.
I'm not going to talk too much about other countries.
That was called the Titmuss lecture,
I gave this one in England last year, more international.
I want to talk about the U.S. today.
So, way one, you know, it's most important, perhaps--
I mean because, perhaps, the past may be a poor policy guy.
But you do learn something from looking at the past.
Their history does tell you something.
And in the debate about the trends,
whether mobility and opportunity have declined
from previous generations, it's only went on in the past,
it's not a way forward.
So, who cares if you can say that my father's generation
after World War II did really well compared to their parents
who went through the Great Depression,
and the next generation, me, baby boomers, did pretty good,
but the next generation is not going to do so well.
How do you know?
I mean, why doesn't it keep going up?
And, as a matter of policy, there's greater concern
to bring the bottom up than the top down,
and I'll tell you why.
So, what we want to do is
what can we do for the next generation?
So, Janet Yellen said this, it's very interesting,
I think this captures where I want to go right away.
We know the families are the locus of both
opportunities and barriers through economic mobility.
What individual or family characteristics
predict who will achieve upward mobility?
Who's going to move up?
How much does someone's initial circumstances in life
influence how far that person can get
or how hard he or she needs to work to get there?
Researchers and policymakers need a better understanding
of how much mobility individuals may experience
over the course of their lives,
meaning the ones who haven't experienced it yet, okay?
So, I'm with Janet.
This is a nice picture, I had a graph in here.
I've got about four papers, three or four papers at the end you can look at,
but the New York Times versions are much easier.
Tom Edsall writes about my stuff a lot,
and so he writes more clearly than I do.
So, what this says is
everybody in this graph started out in the bottom 20%.
They were born to a parent
who's in the bottom fifth of the distribution, okay?
Now the question is, where did they end up?
And what you see at the top is if you were born white,
the bottom, at 23, 19, 23, and then 35 for the top 40%,
that's almost random, that's a great mobility.
So, if you're a white kid and you started out on the bottom,
you got yourself up and you moved ahead.
Now, suppose you were a black kid
who started out on the bottom.
You have a 51% chance of being in the bottom 20%.
27% chance of being in the next 20.
That means 78% of the black kids in America
who started at the bottom end up below the median, okay?
That's what it tells you.
Do the same thing by parenthood.
Mothers are continuously married looks a lot like whites.
Discontinuously married, a little worse.
If you were never married, 74%.
If your mother's never married,
74% chance of being stuck at the bottom.
How about education?
If your parents are college graduates, it's amazing.
It sort of jumps out at you.
That looks like that, looks like that.
That looks like a mobile society, but then you go down here.
Less than high school, you know,
you've got about an 80% chance of ending up below the median.
So, we know who it is who's having trouble.
Minorities, undereducated,
kids who grow up in more or less a single parent family.
Those have higher risk, you can tell that from this.
I had a table in the paper, but this guy, Bill Mader,
he's damn good at graphs.
I'm telling you, that's much better than I could do.
I just copied it, I must admit it.
So, the idea is the usual look back can't really capture
the inequality boom because inequality really took off
in the '80s in our country.
Those kids aren't old enough yet.
If your kid was born in '79 or '80,
they're not going to be 40 for another four or five years.
Then we have to go and measure them or whatever,
so we don't know what's going to happen to them.
Before 1980, I mean, incomes moved up pretty evenly.
Everyone got ahead.
I mean, it was great growing up in South Buffalo
with Big Ed the carpenter 'cause every year
we had a higher standard of living, you know?
And, I mean, you could see the whole family moving up.
And then all a sudden the top moved up
and the bottom didn't go anywhere and it fell.
So, that's what we're experiencing now.
But we can't tell what effect that had yet
'cause we haven't waited, the kids aren't old enough.
There are different ways to look at youth and adults
under age 30 today and ask,
how are they moving through their lives?
How likely are they to hit the success markers
for joining the middle class?
Which is what I consider making the American dream.
So, it's a life course approach, all right?
How you grow up affects where you end up is the story.
And there's CRITA, the Cross-National Research,
I'll show you a diagram or a model that we use to do this.
And we're just going to do it in the U.S.
There's something called the social genome,
which helps measure this,
that the Urban Institute in Brookings have
that I've been an advisor on, so, we'll talk about that too.
So, the question is,
given key parameters for child mobility,
are we making much progress?
And the answer is, in general, not much.
I'll show you.
So, this is the regression, only in a picture, okay?
There's parental SES.
This is where you end up as an adult, okay?
You go through, there's investments in institutions
that are made publicly, that are made privately,
and so forth, and those things happen
in your birth year that are really important.
Your early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence,
early adulthood, and then you end up an adult, okay?
The things that affect things here are things like
education, parents' education, income, earnings,
occupation, wealth, employment.
These are the stages I just mentioned.
And you have lots of different outcomes.
Attainment, cognitive measures of progress, social,
emotional, behavioral, employment, labor market, health,
physical outcomes, lots of different outcomes,
and investment through institutions
which help you get through these or barriers which stop you.
That's why this was originally, at some point,
somebody was calling the talk Gates, Gaps,
and something else.
But I'm not going to talk too much about that.
And then you've got the outcome measures.
So, this is the general way that people do it.
Now, that's not very specific.
So, what do you mean by, what does it take to go from,
to get through that first stage, the second stage,
the third stage successfully?
What's it mean?
Okay, so here's the social genome model.
It has all those same stages, but what it tells you is that
what you need to end up in the middle class,
so white picket fence near the middle of the distribution
or above when you grow up to be an adult.
The first thing is you're born to a non-poor,
married mother with at least a high school diploma.
That's important early on.
If you don't end up in that way, that's okay,
but you just have to work harder to get over the next step.
It's easier if you get over the first step.
You have to have acceptable preparation
for formal schooling, which means you've been to preschool
or somehow you're behaviorally okay, and you're, you know,
you're interested in reading and colors and things
that you have to be ready to learn
when you hit formal schooling.
Then formal schooling works for you.
So, you had add to your basic skills.
You cumulatively move ahead.
Reading, math, social, emotional skills
as you go through school.
Then you have to graduate from high school
with an average GPA and not be convicted of a crime.
Now, the not convicted of a crime turns out to be
a huge barrier in minority populations today.
I do work in that too.
Then you have to live independently
with a post-secondary degree somewhere in your late 20s.
So, you're not staying with mom or dad anymore,
you might only have a technical degree,
you might have an LPN, you might have gotten a certificate
in advanced computing or something
from community college or more, okay?
And then, by the time you're in your 30s and 40s,
you're at least 300% of poverty,
which is about the 60th percentile.
In other words, you're middle class, in other words.
So, these are all the steps it takes to get to middle class.
And all we're going to do is say,
well, what happens in those steps?
I mean, what are the trends?
What's going on?
Are people moving ahead in those steps?
And it comes down to five different things
that turn out to be important.
Independent forces, these are those institutions
and investments and lack thereof.
Family status early in life.
We're going to talk about diverging destinies hypothesis,
birth conditions, age and education of mom,
which are very important.
I'm going to talk about parents and parenting.
Is the family stable?
What human and material resources are available for the kid?
Do you read to the kid?
Is the kid being pounded and whatever?
My father pounded me but he read to me too,
so it worked out. [audience laughs]
Money, economic status of families and growing inequality.
And it turns out that if you've got a bachelor's degree
and you want to make money and you can pick any country
in the world to be in, this is the country.
Because we have a real undersupply of people
who've gotten four-year degrees.
And that means when the demand goes up,
the supply is behind.
I'll show you this later on, okay?
And the more human capital you've got,
the more money you make, you have financial ability
to raise children and provide a private safety net.
I'm going to talk about the glass floor.
I'm going to ask you, normally when I talk to a professor
or another audience I ask,
"Have you ever done any of these for your kid?"
And the answer is pretty much, "Yeah, at least one."
Well, the top end will do all of these.
We'll get to that, okay?
Then social institutions.
Level of pay, is education open?
Do we subsidize education, like preschool?
Is healthcare available at reasonable cost to everybody?
And things like that, those are all important.
And then the role of place, where you live.
It amplifies parenting differences and money differences.
So, these are all factors that produce differences
in those outcomes, and we're going to talk about them.
So, this is not good.
Births and cohabitation at early ages,
or marriage at early ages does not predict stability.
College kids get married after they get their degree
and after they've gone through a lot of other steps,
I'll go through in a second.
Cohabitation outside marriage now is more common
than marriage among those 30 and under.
So, if you're not living with your parents and you say,
okay, and you're not living alone,
are you living with somebody else?
The chances that you're cohabiting
are greater than the chances you're married.
That just happened last year.
This is just a recent change.
Especially kids who aren't doing well aren't married.
College kids get married.
And they get married when they're going to have kids,
and it's a commitment device for kids.
So, college and up is okay,
and I'll show you this in a minute.
Now, there's more cushions in some countries,
more better early childhood education.
There's some income support, wage setting,
and continuous healthcare, those things help them overcome
the fact that there's only one parent,
and they might not have as much money, okay?
But still you're at somewhat of a disadvantage.
So, here's how I tell my students and this is no different.
I told the governor's commission on the future of the family
the same thing, okay?
There's four adult differences, life stages,
that separate children and parents, okay?
Education, work status, partnership, and planning.
So, increasingly,
children come in at either end or the start of these stages,
and it makes a huge difference.
So, dissimilar families and children
follow very different life course paths
depending on where you had your children along the way.
So, here's the problem at the bottom end.
We all want our kids-- I'll tell you the good.
We all want our kids to finish school.
Oops, it's okay.
I'm not falling down. [audience laughs]
Finish school, okay?
Get a job.
Find a partner.
Make a plan, have a baby.
Now put have a baby first.
You haven't finished your schooling,
you don't have a good job,
you don't have a partner, and you don't have a plan.
Unintended pregnancies are a hugely terrible problem.
So, there is the two poles, okay?
Women under 30 who have a first child at age 19 and 22
and then 1.6 more kids, the big families
are the lower income families in our country.
They're complex.
By the time a biological child is nine,
the chances that one or both of these parents
will have another child with a different partner is 75%.
So, you take the following.
You take under 30, unmarried, man, woman, baby, okay?
The chances that man or that woman will have another baby
with another partner are three-quarters.
It's what you call a complex family.
Two kids here and there and whatever.
And this comes from the Wisconsin child support data.
It comes from Fragile Families.
It's what my wife does and others.
People are normally shocked at that, but it's true.
It's very complex.
And almost 70% of births to women under age 30
are unintended, and those kids don't do as well.
So, there's a lovely book
by Belle Sawhill called "Generations."
And it's like you slip into motherhood.
It's like, "Oops, I got pregnant.
"Well, you know, I'm not sure and, okay, we'll have the baby
"and we'll see how because it's okay in our neighborhood."
And that just doesn't work very well.
It doesn't work very well for the mother or the kid, okay?
So, that's Belle Sawhill's book.
Now, marriage, marriage is failing among all
but college graduates, and those that marry early
are more likely to divorce.
The biggest declines in the last 10 or 15 years
are among whites in their 20s and 30s.
Charles Murray wrote a book called Coming Apart.
No Latinos. No African Americans.
I'm just going to look at white Anglos.
And he looked at the same places that Bob Putnam did
when he looked at our children.
These are kids who grew up in blue collar places,
and they're just-- They didn't get educated,
they're not following their parents,
they're not finding jobs,
and they don't have the basis for getting married.
So, marriage, it just isn't happening among these 20s
and mid-20s people.
But, on the other hand, college graduates remain high,
little divorce and so forth, and they have fewer children,
more money, more resources, fewer children.
Here's some pictures.
That's a percent of all births that are non-marital, okay?
Less than high school is the top line.
High school, some college.
College grad down at the bottom, okay?
College graduates don't have babies outside of marriage.
Many of you remember the TV show Murphy Brown.
There's about 1/10 of a percent of the mothers in America
are Murphy Brown, okay?
She had the baby and she'd be off directing the TV show
and doing this and this.
Whenever the baby was on,
he wasn't making any fuss or whatever,
and he was nice and she'd hand him off somewhere
and go do her thing.
It ain't that way, okay?
It just isn't.
You can look at this, you can see what happens.
Less than high school, phew.
Never married mothers.
These are mothers who were never married.
Only 3% of college graduates, mothers,
have never been married.
It doesn't happen.
Look how high all the others are and where they're going.
You can follow lines and read charts.
I don't need to tell you.
This is this multiple partner fertility I mentioned.
So, these are urban U.S. parents who have a child
by another partner nine years after the focal,
or the first birth,
that you started to follow by marital status.
So, if you're married, you know,
there's a much smaller chance
that you'll have a birth with somebody else.
You'll probably stay together long enough.
If you're unmarried, look at that.
That's where that 75% number comes from.
And this makes a mess.
Two different kids, two different fathers.
My colleagues Dan Meyer and Maria Cancian write articles...
I'm doing okay.
...with things called, "I ain't paying for his kid."
You can figure out what that means, right?
We've got all the child support records in the state,
the actual records, and we do all the work for DCF on it,
therefore we know more about child support
and broken families than anybody else in the country,
probably in the world, here.
They've been doing it for 20 years.
And they can go out and find a mother
who's got a couple of kids who isn't married
and go and talk to both of the fathers.
And they say, "I ain't paying for his kid."
So, neither one of them pays anything, and the mother
is stuck there in the middle with nothing, okay?
The father may be in jail, maybe unemployed,
maybe isn't making enough that he has much to share
to start with, but, I mean,
that's a problem when you start out at this end.
Now, factor number two are parents, money, and skills.
I would argue with you, and I've always argued this,
almost all parents want to do-- I used to say "all"
but somebody in the education department got pissed at me
and said, "Not everybody does!"
Almost all parents want to do everything they can
for their kids, but some are better able.
So, does anybody in this room think
form the conception of their child, forget the birth,
that that kid wasn't going to college?
No, only about 60% of the kids actually do go to college,
so, somebody's not thinking about that, okay?
And money and skills are important, okay?
So, if you're born at the 90th percentile,
that's the middle of the top quintile,
you had $55,000 per kid to spend on each child in 2013.
And if you ended up at the 10th percentile, you had $7,000.
That's for room, board, everything else.
Yeah, huge difference, that's just for the kids, okay?
I'm going to show you these things.
I'm going to show you some of the ideas of, you know,
summer camp, enrichment, after school programs,
all that stuff, computer at home, music lessons.
All right, this is Katherine Magnuson,
who's my colleague in the La Follette School.
Katherine wrote the child support quality standards
for the state of Wisconsin, the (Young)Star standards.
She wrote them, she's good.
Here's how much you spent if you're in the top fifth
and the bottom fifth.
This only goes to 2006, but you can see
this is how much you spent for your kids
on enrichment activities, after school programs,
summer camps, preschool programs,
things that add something to their life.
Huge differences, huge, okay, huge.
Most of us are at that upper end, okay?
Here's parenting and kid's literacy skills.
So, it's all relative to the top quintile.
So, one, two, three, four,
the top quintile is at the zero line, okay?
This is the time you spent in literacy activities,
like reading to your kid or interacting with your kid
and talking with your kid, okay?
If you start out at the bottom, you're way below.
It turns out that the people that are upper middle class
actually do more early on when the kid is really young.
But you can see, go ahead, that you don't read to your kid,
you're not interacting with your kid,
you're not talking to your kid, that's not good.
But that's what happens depending on where you are
in this distribution.
Now, this is something called parenting quality.
Now, don't, this is, they go out and they visit the home,
and is anybody here a psychologist?
There must be somebody.
They do something called the home scale.
They go out and they check it out.
Is the place clean? Is the kid watching TV?
Are there any books in the house?
And so forth and so on.
And if you rank parents,
and you can go right here and find the article,
according to the weakest, the average,
which is the middle 50, and the strongest parents,
you can see at every stage,
all those stages I mentioned before,
the stronger parents kids do better
at every one of those stages.
So, parenting makes a big difference on who gets ahead.
Who's going to succeed?
Who's going to move up in school?
Who's going to stay in school? Who's going to get a degree?
Who's going to have a job and so forth.
So, parents are incredibly important.
Now, keep that in mind
because in a minute we're going to face a real conundrum
when you try and tell a parent you can't do
everything you want, you can for your child.
That's a stopper.
We're not going to do that.
So, that creates a big problem.
So, money matters, income is important.
And children's family income inequalities have widened.
So, even if you assume that inequalities is represented
by rungs in a ladder and just say that, you know,
the rate at which people move up and down the ladder,
that beta coefficient, hasn't changed.
But the rungs of that ladder have gotten much wider apart.
So, being at the bottom or being at the top
are very different things now than they were 25 years ago.
So, the stakes for ending up at the top or the bottom
are much higher now, regardless of the trend.
So, this is just a show stopper.
This is a congressional budget office data.
This is the after-tax income
of the bottom, middle, and top fifths in 2010 dollars.
These are only households with children, okay?
Here's the top, here's the middle, and here's the bottom.
And here's the growth over time.
You can see that there's been a much bigger growth
in the top relative to the middle
than between the middle and the bottom.
Neither the middle or the bottom have done terribly well.
At the top, things have exploded, okay?
It's totally exploded, the gap is huge.
So, I've got some summary.
I point to a picture, then I say it's so, okay?
Middle has suffered real income declines,
negative absolute mobility.
In other words, they're worse off now.
Absolute and relative mobility are both important
to the middle class.
And that's why the bodies in the World Bank,
and the International Monetary Fund and people in Washington
want shared prosperity and inclusive growth.
You want something that brings the bottom up too
and not just lets the top run away.
So, you hear all these people saying growth is good,
economic growth is good.
Who gets the benefits of the growth?
If all the growth goes to the top end of the distribution,
that growth isn't really helping.
So, it has to be more widespread.
It's finally starting to be in the last year or two
after a long, long time.
I don't know how long it will continue.
But finally people at the bottom are starting to move up.
Their real incomes are increasing.
But this is eight years after the Great Recession,
or seven years after the Great Recession, okay?
So, there's a big income inequality.
Now, wealth is even more important than income, okay?
Income is a flow, you get so much a year, whatever.
Wealth is what you've got sitting there that you've built up
by saving or you've inherited it or somebody gave it to you
or you got lucky or whatever, and your wealth builds up.
And wealth is insurance.
You can use that money to do whatever you want.
I'll show you what happens, okay?
And I'm going to show you-- you can read that--
but I want to show you a picture here.
This is the OECD data.
And this is the income share of the top 10%.
You can see in the United States, it's the highest.
We have the biggest,
the top 10% is the biggest share of the pie in the U.S.
And then you look at wealth.
They've got an even big share of this, bigger shot.
Almost above 70%.
That's wealth.
Assets, stocks, bonds, housing, businesses.
So, we've got a big issue here.
And when you look at inequality in all of these,
just know that they're all going up.
They're not always going up incredibly fast.
That's because there's a trick, you know,
you can make these axes much bigger
and it'll grow much faster, but they're all going up.
So, all inequality in consumption, inequality in income,
inequality in wealth are all going up.
So, it's not just inequality in income, it's in wealth too.
And I'll explain why.
Here you go--
How many of you guys have done this?
Since I see a lot of people out there that are about my age,
which is 68, a lot of you have been through this.
You buy an expensive home in a good, safe school district
so your kid goes to a good school.
Your children graduate college and often a post-grad
with no debt, so, in other words,
somebody paid for their college, they're not in debt.
Your children, my child, one of my boys,
grew up in Syracuse, New York.
Patrick is a hell of a hard worker,
but you couldn't do squat in Syracuse
in the Great Recession.
First and last month's rent to go to Boston.
He's got an incredible job, he makes 100,000 bucks a year,
and he loves it at age 28, okay?
But whose dad had the money to get him there
to overcome the job mismatch and put a bright, young kid
in a place where he could get a good job?
Parents buy a first home at favorable interest rates.
Interest rates have been incredibly low.
I mean, all these developers who have built all these things
borrowed that money at 0.5%, they've done incredibly well.
And my mortgage, and I mean
2.4% on a 15-year mortgage.
When interest rates went down, we all refinanced.
That saves you gazillions of dollars.
Now your son or daughter just graduated from college,
and they got their girlfriend
and they want to get a place somewhere, want to buy a condo,
it looks like a good investment, but they don't qualify
because they don't have a good enough credit history.
[audience laughs]
Co-sign.
Bada bing.
And then there's this evidence in the United States,
Denmark, and Canada that if you're in the top 5%,
the chances that a kid who grows up
with a parent in the top 5% will go to work
in the family business are about 25% in each of those.
I taught these kids at Bowdoin.
They didn't give a xxxx about anything.
They didn't want to learn and whatever.
They have a big party, have a good time out in the woods
because, "Oh, I'm going to work on the family farm."
I'm going to go to work for wherever, okay?
These are all the advantages that the kids at the top have.
You can overcome it.
I got over a lot of them, your kids probably did too.
But those are all the things that a rich kid can do,
not to mention things like, you know,
if your kid gets caught smoking dope some night,
or drunk and disorderly,
you got a lawyer there in 52 seconds
and he's going to be okay.
If it's a black kid, that's one strike,
then he gets a second strike, and he hauls you in
and there's way more police in their neighborhoods
and so forth and so on.
So, we do this, we protect our children, we do it.
We can afford to do it.
We can afford to tell them how important it is
to do X, Y, and Z to get ahead and so forth.
And so this is sort of what you're up against.
This is what's going on at the top.
And we'll go right into that in a minute, I'm almost there.
We're getting there, I got another 15 minutes I'm told.
This is a talk where they tell you talk 52 to 55 minutes.
[audience laughs]
I'm doing my best, okay?
So, you know, there's things.
Social institutions are really important
in the United States and the rest of,
in Europe, they have universal healthcare.
Everyone in the world except for us has universal healthcare,
and it's much less expensive, of course.
They have universal programs for healthcare, childcare,
subsidized from early on, high quality childcare.
And for us, you get some of that
if you're low income and you work now,
but you have to work a certain amount and so forth.
But in the other end, we have big tax subsidies
for the rest of us in education, healthcare, and so forth.
It's not at the bottom, you subsidize the top.
How many people here have 529 plans
to save for their kids to go to college?
All right, the hands are up.
How many of us got that mortgage tax break
so we can buy a good house? Uh-huh, okay.
We can put our pension money away without paying for it.
Ah, now there's a set-aside program
where you can pay for your healthcare,
out of pocket expenses,
and your childcare at pretax dollars.
Who are we subsidizing?
The people I had on the last page,
not the people who need it.
Not the middle class and not the bottom.
So, this is, essentially, that's what this says.
OEC calls it TBSP, tax breaks for social purposes,
and they mainly go to people at the top.
MOOP is medical out of pocket expenses, all that.
I mean, this is just a list, okay.
So, our social institutions don't really help much.
It subsidizes rich kids whose parents already have
high income and wealth, and that means that the rich
don't want to support direct universal benefits.
Why should I?
I don't want any competition for my kid.
I saved for my kid.
Of course, I made seven times more than this person,
but I saved for my kid.
And we can opt out from public support.
Why vote for public health insurance and public university?
I don't need that.
I can buy my own healthcare plan,
I get a great healthcare plan from my employer,
and I can put my kids through private school if I want,
so why should I spend all this money
on these other programs?
It's pretty selfish and hard,
but there's a lot of that out there, okay?
Last thing, factor five, neighborhoods.
The place where kids are raised
amplifies parenting and money differences, okay?
Home mortgages, zoning,
these tax breaks for social programs.
You get a bad neighborhood
and you have zoning and other things to exclude the poor.
Even middle class kids in poor neighborhoods don't do well.
So, this is Raj Chetty and Nathan Hendren
who've measured all this stuff.
Neighborhood effects are substantial,
especially for children in low-income families.
The U.S. county in which a child grows up
explains nearly half as much as the variation
in their earnings as their parents' incomes.
Parents' incomes might explain more, but where you are,
the quality of the, you know, look around,
go over right here.
I live over here in University Heights.
The playgrounds are nice, the streets are clean.
A few drunken students, but you got to put up with that
because otherwise you wouldn't have this business we're in
and so forth.
But, you know, I don't go out there on Allied Drive
and duck when I hear something go crack
in the middle of the night and afraid that my kid, you know,
leave my kid go out at night and so forth.
So, that's important too.
All right, so that's it.
All the ingredients seem to be going,
or a lot of them are going in the wrong way.
If you believe in equality of opportunity,
you probably don't have it.
Even if the trend is questioned, virtually everybody agrees
the amount of mobility we have in our country is too low.
I mean, there are these 40% stuck at the top
and about 35% stuck on the bottom, and in between,
the low-middle class moves around pretty well
but the others don't.
So, what are we going to do about it?
It's possible to provide more equal life chances
than is the case,
in ways that do not violate family autonomy.
But this is the hard thing to jump through.
But there are limits to these policies
because parental influences are evident everywhere,
and the rich buy out of public goods
that are subsidized to do so in our country.
You know, Obama, for three days he tried to get rid
of 529 plans, the special breaks in 529 plans.
The roar was huge, and he backed off.
And that's, you know, they're great devices.
You put your money away for your kids or your grandkids,
they build up, two of my boys, three of my kids actually,
you know, it was very helpful for them
to get through school, I could save for them to go to school
without any tax penalty.
It'd build up over time, and I spent it on their schooling.
But it was an advantage I had,
and if you didn't have that money, you couldn't.
And then self-interested parents
have every reason to fight against such policies
to give their children more advantages.
If you don't see this,
there was a great "Law and Order" episode one night,
and the cops go and what's happened is
the director of admissions at a preschool was murdered.
So, they go and they, ah-ha,
so and so's daughter didn't get in.
So, they go and they knock on the door.
This really cute little five-year-old girl
comes up and says, "Good afternoon, hello, how are you?
"Oh, come on in, " unbelievably nice.
And her mother's in there and she's packing.
So, "Why are you packing?" She says, "We have to move."
"Why are you moving?" "My daughter didn't get into the right preschool.
"We're moving to Connecticut "because we can't live in this city
"because she didn't get into the right preschool
"at age five," okay, I mean.
Now, here's an example of where you run into conflicts,
you're trying to set policy.
James Fishkin has a trilemma.
If you would probably agree with all three of these things,
but then try and find a policy that meets all three of them.
The first thing is the principle of merit.
Society believes in procedural fairness
in evaluating qualifications for school or jobs
or other prizes, in other words, if you got better grades,
if you do better in the interview, you should get the job.
I mean, that's why we do these things.
Meritocracy is what we would call it.
Equality of life chances.
Your chances or prospects for children shouldn't vary
systematically with any native characteristic.
Parental advantage, SES, race, ethnicity.
Kids didn't pick their parents, they should have a fair shot.
But then autonomy of the family.
You should not coercively interfere with parents
except to ensure prerequisites for adult life
and to provide safety for children.
That means, and probably right, it's inefficient, impolitic,
and certainly we're unable to say,
hey, you can't do that for a kid.
It's not going to happen.
So, the only thing we seem to be able to do is
to try and give more opportunities to kids at the bottom.
Give them a better shot at getting to the middle class,
to try and do our best in schools and other policies to,
you know, follow the top two.
Because we're not going to tell parents they can't do
what they want to do with their kids.
I mean, can you imagine?
Go talk to your neighbor, I don't think you can do that,
I don't want you to. What do you mean you don't want to,
it's my kid, I can do that.
Anyway, so here's some things.
First, most important, eliminate out of wedlock childbirth.
If 70% of those births at the bottom are unintentional,
we need to say if you didn't intend to have,
if you really don't want to get pregnant, use this,
an IUD or long-acting reversible contraceptive.
They're using it all over, not in Milwaukee,
but all over the rest of the country, tremendous effects.
If there's one thing my wife and I,
I've studied poverty my whole life,
one thing I would say to prevent poor kids
is to wait until you're older to have kids.
You may not be married, but wait until you're older.
You're more experienced, you've got your schooling done.
You've got a job, maybe you got a partner, just wait.
Because having a kid early on, the kid's going to have a hard time
and you're going to have a hard time, okay?
So, that's important.
Also, early preschool has a causal effect.
It partially closes the gap.
You're never going to totally close the gap.
But it does, kids, low income kids, who go to a preschool,
go to a good preschool, do do better in school
and do end up better at the end of the day.
Jim Heckman can tell you all about that.
Now, we're finding out so much more now
about the effect of the physical environment
on kid outcomes and on birth outcomes, it is amazing.
If you live on the wrong side of the tracks
or there's a much higher level of pollution,
or you lived near a toxic waste dump,
your kids systematically do worse.
We find some maternal and child healthcare and the women's,
infants' and children feeding are important.
We have something that actually works
called nurse home visiting.
That means if you're a first time young mother
who has no experience, a nurse comes to their home and says,
"Hey, do you have any problems? How's things going with the kid?"
And if you're really smart, the nurse looks around and says,
"Gee, you know, there's this unruly guy
"screaming and yelling and drinking in the living room.
"I mean, you know, what's going on here?
"Do you need any other help?
"Can we get you some help," and so forth.
That thing turns out to work.
And then there's something called Two-Generation healthcare.
So, I'm on the American Pediatrics Association Task Force
on Child Poverty.
Those pediatricians say, "Higher minimum wage!
"More preschool!"
And I say, wait a minute, between birth and preschool,
who's the major social institution that these kids run into?
You.
Wouldn't you like to know, when you're examining that baby,
whether the mother is clinically depressed?
Would you like to know if the mother had some problems
during her pregnancy with either substance abuse
or with other physical issues and so forth?
It turns out the most important thing from zero to two is
the relationship between the mother and the kid.
It's just the way it is, so, we could do that.
We have the ability to do that, we can bend HIPPA rules
and do that, we should do more of that.
Money and time.
They make a difference.
There's good evidence that this earned income tax credit,
these things, small amounts of money improve
the health status and outcomes for mothers and babies,
and that's the basis for something that
the rest of the world calls child allowances.
I spent last week at the White House
and in Senator Baldwin's office and a couple other offices
talking about child allowance.
Here's what you do.
You get rid of the tax deduction we have for kids
and the tax credit.
Every kid in America under age 18,
they all have social security numbers if they're legal kids.
Every kid gets a deposit of 175 bucks a month in an account.
The mother has that in the account, or the father,
or the both of them if they file jointly,
goes into an account, every month, every kid, everywhere.
40 million families, 79 million kids,
everyone gets this every month.
So, nobody lives on less than $2 a day.
Everyone knows that there's at least something coming in.
If you get laid off, if the guy moves out, or whatever.
And it doesn't cost anything.
The costs are equal at that level.
This is a no-brainer to me.
I believe people would have much more confidence in government.
Right now your tax deduction for kids,
you go put your parameter, you put your earnings and stuff
into TurboTax and you push a button and out comes a number.
You don't know how it all worked out.
But here, every month, 175 bucks for each kid shows up
in your bank account.
Social Security knows how to do this.
They know how to police it.
We have something called a representative payee program,
which is when you have an aged parent who can't handle
their own financial affairs,
and they name you their representative payee.
They check, are you really doing
what you're supposed to be doing?
You do the same thing with kids.
We should be doing this.
It's incredibly progressive and wouldn't cost us anything.
And so it will be in the New York Times in about two weeks.
We just finished the paper, but we're shopping it around
at various places, and hopefully this will catch hold.
And it gives you a little bottle of money at the bottom.
Now we're going stay with this earned income tax credit,
which pays you more if you work
as an incentive to go to work, so that goes with it.
We need a higher than $7.65 minimum wage.
No, we do not need a $15 minimum wage, 10 would be the most.
But if you look around Madison right now,
the economy here is, have you seen any place,
any retail establishment
that doesn't have a sign on the window that says
hiring all shifts, all hours, whatever?
The de facto minimum wage right now
because our economy is so hot is about 11 bucks an hour.
That's what people are paying
because you need that to get kids.
But that's only in Madison, that's not Milwaukee,
it's not a lot of other places and so forth.
But making work pay better is important.
And then work schedules that are consistent
with good parenting.
Here's an example of workplace flexibility.
This is part of the problem.
During the Great Recession,
we had way more workers than we had jobs.
So, you got your childcare for eight hours and you go in
and you're punching in at eight o'clock in the morning
and the boss at Target or Walmart or wherever says,
"No, don't punch in.
"We don't need you on the floor yet."
You wait, 10 o'clock you punch in.
Two o'clock, nope, there aren't enough people,
punch out, go home.
That's workplace flexibility.
I got eight hours of childcare,
I thought I'd go to work for eight hours of pay
and you let me work four.
That happens, it's happened a lot.
And there needs to be some balance there.
You can't schedule-- There's laws on the books
that need to be enforced that you have to, at least,
give people a week's notice before you change their schedule.
You can't say, "Oh, come on in tomorrow night
'for a double shift."
"Well, I got kids here and I got nobody to watch them."
Educational system.
Don't ask, I have no idea, get somebody else.
All I know, in 1983, Ted Bell said we're a nation at risk.
Of each cohort, each group of kids, you know, by age,
following them, are only graduating from high school,
75% of them.
Well, now we're all the way up to 77%.
So, 23% don't graduate.
Milwaukee public schools, about 40% graduate on time,
within six years being on time, okay?
We really need to do more about this.
Finally, tertiary education policy.
Oh, good, I'm getting right there.
We need efforts to get kids through school.
And I'll show you this in just a minute.
It's not getting them in the school,
it's getting them through school.
You need incentives for kids to get there,
get through, get done, okay?
Even those with clear and technical training
can even get good jobs in computing, and basic math,
and science, and technology.
You can get a good job today with those too.
You can in this economy, okay?
But here's their problem, right here.
Okay, these are what we call age groups.
So, I'm even older than the 55 to 64, but pretend that's me,
and just look at the yellow box.
Which country had the highest percentage of 55 to 64
who've graduated, who've either got an associate degree,
a bachelor's degree, or an advanced degree?
Who's the highest, the yellow?
USA! USA!
But then, we went flat.
We're flat. Every other country. Bing, bing, bing.
Bing, bing, bing, bing. Bing, bing, bing.
You can see the progress in every other country moving up.
And we're just not doing it.
Their kids aren't getting through.
These aren't the kids we teach here.
They're smart, they're bright, they get in, they work hard.
They'll get out in four or five years.
But it's in a lot of the other schools
that are in our system and whatever, you can't make money,
you didn't really get a good high school education,
so you can't handle this course and that course.
I mean, this is a real problem, and this is where we are.
We're just not making a lot of progress.
Why should we care? This is kind of cool.
This is an OECD graph that shows
that inequality shapes the opportunities.
Higher inequality lowers the years of schooling for kids
who have low educational ability.
So, if you're a high income kid,
it doesn't matter how much inequality is in the society,
you're going to get through.
If you're a middle income kid, the more inequality,
there's a small decrease in your chances of getting through.
But if you're in a high inequality country,
much lower chance of getting through four-year education.
Much lower chance.
Everyone got that picture?
Okay, this is our problem.
I'm hoping some serious candidate
will do something about it.
We're not in good shape in this country,
and we're never going to eradicate SES differences.
You're not going to outperform two bright parents
who've got one kid and do all the right things for that kid
and, if they can't do it, buy all the right things
for that kid and have all the right connections
and so forth, okay,
but you can bring the bottom up to a better place, okay?
And that we can do, okay?
And this is my biggest problem in the inequality boom.
It's not the current generation, it's the next generation.
It's what kids are going to get.
So, that's where I am.
I love comments.
Here's some of the sources, they're at the bottom.
The ones in bold are the New York Times
writing about these articles that I wrote,
and they're easier to, it's much easier to,
you get a bigger, a quicker picture from Tom.
Tom Edsall did both of them, I think.
And I'm working with Harry Brighouse on a nice paper called
"The Cost of a Well-Raised Child."
So, how much does it cost to pay for a kid
who has a decent chance, a reasonable chance of--
we have to define reasonable-- of making the middle class?
And it's more than being not just poor.
It has to do tremendously with how much healthcare
and childcare, which are really expensive, are subsidized.
And you can't afford, if you're making eight bucks an hour,
you're not going to afford $6 or $3 or $4 an hour
on childcare, you can't do it, it doesn't work.
You aren't going to be able to do that.
So, that's it, okay, done.
Talk, questions.
[audience applauding]