Classy...

The NY Times online offers a fascinating dissection of socioeconomic class in America. It offers you an opportunity to determine how you fit in, percentile-wise, to our society based on income, education, occupation, and accumulated wealth. There are also graphical breakdowns of class by quintile, income mobility, and what people think.

Aside from the intrigue of quantifying exactly how you should feel about yourself (what a wonderful time to be alive!), I found the most interesting section to be the series of slides on income mobility - make sure you click "next" to cycle through them all. The "income elasticity" portion shows exactly how great a handicap being poor in America is: a child born to parents in the bottom fifth is only expected to make about 60% of the national average income, and children three generations removed from poor parents still are barely expected to make 90% of average. Country-wise, American families are roughly as economically mobile as British, but much less mobile than France, Canada, or Denmark.

It's safe to assume that class mobility is desirable in modern society. The more highly mobile society is, the more people will be rewarded for their own merits, abilities, and accomplishments rather than those of their parents (or parents' parents). In this light, lagging behind most "progressive" industrialized countries, the conservative push to repeal the estate tax seems especially ludicrous. After all, the estate tax is essentially a tool to level out society and prevent development of a permanent economic aristocracy. Without it, none of Bill Gates' descendants, to take an extreme example, would need to work for at least 50 generations (1200 years!) of decadence.

Anecdotally, the findings of this study seem pretty intuitive. For a math dork like me, though, it's interesting to see it in numbers.