Barry spoke at Maryland on Friday, making a good old-fashioned case
for economic equality. He cited the following statistics as evidence that
we do not have much social mobility in the US: If you are a male
born in the poorest tenth of the population, you have only a 1.3 percent
chance of reaching the top ten percent during your lifetime, and just
a 3.7 percent chance of becoming at all wealthy (in the top fifth). If
you are born in the bottom tenth, the odds are more than even that you
will never make it out of the bottom fifth. Barry’s source is Samuel Bowles
and Herbert Gintis, "The Inheritance of Inequality," Journal
of Economic Perspectives 16 (2002) 3 – 30, p. 3.