Monday, December 8, 2008

Rags to riches, a true American Danish story

It's a fairly banal point that being born into privilege sets you up for a life of success... and while there are many stories of people lifting themselves up from poverty by their bootstraps, for the most part, people from rich families stay rich and people from poor families stay poor. That's just one of the imperfections of capitalism, right? Better than Feudalism anyway. Well Ezra Klein puts up some interesting figures from Brookings that show we in the States may be closer to Feudalism than you think, and it's the damn dirty socialists in Europe who demonstrate the most "rags to riches" (and "boardroom to the poor house").

While Ezra showed the pretty graphs, I wanted to point to a table that seems to tell the tale better:
Sucks to be poor here. Damn.

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