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Singapore at 50: Can meritocracy flourish?
Singapore turns 50 this year. The celebrations of independence are going to be spectacular, if all the preparations being made across the island are any clue. But middle age is also causing some...
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Four charts that show the opportunity gap isn’t going away
Editor's note: This post originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal Think Tank blog on July 21, 2015. Child poverty rates are coming down slowly, according to figures from the Pew Research Center,...
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Following the success sequence? Success is more likely if you're white.
Why are black Americans at greater risk of being poor? This is a complex and contested question, one that has exercised scholars and politicians for decades. One of the most sensitive issues is the...
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Book review: The Road to Character by David Brooks
I failed, right from the outset. David Brooks asks us to act with greater humility and restraint, to move away from the ‘Big Me’ model of the self towards a nobler outlook. But the first thing I did...
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Memo to Hillary Clinton: More choice can thwart community college students
Hillary Clinton has unveiled a plan to improve college access, and few can doubt the urgency of the task. (If you are one of the few, read this by Professor Sean Reardon.) For example, more than 80...
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Prospects for America's children: Three cheers, three fears
Out on the long presidential campaign trail, every candidate will say something like “children are the future of this nation.” So what are the prospects for our kids? The latest Kids Count report from...
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Social mobility: low, and lower at the top than the bottom
How socially mobile is America? Not very, is the general consensus. But it may be worse than we thought, especially in the upper reaches of the income distribution. Those are the conclusions of an...
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Six memos on social mobility you ought to have read
Happy Birthday, us! Social Mobility Memos is two years old today, and we are going to take this arbitrary opportunity to shamelessly promote some of our earlier work. Rather than share our greatest...
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From health care to health – the next agenda
Slowly, but hopefully surely, the U.S. is providing more of its citizens with the security and advantages of health care. Following the passing of the Affordable Care Act, millions more Americans are...
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Two anti-poverty strategies
There are two strategic approaches to tackling poverty. Strategy 1: raise the incomes of those with low incomes. Strategy 2: reduce the knock-on effects of having a low income on housing, schooling,...
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The dangerous separation of the American upper middle class
The American upper middle class is separating, slowly but surely, from the rest of society. This separation is most obvious in terms of income—where the top fifth have been prospering while the...
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Not just the 1%: Upper middle class income separation
Is the upper middle class really pulling away from ordinary Americans, as we claimed in the first post in this series, or is it really just the top 1 percent? A lot of people have asked us that...
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The metric that matters more than male U.S. workers’ earnings
The plight of American workers made headlines again recently with the release of Census Bureau figures on earnings. Most of the headlines were gloomy–perhaps too gloomy. That’s partly because of data...
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Comeback kids: School suspension and high school graduation
People on track to success tend, obviously enough, to succeed. They complete their education, develop essential life skills, stay out of trouble, and plan for their futures. But not everybody succeeds...
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The American Dream in American cities: Exploring a 'Metro Genome Model' approach
Mobility: A metro issue Economic mobility is a national challenge but a metropolitan issue. The American Dream is part of the nation’s self-identity: the promise of upward mobility remains a defining...
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How upwardly mobile are Hispanic children? Depends how you look at it.
People often immigrate to a new country to seek a better life for their children. In their new country, immigrant children very often show rapid upward mobility. But immigrants are very far from being...
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School readiness gaps are improving, except for black kids
There is an encouraging message from a new paper by Sean Reardon and Ximena Portilla: school readiness gaps are narrowing. But it’s not all good news. Between 1998 and 2010, inequality in school...
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Jobs, wives, kids: Three reasons men need 'Men's Lib'
The world has changed, and women have changed. But men have not: or at least, not enough. That’s the argument Belle Sawhill and I made in the New York Times yesterday in a piece headlined ‘Men’s Lib!’...
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My marriage? Great! Yours? Not so much.
There’s a lot of gloom about marriage in America. Just as same-sex couples win the right to marry, the whole institution seems to be in trouble, especially among people with less education or lower...
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Americans support marriage–but split over what the institution means
Americans are deeply divided over marriage: what state it is in, why it is important, and what makes it work. That’s the message of a survey published Tuesday by the Center for the Study of Elections...
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