The children of rich families tend to differ from their poorer peers in multiple ways. They have fewer siblings and more educated parents. Their parents spend more time with them and send them to better quality schools. Their cognitive skills are higher, and they complete more years of schooling. All of these channels have been found to affect an individual’s earnings. However, in order to design policies to improve intergenerational mobility, we need to understand how these channels interact with each other in generating correlations in lifetime income across generations.
People living in upper middle class households don’t like to think of themselves as affluent, but they are. “The truth is if you are an educated, white-collar professional family, you are this demographic,” she said in an interview. In a 2003 research paper called “The Culture of Affluence,” she pointed to a range of factors that are unique to wealthy, upwardly mobile America, which present their own kinds of challenges.
