>the economy has become polarized, resulting in a diminished middle class and an exacerbated wealth gap that is increasingly formidable to overcome. This realit

>the economy has become polarized, resulting in a diminished middle class and an exacerbated wealth gap that is increasingly formidable to overcome. This reality has not escaped the notice of new generations, who are progressively more politically active, radical, and discontented with capitalism....A telling indication is that your parents' income now stands as the most reliable predictor of your future earnings I think the data is interesting but I don't understand the interpretation of the data. Knowing nothing else, isn't the pattern of the graph somewhat suggestive that inequality is going down and your parents income is having less of an effect on your future income? There's obviously a lot going on with change of wealth over time, but if we lived in a society where children of the 90th percentile and 10th percentile had the same chance of exceeding their parents wealth that would seem to suggest that people were playing with different floors. That seems to be closer to the older generations than the new ones. My somewhat cynical belief is that income is more meritocratic than it used to be and downwardly mobile children of wealthy people would like to blame wealthy people - instead of accept the reality that their life at the 50% percentile feels less materially wealthy simply because they are comparing it to their childhood at the 90% percentile.