h4>Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert; & Groves,
Melissa Osborne. (Eds.) (2005). Unequal Chances: Family Background and
Economic Success. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
304 pp.
$35 ISBN 0-691-11930-9
Reviewed by Marghi Hagen
The Sea Coast, California
August 14, 2006
In an effort to clarify the growing consensus that family
background has a greater effect on an individual's life outcomes
than was previously thought, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and
Melissa Osborne Groves bring together the work of more than
twenty sociologists, economists, biologists, and
philosophers.
The data presented in Unequal Chances is expansive and
rigorously researched. It contains extensive quantitative data
sets and statistical analyses, and is directed at scholars and
researchers interested in the detailed study of the complex
issues that influence intergenerational transfer of economic
status.
The Introduction sets the tone for most of the chapters.
It includes a discussion of the reasons for the historic position
that parental income was not an important variable in determining
economic success of children (Blau and Duncan, 1967). The editors
then offer research and evidence (although inconclusive) that
parental income is potentially more important than education,
natural ability or intelligence.
Although the data represented and arguments put forward were
certainly thought-provoking, Unequal Chances was a
disappointment, especially when applied to the promise of
educational opportunities. My negative response is
three-fold. First, the initial sentence of the book cover
misleadingly reads, “Is the United States, ‘the land
of equal opportunity’ or is the playing field tilted in
favor of those whose parents are wealthy, well-educated, and
white?” Individual chapters provide excellent quantitative
data for background research on very specific topics, yet the
analyses present an extremely broad quantitative perspective on
international disparity of wealth, and rarely speak to the
potential “tilt of the American playing field.”
Topics range from gender preference in China, to the question of
nature versus nurture, to the mobility of African-Americans in
the U.S.
There is little or no connection drawn between these
topics, other than that each emphasizes, in some way, the
great inequity of wealth on this planet- for many reasons.
Additionally, the book seems to paint a picture that focuses
on the inevitability of a person’s life status, or the
deterministic nature of children’s’ starting places
in life. The editors perhaps should have included other types of
studies that go beyond these narrow, statistical analyses. More
nuanced, qualitative analyses, in particular, might have served
to provide a fuller picture of what is certainly the complex
nature of the links between family background and economic
success.
My third concern is that, although the editors note,
“the transmission of economic success across generations,
however, remains something of a black box” (p. 3),
education, (which has, in the past, been considered a vital
aspect of individual economic and life outcomes), is not
discussed, other than to suggest that it may not be as important
a determinant as family background. This conclusion may be
justified. Yet, if this is so (since determinants of life
outcomes is an enormously important issue, and no conclusive
research has been done that compares education and family), it
would seem that a book that suggests that family is the most
important factor should at least mention the role that education
might play in life outcomes. Chapter five is relegated to the
study of race as a factor, while chapter seven discusses the
relevance of personality. Education, as a contributing factor, is
excluded.
The first five chapters reach similar conclusions about the
relationship between family background and economic status. In
the first chapter, Greg Duncan, Ariel Kalil, Susan E. Mayer,
Robin Tepper and Monique R. Payne examine intergenerational
correlations such as psychological characteristics, education,
earnings and occupation. The authors’ conclusion is that
“like begets like” across generations (p. 71).
Chapter two suggests that “earning gaps in society may
persist for many decades more than previously thought” and
they may “…point to an especially high degree of
rigidity at the bottom and top of the earnings
distribution” (p. 80).
Bhashkar Mazumder analyses evidence
from the most recent Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the
National Longitudinal Surveys and concludes that, although
parental income has a greater effect than was previously thought,
those at the very bottom and very top of the spectrum show an
even greater effect than mid-range families.
In “The Changing Effect of Family Background on the
Incomes of American Adults”, chapter three, David J.
Harding, Christopher Jenks, Leonard M. Lopoo and Susan E. Mayer
suggest that their research differs from previous work in two
ways. As they explain:
We focus instead on an individual’s total family
income (including non-wage incomes)… Our second innovation
is that we measure changes in the effect of family background in
two conceptually distinct ways. Our first measure of
intergenerational inheritance is the multiple correlation between
adults’ family income and their parents’
socioeconomic rank… Our second measure of inheritance is
the ratio of the income received by adults who grew up in
advantaged families to the income received by adults who grew up
in disadvantaged families (p. 100).
Chapter four reports on a study of various sibling types in
Sweden. Anders Bjoklund, Markus Jantti and Gary Solon state,
“Although our results point to a significant role of
genetic variation, perhaps the most striking finding is the most
obvious one - about the importance of non-shared
environment” (p. 163). The significance of the debate over
nature versus nurture is a key element to this research.
In chapter five, “Rags, Riches and Race: The
Intergenerational Economic Mobility of Black and White Families
in the United States”, Tom Hertz argues that “the
observed degree of intergenerational economic mobility in the
United States depends critically on the race of the
parents” (p. 165). This chapter seems especially important
because the author is making a more contextualized argument about
socioeconomic status, one that places race as a prominent factor
as well.
Chapter six provides a departure from the thrust of other
chapters, which collectively seem to imply that parental income
and wealth are deterministic of the income levels of subsequent
generations. This chapter focuses on whether parents’
personalities and attitudes resemble those of their children.
John C. Loehlin concludes, “It appears that much of the
quite substantial genetic contribution to individual differences
in personality does not translate into heritability in the sense
of transmission of traits across generations” (p. 207). The
data reported in this chapter seem to provide some hope that what
occurs in children’s environments matters for their
personality and life outcomes. School, of course, plays a large
part in those environments.
In a related vein, chapter seven, “Personality
and the Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Status”,
by Melissa Osbourne Groves, finds that personality is a
significant factor in determining earnings for adults. Osbourne
Groves states that “personality is able to elucidate a
significant mechanism by which families transmit economic status.
. . The inclusion of personality, controlling for education,
tenure, and cognitive performance, is estimated to reduce the
unexplained portion of earnings transmission by four percentage
points- more than twice that of cognitive performance” (p.
221).
The preference for male children over female children in China
is studied in chapter eight, entitled “Son Preference,
Marriage and Intergenerational Transfer in Rural China”, by
Marcus W. Feldman, Shuzhuo Li, Nan Li, Shripad Tuljapurkar and
Xiaoyi Jin. The authors examine the multiple facets of
preferential treatment of male children and state: “First
we have cultural transmission of attitudes toward the sex of a
child…Second, we have seen transmission of marital form-
virilocal or uxorilocal across generations…The third class
of intergenerational transfers reverses that traditionally
studied by Western economists in that it concerns what children
provide for their parents.” (p. 254).
The final chapter, by Adam Swift, is entitled, “Justice,
Luck, and the Family: The Intergenerational Transmission of
Economic Advantage from a Normative Perspective.” Swift
also suggests that economic placement of a family has much to do
with the life outcomes of the children of that family. He
concludes, as a result of the research, “the mechanisms by
which economic status is transmitted from parents to children are
likely to be judged more worthy of respect” (p. 273).
The exclusion of education in these discussions, the seemingly
deterministic conclusions, and the overly broad, yet specifically
quantitative approach detract from this book as a resource,
especially for those interested in education. The materials
covered in the book would perhaps have been more useful as
individual journal articles.
Reference
Blau, Peter, and Duncan, Otis D. (1967).
The American Occupational Structure. New York: Free Press.
About the Reviewer
Marghi Hagen received her MBA from Cal-State Hayward in 1982,
and worked as an operations management consultant until receiving
her Ph.D. in education from Arizona State University in 2005. She
presently researches, writes, and speaks on issues regarding
wealth inequity in the United States. She is also president of
the Redwood Coast Affordable Housing Commission in Northern
California.
Copyright is retained by the first or sole author,
who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.
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