Timothy Noah: The Mobility Myth | The New Republic

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/100516/inequality-mobility-economy-america-recession-divergence?page=0,1&passthru=NjY1NzJmOGJhMzZlNGYxZDJkOWE0YTVkYjU4NDZjNzg

Or possibly: I am the master of 40 to 50 percent of my fate. In 2001,
Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of
Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to
Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child
incomes over a greater number of years. He found that income
heritability was more like 50 to 60 percent. Mazumder later
recalculated Solon's PSID-based findings applying a more sophisticated
statistical model and found that income heritability was about 60
percent. Then, in a 2004 study, Mazumder approached the question from
a different angle, examining the correlation in incomes among
siblings, using longitudinal survey data collected by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics. That put income heritability at about 50 percent.
"The sibling correlation in economic outcomes and human capital are
larger than the sibling correlation in a variety of other outcomes
including some measures of physical attributes," Mazumder wrote. Most
strikingly, he found that income among brothers actually correlated
more closely than height and weight. I am less the master of my fate
than I am of my body mass index.
---SPSmith