Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, Turner: Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? (2014)
The Point: The authors find that intergenerational mobility in the United States has not decreased over time (looking at birth cohorts from 1971-1993), despite the fact that inequality over this time period has increased. The Quote: "Envision the income distribution as a ladder, with each percentile representing a different rung. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children's chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not
Piketty & Saez: Income Inequality in the U.S. 1913-1998 (2003)
The Point: Nearly half a century later, this paper responds to Simon Kuznets' findings. Saez and Piketty find that over the course of the twentieth century, top income and wage shares in the United States display a U-shaped (not an inverse U-shaped) trend. Their reasoning is that shocks to capital owners during the Great Depression and World War II lowered inequality for a period, but top wage shares began to rise again beginning in the late nineteen sixties. The Quote: "We h
