The Hand We’re Dealt

Dalton Conley Asks Why Some People Get Ahead And Others Fall Behind

What does it take, in this era of growing inequality in the United States, for someone to move up the social ladder? How people answer that question tends to reveal how they view our society: whether they believe hard work is rewarded no matter who you are, or whether they think race, class, and economics place restraints on your chance of success.

Sociologist Dalton Conley has spent much of his career studying the forces behind social mobility. Born in 1969, he grew up in a New York City housing project where he was one of only a few white children. His parents, he says, were “liberal starving artists.” His mother was a writer, and his father was a painter whose ancestors had come over on the Mayflower. They lived on food stamps, but family friends were willing to let Conley’s parents use their address to transfer him to a progressive school in Greenwich Village, where his fellow students were more privileged. The experience gave him a lasting curiosity about inequality and race, subjects he would later write about in Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America and Honky, a lyrical memoir about his childhood.

The search to understand unequal outcomes has led Conley to other subjects, including some that sociology has traditionally avoided, such as the roles played by fetal development and genetic inheritance. He recently completed a PhD in biology to help him examine whether certain genetic markers — DNA sequences — help determine success or failure in life. He even has a tattoo on his left forearm depicting a marker associated with learning from one’s mistakes. (He got it after his divorce.)

A former dean of social sciences at New York University, Conley still teaches at NYU. He is also an adjunct professor at Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the dean of arts and sciences at the University of the People, a tuition-free institution. His other books include The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate W. Strully and Neil G. Bennett), The Pecking Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become, and Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. He is affiliated with the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and served as a senior advisor to the United Nations Millennium Project. In 2005 he became the first sociologist to win the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, given annually to one young researcher in science, mathematics, or engineering.

I met Conley in 2004 at a conference called Inequality Matters. He was presenting findings from The Pecking Order, and I was working for a nonprofit that aimed to reform philanthropy. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. Even so, I was a little hesitant to interview him. He’s used to being the one asking the questions, and he always seems to be mining for data.

We held this free-ranging conversation in his home, a converted warehouse space in Manhattan that he shares with his daughter and son and their many pets: two cats, a yippy Yorkshire terrier, three guinea pigs, a lizard, a rabbit, a fish, and a bullfrog (thought to be expired until he was discovered thawing in the pond on the back deck during my visit). Believe it or not, this menagerie is smaller than previous ones kept by the family.

Conley is precise about word choices and careful to avoid making generalizations. (He began our conversation with a caveat: “You have to put ‘on average’ after everything I say.”) Still, he comes across as easygoing and is quick to laugh at his own shortcomings. Being the father of two teenagers undoubtedly helps keep him humble.

Conrad: What are the questions that concern you?

Conley: I’m interested in who gets ahead in this country from generation to generation and why. My father loved handicapping the horses, so I spent much of my childhood sitting at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York, sifting through used betting tickets, reading the Daily Racing Form, and learning how to predict winners. Basically that’s what I do today, only with people. I want to know: What are the social mechanisms by which upward or downward mobility happens? How does what we inherit from our parents and forebears affect our opportunities in life? As my dad did with the fillies, I examine the data and try to figure out who’s going to win the race.

Conrad: So what does it mean to “win” in life?

Conley: I look at a variety of outcomes, but I try to stick to those that can be clearly measured. So I don’t look at whether people are happy. I don’t look at their sense of spiritual well-being. Those are important, but you face an almost insurmountable challenge when you attempt to measure them. Take happiness, for example: the Scandinavians are said to be the happiest people on earth, yet Scandinavian countries also have relatively high suicide rates.

Instead I turn to data that don’t leave a lot of room for interpretation: I look at how much infants weigh at birth. I look at how long people live. I look at how far people go in school. I look at net worth — how much money people have. I also consider genetic information. These are not subjective measures. They’re not opinions or feelings.

Conrad: So what have you found in regard to social mobility? If someone has achieved a higher socioeconomic status than his or her parents, which factors proved most significant?

Conley: Only two measurable socioeconomic aspects of the parents really matter in predicting who succeeds: the parents’ education, which is the most important, and the family’s wealth, which is the second most important. By “wealth” I don’t mean how much the parents make a year. I mean net worth, including savings, property, and other financial resources.

To come to this conclusion, I used a survey called the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. I like to call it “America’s family tree.” It started with five thousand U.S. families in 1968 and has followed members of those families ever since, even after the kids grew up and moved out or a couple divorced. Because those kids have grown up to start their own families, the survey has grown dramatically in size. It now contains information on three, and in some cases four, generations. We can look at siblings and see how they have fared differently. We can compare cousins. We can document the rise and fall of people’s fortunes through recessions and booms, divorces and remarriages. The survey really is a national treasure. Unfortunately, because of budget cutbacks in the 1990s, it now happens only every other year. Keeping that study going is one of the most important efforts in my field. It’s the social-science equivalent of a 1,200-year-old sequoia: if you cut it down, it’ll take lifetimes to replace it.

Anyway, in the 1990s the survey started asking not just about income and employment but also about wealth and savings. So I looked at kids who had been living with their parents in 1984 and then followed them as they grew up and formed their own households, tracking their educational and economic outcomes. What I found is that the parents’ incomes and what jobs they had didn’t matter. Even race didn’t matter. There were racial differences, but only because there also were differences in wealth and education between races.

Conrad: Why do you think that parents’ education has such a pronounced effect? Does it give children a head start in school? Does it correlate to greater stability at home?

Conley: To be honest, I don’t really know. It could be that highly educated parents provide their offspring with a more cognitively stimulating home environment. There was a famous, if somewhat flawed, study documenting how the number of words spoken to young children varied by social class. The researchers didn’t measure the size of the parents’ vocabulary but the literal number of words they spoke to the child. Between families with highly educated parents and those with less-educated parents, there was a gap of millions of words by the time kids hit school age. But, again, it could also be that education is merely a proxy for other factors, such as attitudes toward schooling or social connections. It could even be that parents with more education pass on “smarter” genes. The answer is probably that education is working through a whole host of channels.

Conrad: A moment ago you made a distinction between income and wealth. Could you clarify that?

Conley: It’s an important distinction. Most past studies of social mobility looked at occupation or income or both. My contribution, standing on the shoulders of giants, was to examine wealth or net worth. You can think of income as a stream: if you stop going to work or get cut from the welfare rolls, the stream ceases to flow. Wealth is more of a pond, and it’s the stuff of which mobility is made. Economists have shown that somewhere between 25 and 75 percent of our lifetime wealth accumulation is a result of what we receive from prior generations. This doesn’t mean just inheritance, which usually comes late in life, but gifts along the way, such as your parents’ financing your college education or cosigning the loan for your first mortgage. Wealth is also where the legacy of racial inequality shows up starkly: the median African American family has just 8 percent as much wealth as the median white family — a gap that isn’t explainable by income differences. A white family with an income of thirty thousand dollars a year will likely have money in savings, whereas a black family making thirty thousand a year is likely to be in debt. And this isn’t because white people save more. The data show that saving rates are the same for blacks and whites.

Part of the reason there’s this enormous gap is that whites have had more wealth to pass on generation after generation. It’s also a result of discriminatory policies such as “redlining,” in which banks refused to give people loans to buy homes in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Homeownership represents the largest part of a family’s nest egg, and rates today are 73 percent for whites and 43 percent for blacks. Homeownership also creates wealth in a number of ways: You get a mortgage deduction, meaning you pay less income tax than if you were renting. Owner-occupied communities tend to have better public services — everything from garbage pickup to policing to public schools. And, of course, you can borrow from the equity in your home to start a business or send your kid to college.

In fact, when you compare black kids and white kids from families with the same income and wealth, the rates of college graduation are the same; the rates of employment are the same; the number of welfare recipients is the same. This is why I say that the issue is not race, per se. Race is just closely associated with significant wealth differences.

Conrad: In the U.S. we cling to the story of the self-made millionaire, and so we downplay the significance of how much wealth we’re born into.

Conley: In sociology we talk about ascription versus achievement. It’s similar to nature versus nurture in biology. Ascription means what is determined by conditions of birth and is therefore out of our control. For example, your physical appearance. Achievement is your performance — anything over which you do have some control. Achievement-based rewards are considered more legitimate in our society. We say we’re a society of equal opportunity and that the conditions of your birth don’t really affect you as much as they do in, say, post-feudal Europe, but that’s an idealized image. The truth is that there are plenty of ascriptive factors that affect how Americans fare in life.

We typically measure the extent to which your family background matters by comparing how alike you and your parents are, or you and your siblings. When there are significant differences, that’s generally seen as an indication of more achievement and less ascription, but not always. For example, you and your sister, assuming you grew up together in the same household, may have had equality of family wealth, but you could still be more attractive than your sister. Economist Daniel Hamermesh and others have found that attractive people enjoy a premium in the labor market — and, of course, in the marriage market, which is another important, if less often studied, factor in economic attainment.

Within black families it appears that skin tone is a good predictor of which siblings will do better. This seems paradoxical, since I just said that race matters only because of its association with family wealth, but there is sorting going on within families that may not show up in a large-scale analysis across families. In white families an overweight sibling will tend to do worse economically than his or her thinner brothers and sisters.

Another factor is sexual orientation. I found that LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] individuals tend to have more social mobility than their heterosexual peers — sometimes upward, and other times downward. LGBT people from wealthy families tend to fare worse because they often don’t get full access to the family’s resources and are kept at a distance by their kin. But those from disadvantaged backgrounds typically show better outcomes than their siblings. A working-class lesbian from a dying Rust Belt town might move to a big city with a more robust labor market. A gay black kid from the ghetto might distance himself from street life and leave home as soon as he is able.

Conrad: Speaking of the ghetto, in your memoir Honky you write about growing up poor in a neighborhood where you were one of only a few white children. Were the issues of race and class as stark to you then as they are today?

Conley: Definitely not. My awareness of race took a long time to sink in. I remember my sister got a “real” Barbie while her friends all got dark-skinned Barbies. And in first grade I was the only one who didn’t get hit by the teacher — an African American teacher, I should add. Also I didn’t get the same treatment by the police as my neighbors did. But before I started school, I didn’t really understand race. Once I wanted a little sister so badly that I stole a baby girl by grabbing her stroller in the park of our housing complex. I didn’t get very far, of course. Her parents turned out to be the leaders of the local black-separatist movement! [Laughs.] But at the time I saw no reason why people with completely different skin tones couldn’t be from the same family. Only later was I able to make real sense of the race and class dynamics that were rife throughout my childhood.

A friend of mine grew up in the reverse situation. He was the only African American kid in a rural white community. He says that in preschool another kid asked him why his skin color wasn’t coming off when he washed his hands. My friend then attempted to scrub the brown off his own hands. It was the first time he’d realized that skin tone was important.

In the U.S. we get hung up on skin color because of our history of slavery, but it’s not inherent to the concept of race. In Japan, for example, a minority group called the Burakumin experience much the same bigotry that African Americans do in the U.S. The Burakumin, who make up about 3 percent of Japan’s population, are descended from people made homeless by the Japanese feudal wars during the shogun era. They have been socially isolated since the fourteenth century.

Even though the Burakumin look identical to the majority of Japanese — seven hundred years is nothing in evolutionary time — they experience discrimination. There are firms that racist Japanese parents can hire to make sure that their potential son- or daughter-in-law does not have Burakumin blood. As with African Americans and white Americans, there’s a life-expectancy gap, a test-score gap, a health gap, and an economic gap between the Burakumin and the Japanese majority. When individuals from both groups immigrate to the U.S., however, all those differences go away. They are all just Japanese.

Conrad: Are there examples of other “races” with no physical indicators?

Conley: In Nazi Germany Jews were marked with a Star of David because they weren’t physically different. In Rwanda the Tutsis and Hutus are said to have different physical features, but ultimately the distinction relies on whether one’s ancestors were a nomadic people or a farming people. In Brazil there is a continuum of many shades, rather than the two simple categories of “black” and “white.”

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