"More than 90 percent of the entrepreneurs came from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds"
I'd like to offer a potential explanation of this: Middle and upper-lower-class individuals have the most to gain by doing things on their own.
* An upper-lower-class or middle class child will not have the same burdens and problems as a lower-class individual as describes in this post. They likely have just enough of a support system to be able to make it on their own.
* An upper-lower-class or middle class child will NOT be able to get into a great college with scholarships. They will likely choose a safer route, like a cheaper state school. This makes them less desirable to employers, so the "safe" route doesn't exist.
Yep this is exactly it I believe. I come from a very middle class background. My dad is mechanic and my mom is a teacher. If I wanted to move up in the world this is the best route. I had neither the business connections nor the ability to afford an Ivy League school. That being said, I was lucky enough to go to a state school and for my parents to support me for about 6 months while I got my company making revenue. So your 2 conditions seem to hold true.
My mom works in education and my parents are divorced, so I bought a degree from a lower-tier state school with loans. I still had to list both parents on my FAFSA and couldn't qualify for any need-based anything.
Basically I ended up paying more for a less valuable piece of paper. Because my chosen school sucked it was really hard to find a job. I'm only where I'm at because I'm lucky, and I don't think many people in my situation would have had similar success.
My understanding is that there is a very strong correlation between a person's educational and socio-economic attainment and those of their parents. The number that sticks in my head is that parental status accounts for 80%+.
If you are born to parents in the lowest quartile you have ~10% chance of making it into the highest by age 26. For people born in the highest the probability is ~30%.
(and if it was random it would, obviously, be 1/4 = 25%)
On its own, leaving a quartile doesn't say anything about the magnitude of the change, so it's not a very useful measure of anything.
Another problem is that because the distribution is so heavily skewed toward the top (for both income and wealth, but more heavily for wealth), dividing the population into equal groups creates a somewhat misleading picture of mobility. A nonlinear breakdown of classes is more reflective of the distribution. In that case we might ask something like how many people move from the bottom 40% to the top 5%.
Although for some questions, e.g. "Can you escape poverty in the US today?" (which could be specified as moving from 1st -> 3rd quartile) this data works.
But, for other types of questions, e.g. "Is extreme wealth mostly hereditary?" you'd need a non-linear breakdown of classes.
That's always the problem with surveys like these. I started the form, then realized it'd be very difficult for me to group everyone into multi-choice categories for job, background, etc.
