ABSTRACT
Are children born into privilege very likely to end up privileged themselves? Are children born into less privileged families likewise fated to remain in their social class of origin? We care about such questions for many reasons but perhaps primarily because they speak to whether the competition for money, power, and prestige is fairly run. For many people, the brute facts of extreme poverty or inequality are not in themselves problematic or objectionable, and what really matters is simply whether the competition for riches is a fair one in which everyone, no matter how advantaged or disadvantaged their parents may be, has an equal chance to win. This commitment to a fair competition motivates a quite extensive research literature on how much mobility there is, whether some countries have more of it than others, and whether opportunities for mobility are withering away.
