I once read a study ... from the Cato Institute, so I don't entirely trust it, but ... claiming that though the US has particularly poor income redistribution in cash terms, the relatively poor get a considerable amount of price reductions and in-kind benefits. The report claimed that by this broader measure showed US benefits as similar to the rest of the advanced world. ... But that isn't my point here.
My point here is that the report had a graph of "annual consumption level" (measured in dollars) vs. "percentile on the income distribution". That curve was remarkably flat across the bottom 80 percentiles, basically doubling from 0th to 80th. But above 80th, the curve was relatively steep, increasing by a factor of several into the high 90s, and above that, increasing at increasing rates.
The consequence would be that working hard to move up 5 percentiles doesn't gain you much unless you're already above about the 80th percentile, but above that level, relatively small rank changes make a big difference in your consumption level. Naively, this should encourage affluent parents to be far more interested in maximizing their children's potential than non-affluent parents. And that does seem to be how parents behave.
I once read a study ... from the Cato Institute, so I don't entirely trust it, but ... claiming that though the US has particularly poor income redistribution in cash terms, the relatively poor get a considerable amount of price reductions and in-kind benefits. The report claimed that by this broader measure showed US benefits as similar to the rest of the advanced world. ... But that isn't my point here.
My point here is that the report had a graph of "annual consumption level" (measured in dollars) vs. "percentile on the income distribution". That curve was remarkably flat across the bottom 80 percentiles, basically doubling from 0th to 80th. But above 80th, the curve was relatively steep, increasing by a factor of several into the high 90s, and above that, increasing at increasing rates.
The consequence would be that working hard to move up 5 percentiles doesn't gain you much unless you're already above about the 80th percentile, but above that level, relatively small rank changes make a big difference in your consumption level. Naively, this should encourage affluent parents to be far more interested in maximizing their children's potential than non-affluent parents. And that does seem to be how parents behave.
It's certainly how my parents behaved, Worley!