Thesis: Statistics can mislead, but the numbers seem to say the United States is a vertically mobile and increasingly wealthy society – not a land of literally equal opportunity, to be sure, but for all that still a land of opportunity.

PROGRESS

Have we made progress toward economic equality? How would we know? We have statistical evidence that (in some countries) even least advantaged groups have rising life expectancies, and rising living standards along dimensions we can measure. If we were highly idealistic, we might say rising living standards are not enough: A child's background should have nothing to do with where the child ends up. More realistically, we might say children should have opportunities to be wealthier than their parents were at a comparable age. Progress, so measured, would not be obscured by the truism that upbringing affects a child's life prospects.

One might assume pertinent statistics are readily available, and easy to interpret. Not so. Newspapers often publish articles on the topic, but such articles often are badly mistaken, and it is not easy to do better. I present pertinent data, with painful awareness of how easy it is to be wrong. The information base is always changing, and must be sampled rather than exhaustively reviewed. Moreover, working with available data is a bit like looking for my keys under the streetlamp not because that's where I dropped them but because that's where the light is better.