The bottom 20% and the top 20%.
Odds are a lot better for somebody in the bottom 20% to wind up in the middle 20%. That's a different class. That's rising "above your class," at least where you started. But we don't care because it's not the top 20%.
Gee. If my family made $15k/year I'd consider getting up to $66k a year an improvement, even if it means I don't make $200k/year. But this kind of article says that those making $65k/year are just like those making $15k. It has to. If it's an improvement, if that shows social mobility, then the basic premise of the claim made is in error.
Some of the rest of the article is sketchy. It assumes that there's upper, middle, and working classes, no more. But even then, it says that the working class is projected to be <50% white in 2032. (So what is it now, and does "white working class" really have to mean "100% white working class"?)
Wealthier kids do better on the SATs. They have more enrichment activities. Once a teacher of mostly low-income kids said we'd provided our kid with a lot of them. That included going to the (free) botanical gardens and library, to the beach (40 miles away), and to the occasional museum. It included making a catapult out of a cereal box, rubber bands, and popsickle sticks and explaining energy, force, torque and moment arms. But the primary boost is in pre-K and involves vocabulary, phonemic awareness, and syntax--when more highly educated parents have a more interactive, negotiation-based strategy with small children, when they read and force the kid to engage with what's read to them. The vocabulary gap has been documented since the '60s, and hasn't changed. In fact, back then and in later decades two-parent educated families had more "face time" with their kids that counted than working families, and far more than families on welfare and unemployment. You may both work 8-hour days and commute an hour each way and bring work home, but you interact better than unemployed welfare families. That's not $. But for those who view everything in terms of money, it's easy to think that it is. Except it's hard to explain how mere money makes for the change.
The minimum-wage single-mother ex-Montessori teacher I worked with during the Carter/Reagan recession did a great job with her kid. I've known far wealthier families with far lower education levels that did much worse. Even though typically education = $ in the US, it's that kind of example that shows that what's important in many ways isn't $ but education. (That's true for health and life span, accidents, mental health, and so many other things.)
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