 Inequality as consequences for individual well-being and persistent inequalities of wealth and income, especially persistence across generations, translate into inequalities that are experienced by parents, children, both within their respective lives and across their lives. So a little bit of jargon for you, sometimes this is called welfareism, and what that means is that we evaluate societies according to the well-being or the welfare of the individuals. Inequality and intergenerational persistence of inequality have essential consequences for the welfare of parents and children. The easiest way to justify that statement is to look at life expectancy. And so what I present here are what are called mortality tables, and what they ask is what is the rate at which individuals die at different ages. If you look at men and women at the fifth percentile versus the ninety-fifth percentile in the income distribution, what you see, of course, is very substantial differences, which especially striking is in the ages 40 to 60. And so I put on the table nothing deeper than the proposition that the inequalities we observe in a society manifest themselves going from income to, you know, the actual bottom line of life expectancy. And of course there's many reasons to think about why that would happen, but for our purposes the first fact is income inequality is associated with life expectancy inequality. Here's a related figure that's black, white, Hispanic, and Asian, and what you see once again is very large differences across ethnic groups in mortality. Now of course some of this is going to be explained by differences in income in the respective groups, but some of it is not going to. So why don't I sneak this one in? My conversation so far has been focused on income inequality, some references to wealth inequality, and suddenly I said here's a new thing to think about, and that is substantial inequality with respect to ethnic group. If we think about individual identities, race, gender, they are fundamental sources of differences in mobility across individuals and across generations. If African-Americans are exhibiting across generations lower life expectancies than whites, that in and of itself is a type of intergenerational persistence. And so in thinking about mobility, thinking about differences between individuals, when us to not only think about the individuals as members of families, that's the parent-child relationship, we also have to think about individuals as members of larger aggregates. Those aggregates are ethnicity and gender. One of the frontiers in thinking about mobility is looking at the interactions between the incomes of parents and the groups parents are members of, and that is part of the story of American mobility and it's part of the story of mobility in any society. The second thing to think about in mobility is to ask about whether or not the persistence we see between parents and children is unjust. That's a different question in the sense that it's asking something really about the reasons for mobility or reasons for persistence. And so what I want to do is put on the table the two, I think, standard ways that philosophers have argued about the fairness of mobility. The first fairness requirement, and much of this work, I want to give credit to John Romer, who's an economist who's written extensively in philosophy, is to argue that inequality is unjust when it is due to factors for which a person is not responsible. If you and I play a poker game and at the end of the game, I've lost $25 and you've won $25, no one would argue I have some claim to being paid back on the grounds that that was an inequity, because I'm responsible for it. I knew what I was doing when I played the game. In contrast, if we think about inequalities due to discrimination, those are ones that are morally objectionable and people are not responsible for them. So they simply don't sit in the same category. If we observe differences in inequality, either cross-sectional or intergenerational, we have to ask to what extent the inequalities we are observing, the persistences we are observing, are due to factors for which people are not reasonably held responsible. And so here I want to highlight some work by sociologist Regina Baker, who's demonstrated the powerful consequences of historical discrimination in what she calls the historical racial regimes that African Americans have experienced. And so what Baker does in her work is she constructs indices of the nature of the racial regimes that different African Americans have experienced. And she does it by looking across states in the South and asking what fraction of the populations were enslaved, what fraction were subsequently sharecroppers, what fraction had this plethora of disenfranchisement devices to keep people from voting, and which fraction of the congresspeople in these states were supportive explicitly in a famous manifesto in favor of racial segregation. What that lets her do is to make an argument that different states in the South had different racial regimes and those had persistent consequences for African Americans as of contemporary periods. So here's an example of what she's able to calculate, and that is she looks at the poverty rate of both blacks and whites and asks about its correlation with the historical racial regimes in those societies. And what she finds is that black poverty is positively associated with the intensity of the racism and discrimination of the different states, but there's really no relationship with whites. What's the message for mobility? The message is that these historical regimes have contemporary consequences for African Americans, and that is about as persistent a phenomena that as one can think about, and obviously since the regimes themselves were intrinsically unjust, not only are people not responsible for them, but the source is an invidious one, and so this is really a very clean example of an unjust inequality. A different way to think about that is work that Baker has done with Dedrick Williams. The idea would be you have a mother, she has a certain marital status, and then you ask the question, what sort of economic risks do the family face? What sort of health risks and what sort of social risks? And so you can then think about mothers that were single, for example, and face three or more risks versus those that face zero. What this figure tells you is if you look across ethnic groups, there are very large differences in the probability of being poor whether or not you're married, cohabiting, or single. The bottom line is intergenerational persistence, in other words, that the consequences are starting life if you're a single mother or not, or you're asking intergenerationally the effects on offspring because of the economic status of the parents. These are deep examples of how unjust, non-responsible factors are relevant in explaining poverty. The work in sociology and these questions of racial regimes and the interaction of ethnicity and risks and other factors with poverty is extremely important in seeing where the unjust mobility exists in American society. Let me make a second argument in thinking about fairness. And it's beyond responsibility. Suppose that I had two workers at a firm and they're doing exactly the same work. They're equally productive. They're going to pay one worker 50% more than another because one's a man and one's a woman. Consider a second situation. There's two workers. One of them is simply more productive than the second. They don't work harder, they just have some skill that makes them 50% more productive and so they're paid 50% more. What I claim is the following. The first observation is to make ask why are they not equivalent and the obvious one is that in example one the inequality was due to prejudice. It involved something having to do with the production process. And so in the thought experiment I rigged it to say the person is simply more productive at the job. And I think there's a common intuition that if somebody's more productive and they get paid more that has a justification that obviously is different from the case where they're paid more because of a prejudice. That intuition can be formalized in the idea of dessert. Do people get what they deserve? Now I want to be clear that within the political philosophy literature dessert has a problematic stance. Some philosophers have argued that dessert's not a meaningful construct. But nevertheless I want to address it because it is a successful argument in the philosophy literature. It matters for how we as citizens typically think the great majority of people do care about dessert. And so here I want to talk about some work due to the economist Caroline Hawks being Christopher Avery. They were able to get an extraordinary data set which had college applications and they could study low income high achieving high school students and ask about the process by which they were being maxed to colleges. To measure the quality of the colleges they applied to they looked at the difference between a student standardized test score and the median test score of the institution that they applied to. And what they found was something that is now called the under max proposition. If you look at the fraction of people that are applying to very low quality schools in the case of high income families it was around six or seven percent in low income families it's well over 40. If we think that high achieving students deserve to go to elite schools it's happening infrequently when the families are disadvantaged. What you can then do is actually go through the calculations to dip more and look at the locations of individuals in terms of their test scores compared to the median of the schools they go to and ask what sort of people go to schools in which they're below the median versus above the median and there you find the contrary thing which is high income families much more likely to go to schools in which you are below the median. The upshot of these two fixtures is to demonstrate that under the traditional meritocratic idea of college admissions there's something about income that matters. The parent's income is translating into lower quality college education that would be justified by the merits in this case the test scores. A second example of this is due to Batek Sharia and Mazumdar and what this figure demonstrates is that if you condition on the AFQT and other standardized tests for blacks and whites the probability of upward mobility is qualitatively different for whites and blacks and in particular black students with high test scores are substantially less likely to exceed their parents than white families are. High test scores again are not producing the same consequences in terms of mobility dynamics for blacks and whites and that's another example where dessert in the traditional definition of the concept is being violated. The final argument I want to put on the table is that there may be reasons to think that mobility is associated with higher levels of economic efficiency. I mentioned that before in the Gatsby curve when I made a comment that there's no reason to think inequality of outcomes and opportunities have to trade off negatively but I want to make a stronger argument here which is that there are reasons to think that a mobile society is a productive one. And so I'll just give you two examples here. One of them simply is that if we match people to the things they're best at, in other words the student who has the best background goes to a college it's possible that that would be one in which the creation of learning would be maximized. Equality of opportunity is productive because it's allowing people to fulfill their potential. Nothing deeper than that. The second idea would be to say that if we think about modern societies individuals are deeply interdependent in their productivities. The productivity of my children as members of the workforce isn't just determined by their education their backgrounds it's determined by everybody's because of the interdependence in the process of production. And so societies in which all individuals have high human capital to use the economist jargon or have high skill levels are likely to be more productive. If you look cross-sectionally over countries one does see that countries that are more in equal tend to have lower growth rates. This is not dispositive that there's a causal relationship between inequality and growth it's more the observation that the data are compatible with that interpretation. What I think is one of the more compelling arguments are that the interdependences across individuals mean that societies in which you have everybody at a certain level of skills are going to be more productive than ones in which you have large disparities and second that making sure that people are able to fulfill their potentials is in the aggregate output GDP however you want to think about it maximizing. So I put those on the table it's basically what the justifications are in thinking about why we care about mobility we care because it's going to have consequences for the well-being of individuals we care because the reasons for lack of mobility can be unjust and therefore we wish to rectify them and third there are reasons why enhancing mobility in certain dimensions simply makes the economy more productive so even if I don't make the traditional ethical argument I would say it benefits the affluence and the wealth of the society.