 If you work hard and you go to a good college, well, that's easy for my kids. After all, they had a college professor for a father. All the family friends were college professors, or children of college professors, et cetera. In other words, they lived in a world where going to college is what you did. What about children that are from neighborhoods where very few people went to college, in which the act of going to college is to move into a world that's very different than one you grew up in? And so I think understanding the whole process of upward mobility for the disadvantage requires thinking about sociological and psychological determinants. My name is Stephen Durloff. I'm a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago. And I'm also the inaugural director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth, Inequality, and Mobility. When my son was born, I looked at this little boy, and of course, I thought he was going to be president, and I wanted to do everything possible for him. You see all of the other parents, and I saw many parents that were clearly disadvantaged and they just troubled me profoundly to the core that they weren't going to have the same opportunities to do for their children. What I wanted to do for mine, and obviously they loved him just as much, and so I found that a very transformative experience. I had been working on certain mathematical models in economics, which turned out to have applications for thinking about inequality. The concept of mobility has two dimensions. One of them is intergenerational. You want to know to what extent, family background, things that are determined during childhood and adolescence, how important are they for adult outcomes? What is family income destiny? If your parents are rich, you're certainly going to be rich. If your parents are poor, you're sure to be poor. Another type of mobility is within the, across the life cycle. Do we see individuals, if they start off doing well, are they locked into doing well for many years, and if they start off doing poorly, are they locked in doing poorly for many years? The reason that that's important is because, well, first of all, well-being has to do with your whole life course, not just how you do one year versus another, but second, it's the trajectories of the parents that are influencing the children. Understanding the things about parents of different ages not only tells you something about their own well-being, but also the well-being of themselves as it relates to the children and the children themselves and the way that they're creating norms for education, their ability to devote time to them and locate their children in places, neighborhoods, and schools that are conducive to success. The other question is whether or not more mobile societies are collectively more productive. If we think about a mobile society, one of the things we think about in terms of mobility is people fulfill their potential. They're not constrained by family background. Well, a society in which people are fulfilling their potential, if you add up all those potentials, that's gonna be collectively a more productive society. That'll be true both because individuals are themselves more productive, they're reaching their own potentials, but because of our interdependences. One can identify a set of policies I think are efficacious in improving mobility, improvements in early childhood investment, and in education, particularly among the less advantaged, that's where school finance rules are going to matter. I think the conventional anti-poverty policies matter and earning income tax credit matters. Child tax credits matter. Universal health insurance would matter. How do we create environments which avoid the reinforcement of adverse experiences? And the final thing to say is that I think that we need to think very hard about the reduction of the levels of incarceration in society because it's having devastating consequences both for those who are incarcerated and their families. And second, I believe that policy such as affirmative action are absolutely part of the story of how to improve opportunities and dynamically how to have a more productive society. I think the general idea of a good society is that background is not destiny.