‘Like Father, Like Son’ Holds True for Income

There’s a simple way to get a leg up toward a good lifetime income--be the son of a high-income father.

A Princeton University economist who studied 876 pairs of fathers and sons found that sons of fathers in low-income brackets tend to end up in the same bracket and vice versa.

David Zimmerman, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, said his study shows “that there is much less mobility in the United States economy than had previously been believed.”

Zimmerman used the National Longitudinal Survey, a database assembled at Ohio State University that tracked two groups of older and younger men for 15 years. He found 876 father-son pairs.

Looking at information on income and job type, Zimmerman found that 40% of the sons whose fathers were in the bottom 25% in income in 1965 were in the same quartile themselves in 1980 and 69% were in the lower half. Only 12% had risen to the top 25%.

At the same time, 41% of the sons with fathers in the top 25% in income were in that quartile 15 years later and 9% were in the lowest income group.

Almost half, or 49%, of the sons of professional men were professionals themselves, while 11% held blue-collar jobs. On the flip side, 45% of the sons of blue-collar workers had the same type of job and 16% were in professions.