酸的和甜的父母职业对儿女的影响

Inequality in China: O brother

, where art thou?

经济学人

CHINA

has enjoyed (and suffered) more than its fair share of social mobility in recent decades.

Between 1981 and 2005, over 600m Chinese moved out of poverty, according to Shaohua Chen

and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank. Some Chinese of modest means became fabulously rich.

But not all social mobility was upwards. From 1949 to the end of the 1960s, China's communists

uprooted landlords, expropriated capitalists, and banished bourgeois intellectuals to the hinterlands.

Through collectivisation, socialisation and rustication, they dismantled the traditional mechanisms

(land, capital, schooling) by which the well-to-do pass on their advantages to their offspring.

Some of those mechanisms may now be back

in operation, however. Inequality

in China has, of

course, risen sharply in the past 30 years. A

few scholars are now documenting its transmission

from

one

generation

to

the

next.

In

a

2010 paper,

for

example,

Yingqiang

Zhang

of

Beijing

Jiaotong

University

and

Tor

Eriksson

of

Aarhus

University,

Business

and

Social

Sciences,

in

Denmark looked at the offspring of thousands of households included in a longitudinal survey of

nine provinces from 1989 to 2006. The offspring experienced diverging fortunes over the years,

roughly in line with national trends. This rising inequality might not be worrying if it reflected an

increasingly

dynamic,

meritocratic

society,

rewarding

greater

effort

or

ability.

But

the

authors

estimate that 63% of this inequality in outcomes was due to inequality of opportunity.

Inequality

of

opportunity

is

not

easy

to

measure,

or

even

to

define.

Economists

tend

to worry

when

some

people

are

barred

from

making

their

full

contribution

to

society, while

other

people

reap disproportionate rewards, taking more from the national product than they add to it. That is

not just unfair; it is inefficient.

Philosophers go further. They feel people should be rewarded or punished only for the things they

can choose, such as effort, and not for circumstances outside their control. Those circumstances

include obvious inherited privileges, such as wealth and social connections. But the definition can

extend further, to include many things we normally associate with merit, such as talent. We do not,

after all, get to choose our talents, so why should we be rewarded for them, beyond perhaps what

is necessary to make us put those talents to good use?

In

their

2010

paper,

Messrs

Zhang

and

Eriksson

take

account

of

a

number

of

circumstances

beyond

the

individual's

control,

including

the

income,

education

and

employer

of

a

person's

parents;

as

well

as

that

person's

place

of

birth

and

gender.

They

find

that

having

richer

parents

helped a person's prospects (a 10% increment in parental income was reflected in a 4.5% income

boost

for

their

offspring)

and

having

parents

who

were

employed

by

the

state

helped

a

lot.

Parental

education,

on

the

other

hand, was

no

help

whatsoever.

In

these

provinces, where

your

parent works matters more than where he went to school.

Not

every

parental

influence

can

be

observed,

distinguished

and

measured,

however.

So

in

a

recent working

paper,

the

two

authors

look

at

an

alternative

indicator:

namely,

the

correlation

between

one

brother's

income

and

another's.

This

fraternal

comparison

is

a

good

measure

of

the

weight

of

family

and

community

influence,

according

to

Mr

Eriksson.

Two

children

brought

up

by

the same

people,

under

the

same

roof,

in

the same

neighbourhood, will

share many of the same circumstances of birth and background. If these things matter greatly in a

society, they will govern the life chances of both brothers, resulting in a tight correlation

in their

incomes. If, on the other hand, family background matters little, the fraternal correlation will be

low.

In a 2000 paper co-authored by Mr Eriksson, he and his colleagues found that the correlation was

much higher in the US (0.43) than in the Nordic countries (0.14 to 0.26). In China, the correlation

is higher still: 0.57. To put that in context, the authors argue that

knowing what a person's brother

earns gives you a a better guide to a Chinese person's income than economists are normally able to

obtain from knowing how many years of schooling and work experience a person has under his

belt.

There

is,

however,

one

big

obstacle

to calculating

brother correlations

in

China.

Thanks

to

the

one-child policy, few young, urban Chinese have siblings. The author's estimate of 0.57, therefore,

applies only to rural China. In China's cities, inequality of opportunity takes a rather different form:

the second-born are denied the opportunity to exist.

从社会不公看中国父母对孩子未来的帮

助

于

2011-06-01 16:13:27

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某天听人转 述了一位老师的话，

他说，

在中国父母双方必须要有一个人要给自己

的子女挣下社会地位，人活了一辈子不就是图自己的孩子能活得比自己好点么。

今天终于找到了研究依据。

认真择业，

这是一个严肃的话题，

要 知道父母的职业

对孩子的未来而言重要性远远高于给予他的教育。

Tags:

社会公平

|

继承

|

社会关系

|

环境影响

中国已经享受

（并且容忍）< /p>

了几十年超过合理比例的社会阶层变动。

根据世界银

行陈少 华（音译）和马丁

拉瓦雷的调查，

1981

年至

2005

年，有超过

6

亿人脱

离贫困。

一些中国的中产阶级变得异常富有。

但社会阶层的流动并不都是从低 到

高的。

1949

年至

60

年代末，中国共产党将地主阶级连根拔起，剥夺了资本家们