How much does the family you’re born into decide your future?

Hard work matters, but people do not begin from the same starting line. In today's 'YOUR INDIA' column, Santosh Nair examines intergenerational mobility, family background, geography and the unequal paths available to young Indians.

A boy in rural Bihar and a boy in urban Bengaluru are both told, often by well-meaning adults, that hard work is the great equaliser, that talent and effort decide where a person ends up. Both boys may work equally hard. Their odds of ending up somewhere very different are not equal at all, and the data on this is more precise, and more sobering, than most conversations about merit tend to admit.

Economists who study intergenerational mobility, essentially, how much a child’s economic position depends on their parents’ position, have found that in India, only about 3 per cent of children born into the poorest fifth of families reach the top fifth as adults. Meanwhile, 52 per cent of children born into that poorest fifth remain there themselves, unable to climb out of the exact bracket they were born into. At the other end, 54 per cent of children born into the wealthiest fifth of families stay in that wealthiest fifth. Birth, in other words, predicts a great deal more than most people are comfortable admitting.

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How strongly does birth predict economic opportunity?

There is a technical measure economists use for this called intergenerational wage elasticity,........

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