父母职业对儿女的影响.docVIP

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, Chinas 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