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Getting Ahead: Economic and Social Mobility in America (Urban Institute Press) Paperback – March 1, 1998
| Daniel P. McMurrer (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Isabel V. Sawhill (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Price | New from | Used from |
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- Print length100 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRowman & Littlefield Publishers
- Publication dateMarch 1, 1998
- Dimensions6 x 1 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100877666741
- ISBN-13978-0877666745
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Product details
- Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (March 1, 1998)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 100 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0877666741
- ISBN-13 : 978-0877666745
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1 x 9 inches
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

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Isabel V. Sawhill is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. She serves as co-director of the Budgeting for National Priorities project and co-director of the Center on Children and Families. She holds the Cabot Family Chair. In 2009, she began the Social Genome Project, an initiative by the Center on Children and Families that seeks to determine how to increase economic opportunity for disadvantaged children. She served as vice president and director of the Economic Studies program from 2003 to 2006. Prior to joining Brookings, Dr. Sawhill was a senior fellow at The Urban Institute. She also served as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1995, where her responsibilities included all of the human resource programs of the federal government, accounting for one third of the federal budget.
Her research has spanned a wide array of economic and social issues, including fiscal policy, economic growth, poverty and inequality, welfare reform, the well-being of children, and changes in the family. In addition, she has authored or edited numerous books and articles including Creating an Opportunity Society with Ron Haskins; Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2005: Meeting the Long-Run Challenge and Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget, both with Alice Rivlin; One Percent for the Kids: New Policies, Brighter Futures for America’s Children; Welfare Reform and Beyond: The Future of the Safety Net; Updating America’s Social Contract: Economic Growth and Opportunity in the New Century; Getting Ahead: Economic and Social Mobility in America; and Challenge to Leadership: Economic and Social Issues for the Next Decade.
Dr. Sawhill helped to found The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and now serves as the President of its board. She has been a Visiting Professor at Georgetown Law School, Director of the National Commission for Employment Policy, and President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. She also serves on a number of boards. She attended Wellesley College and received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1968.
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Given their backgrounds and interests, it's not surprising that McMurrer and Sawhill are politically a bit to the right of center. Furthermore, as proponents of free market capitalism, it's easy to predict that they will locate the provenance of economic difficulties, such as diminished upward mobility, declining payoffs for investments in education, and exaggerated income inequality in ineffective schools and families that provide less and less nurturing and wholesome discipline. In fact, the authors offer these explanations for sagging economic prospects as if they were truisms, subscribed to by everyone and not in need of substantiation.
Nevertheless, it is a tribute to the scholarly integrity of the authors that they offer table after table and graph after graph that make the case that we live in ever-tougher economic circumstances, and that there is no reason to believe that education and the family are the institutions at fault. Instead, though the authors never say this and might well deny that it is a reasonable inference from their work, it seems clear that our economic difficulties are rooted in the organization and functioning of the economy itself.
Consistent with this judgment, McMurrer and Sawhill vividly graph the expected average income for high school graduates if patterns established after World War II had continued until 1995: just over $40,000 per year! In contrast to this projection, however, the actual average in the mid-1990's was little more than $15,000 per year.
In one of the most striking bar charts I've ever seen, the authors also show us that, in the aggregate, there is an astonishingly strong positive relationship between family income and SAT score. Insofar as getting into a college or university is dependent on one's SAT score, as incomes increase -- level by level by level -- one's chances of success are increased markedly.
There are all sorts of ways in which McMurrer and Sawhill could have made the data they display in one figure after another more credible. Some of their graphical accounts make the reader want to cry out for introduction of controls.
Nevertheless, all tolled, the evidence the authors offer in simple but visually arresting form on page after page of this slim volume make it quite clear that most of us are not Getting Ahead, nor are we likely to.


