Further Reading — Chapter 18: Born Lucky? The Sociology of Structural Advantage

Primary Sources and Foundational Research

Corak, Miles. "Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility." Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (2013): 79–102. The paper that gives the Great Gatsby Curve its definitive empirical form. Corak compiles intergenerational earnings elasticity estimates across countries and plots them against Gini coefficients, showing the clean correlation between inequality and immobility. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the data rather than the summary.

Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (2004): 991–1013. The audit study that forms Case Study 2. The methodology section is a model of experimental design. The results section is bracing. Read the paper itself rather than just summaries — the nuance matters.

Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Forms of Capital." In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood, 1986. The foundational statement of Bourdieu's capital framework. Dense but essential. Bourdieu's concept of capital as existing in multiple mutually convertible forms is one of the most powerful tools in sociology.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bourdieu's major work, in which he documents how aesthetic preferences and cultural tastes reproduce class position. More accessible than it sounds, and full of the kind of empirical detail that makes theory concrete.

Books for the General Reader

Markovits, Daniel. The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. New York: Penguin Press, 2019. An accessible and provocative argument that meritocracy, even on its own terms, is self-defeating. Markovits shows how wealthy parents invest to make their children meritocratically competitive, so the competition itself becomes class-structured. Strongly recommended.

Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. A philosophical challenge to meritocracy from one of America's most prominent public philosophers. Sandel's "meritocratic hubris" concept and his examination of what meritocracy does to the psychology of a society are among the most important parts.

Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez. "Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States." Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 (2014): 1553–1623. The Opportunity Insights team's landmark mapping of mobility across US geographies. Shows that where you grow up within the United States has massive effects on your probability of upward mobility — sometimes varying enormously across counties. Publicly accessible data at opportunityinsights.org.

Milanovic, Branko. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Where Milanovic's "citizenship premium" research lives in book form. Shows how global inequality is primarily driven by country of birth and parental class, with compelling data visualizations.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. The foundational modern work on social capital, where Putnam develops his bonding/bridging distinction and documents the decline of American civic and associational life. Dense with data.

Putnam, Robert D. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. More accessible and explicitly focused on inequality and opportunity. Putnam uses a combination of statistics and personal narrative to show how the class gap in childhood experience has widened. Excellent companion to the theoretical frameworks.

On Discrimination and Structural Racism

Pager, Devah. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pager's audit study of how criminal records interact with race in hiring. Shows that white men with criminal records are called back at rates comparable to Black men without records. A devastating illustration of compounded structural luck.

Reskin, Barbara. "The Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination." Contemporary Sociology 29, no. 2 (2000): 319–328. A useful sociological framework for thinking about how discrimination happens through proximate mechanisms (individual decisions) even when macro causes are structural.

Gaddis, S. Michael. "Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market." Social Forces 93, no. 4 (2015): 1451–1479. Extends the Bertrand and Mullainathan design to examine how college prestige interacts with race in callback rates. Finds that attending an elite institution reduces the Black-white gap but does not eliminate it.

Broader Context: Sociology of Inequality

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990. The foundational work in which intersectionality is developed as a framework for understanding how race, gender, and class interact in producing social position. The theoretical home of the intersectionality concept that the chapter uses.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299. Crenshaw's paper that gave intersectionality its name and most influential formulation. Dense legal scholarship but the core argument is accessible.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Where the "veil of ignorance" thought experiment lives in its original form. Rawls' argument for the "difference principle" — that inequalities are only just if they benefit the least advantaged — follows directly from the veil of ignorance reasoning.

Nagel, Thomas. "Moral Luck." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 50 (1976): 115–135. The foundational philosophical paper on moral luck — the philosophical question of whether we can be morally assessed for outcomes beyond our control. Essential background for Chapter 39's treatment of luck ethics.

Accessible Data Sources

Opportunity Insights (opportunityinsights.org) Raj Chetty's research team has made massive amounts of their data publicly accessible, including interactive maps of intergenerational mobility by geography, college attendance rates by income, and more. An extraordinary resource.

The Equality of Opportunity Project The precursor to Opportunity Insights, with research papers on mobility trends, neighborhood effects, and the geography of opportunity.

OECD "A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility" (2018) The OECD's comprehensive report on social mobility across member countries, which includes the most thorough cross-national comparison of the data. Freely available online.

For the Quantitatively Inclined

Solon, Gary. "Cross-Country Differences in Intergenerational Earnings Mobility." Journal of Economic Perspectives 16, no. 3 (2002): 59–66. An earlier review of the international mobility literature that helps contextualize Corak's later work. Shows the methodological challenges in producing comparable IGE estimates.

Pew Research Center: "Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations" (2012) Accessible summary of intergenerational mobility data in the United States, with clear visualizations. Good starting point before moving to the academic literature.