Is American Meritocracy Disappearing?

According to the data, economic discrimination is supplanting racial discrimination. JL

Nick Timiraos reports in Real Time Economics:

'How much money your parents have is more important than your own talent. That's the opposite of meritocracy.'
WSJ/NBC poll found that Americans, by more than two to one, are more worried about their ability to get ahead financially than they are about the widening income gap.
A new book by Robert Putnam, the Harvard University political scientist, delivers some detailed insights into what’s behind those worries.
Mr. Putnam drew attention to the growing segregation of America along class lines at a conference hosted last month by the Federal Reserve on economic mobility in which he outlined key themes from the book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.”
Even as Americans have become less segregated across racial and religious lines than they were a generation ago, they have grown more segregated along class lines. Americans are much less likely to go to school, live with, or marry people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, Mr. Putnam said.
“More and more young people aren’t meeting across class lines,” said Mr. Putnam, raising troubling questions about the implications for the next generation of Americans.
Here’s a look at some of the evidence Mr. Putnam brings to support his concerns about the yawning “opportunity gap” in American society.
First, Mr. Putnam documents how the wealthiest parents have spent more than double on their kids what they did a generation ago, even as spending by poorer parents has edged up only slightly.

Mr. Putnam also shows a clear increase in single-parent households for parents who haven’t gone to college. For college-educated parents, the rate of single-parenthood rose until the early 1990s, when it crested and then declined slightly. For those with a high school diploma or less, rates of single-parenthood have climbed without slowing.

This class and educational divide shows up elsewhere. Children whose parents read to them or eat dinner as a family tend to have higher incomes when they grow up. And on this score, the educational gap also looms large.

Participation in high school sports and other extracurricular activities also signals fraying social bonds. Those activities, Mr. Putnam said, provide important soft skills, such as teamwork, or “what my mother would have called ‘gumption.’” Throughout most of the post-World War II period, public schools in the U.S. covered the costs of sports activities for students.
But beginning in the 1990s, school districts began to cut back on those activities, which were increasingly viewed as frills. More often, students have had to pay to play. And when costs can run into the hundreds of dollars a semester, students from the poorest families may not be able to participate.

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Not surprisingly, extracurricular participation has trended down for students from poorer families, Mr. Putnam said. The upshot is that this leaves students with “less savvy” to deal with situations that arise later in social settings or the workplace. They know less about “how to get along in the world,” he said.
Most sobering, Mr. Putnam said, are data from a 2000 analysis showing that that a family’s socioeconomic status has become more important than their educational aptitude in predicting whether an eighth-grader would graduate from college.

“That’s the opposite of meritocracy,” said Mr. Putnam. “How much money your parents have is more important than your own talent.”