As a rhetorical ideal, greater opportunity is hard to beat. Just about all candidates for high elected office declare their commitments to promoting opportunity – who, after all, could be against it? But opportunity is, to borrow a term from the philosopher and political theorist Isaiah Berlin, a "protean" word, with different meanings for different people at different times.

Typically, opportunity is closely entwined with an idea of upward mobility, especially between generations. The American Dream is couched in terms of a daughter or son of bartenders or farm workers becoming a lawyer, or perhaps even a U.S. senator. But even here, there are competing definitions of upward mobility.

It might mean being better off than your parents were at a similar age. This is what researchers call "absolute mobility," and largely relies on economic growth – the proverbial rising tide that raises most boats.

Or it could mean moving to a higher rung of the ladder within society, and so ending up in a better relative position than one's parents.

Scholars label this movement "relative mobility." And while there are many ways to think about status or standard of living – education, wealth, health, occupation – the most common yardstick is household income at or near middle age (which, somewhat depressingly, tends to be defined as 40).

As a basic principle, we ought to care about both kinds of mobility as proxies for opportunity. We want children to have the chance to do absolutely and relatively well in comparison to their parents.

On the One Hand…

So how are we doing? The good news is that economic standards of living have improved over time. Most children are therefore better off than their parents. Among children born in the 1970s and 1980s, 84 percent had higher incomes (even after adjusting for inflation) than their parents did at a similar age, according to a Pew study. Absolute upward income mobility, then, has been strong, and has helped children from every income class, especially those nearer the bottom of the ladder. More than 9 in 10 of those born into families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution have been upwardly mobile in this absolute sense.

There's a catch, though. Strong absolute mobility goes hand in hand with strong economic growth. So it is quite likely that these rates of generational progress will slow, since the potential growth rate of the economy has probably diminished. This risk is heightened by an increasingly unequal division of the proceeds of growth in recent years. Today's parents are certainly worried. Surveys show that they are far less certain than earlier cohorts that their children will be better off than they are.

If the story on absolute mobility may be about to turn for the worse, the picture for relative mobility is already pretty bad. The basic message here: pick your parents carefully. If you are born to parents in the poorest fifth of the income distribution, your chance of remaining stuck in that income group is around 35 to 40 percent. If you manage to be born into a higher-income family, the chances are similarly good that you will remain there in adulthood.

It would be wrong, however, to say that class positions are fixed. There is still a fair amount of fluidity or social mobility in America – just not as much as most people seem to believe or want. Relative mobility is especially sticky in the tails at the high and low end of the distribution. Mobility is also considerably lower for blacks than for whites, with blacks much less likely to escape from the bottom rungs of the ladder. Equally ominously, they are much more likely to fall down from the middle quintile.

Relative mobility rates in the United States are lower than the rhetoric about equal opportunity might suggest and lower than people believe. But are they getting worse? Current evidence suggests not. In fact, the trend line for relative mobility has been quite flat for the past few decades, according to work by Raj Chetty of Stanford and his co-researchers. It is simply not the case that the amount of intergenerational relative mobility has declined over time.

Whether this will remain the case as the generations of children exposed to growing income inequality mature is not yet clear, though. As one of us (Sawhill) has noted, when the rungs on the ladder of opportunity grow further apart, it becomes more difficult to climb the ladder. To the same point, in his latest book, Our Kids – The American Dream in Crisis, Robert Putnam of Harvard argues that the growing gaps not just in income but also in neighborhood conditions, family structure, parenting styles and educational opportunities will almost inevitably lead to less social mobility in the future. Indeed, these multiple disadvantages or advantages are increasingly clustered, making it harder for children growing up in disadvantaged circumstances to achieve the dream of becoming middle class.

The Geography of Opportunity

Another way to assess the amount of mobility in the United States is to compare it to that found in other high-income nations. Mobility rates are highest in Scandinavia and lowest in the United States, Britain and Italy, with Australia, Western Europe and Canada lying somewhere in between, according to analyses by Jo Blanden, of the University of Surrey and Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa. Interestingly, the most recent research suggests that the United States stands out most for its lack of downward mobility from the top. Or, to paraphrase Billie Holiday, God blesses the child that's got his own.

Any differences among countries, while notable, are more than matched by differences within Pioneering work (again by Raj Chetty and his colleagues) shows that some cities have much higher rates of upward mobility than others. From a mobility perspective, it is better to grow up in San Francisco, Seattle or Boston than in Atlanta, Baltimore or Detroit. Families that move to these high-mobility communities when their children are still relatively young enhance the chances that the children will have more education and higher incomes in early adulthood. Greater mobility can be found in places with better schools, fewer single parents, greater social capital, lower income inequality and less residential segregation. However, the extent to which these factors are causes rather than simply correlates of higher or lower mobility is not yet known. Scholarly efforts to establish why it is that some children move up the ladder and others don't are still in their infancy.

Models of Mobility

What is it about their families, their communities and their own characteristics that determine why they do or do not achieve some measure of success later in life?

To help get at this vital question, the Brookings Institution has created a life-cycle model of children's trajectories, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth on about 5,000 children from birth to age 40. (The resulting Social Genome Model is now a partnership among three institutions: Brookings, the Urban Institute and Child Trends). Our model tracks children's progress through multiple life stages with a corresponding set of success measures at the end of each. For example, children are considered successful at the end of elementary school if they have mastered basic reading and math skills and have acquired the behavioral or non-cognitive competencies that have been shown to predict later success. At the end of adolescence, success is measured by whether the young person has completed high school with a GPA average of 2.5 or better and has not been convicted of a crime or had a baby as a teenager.

These metrics capture common-sense intuition about what drives success. But they are also aligned with the empirical evidence on life trajectories. Educational achievement, for example, has a strong effect on later earnings and income, and this well-known linkage is reflected in the model. We have worked hard to adjust for confounding variables but cannot be sure that all such effects are truly causal. We do know that the model does a good job of predicting or projecting later outcomes.

Three findings from the model stand out. First, it's clear that success is a cumulative process. According to our measures, a child who is ready for school at age 5 is almost twice as likely to be successful at the end of elementary school as one who is not.

This doesn't mean that a life course is set in stone this early, however.

Children who get off track at an early age frequently get back on track at a later age; it's just that their chances are not nearly as good. So this is a powerful argument for intervening early in life. But it is not an argument for giving up on older youth.

Second, the chances of clearing our last hurdle – being middle class by middle age (specifically, having an income of around $68,000 for a family of four by age 40) – vary quite significantly. A little over half of all children born in the 1980s and 1990s achieved this goal. But those who are black or born into low-income families were very much less likely than others to achieve this benchmark.

Third, the effect of a child's circumstances at birth is strong. We use a multidimensional measure here, including not just the family's income but also the mother's education, the marital status of the parents and the birth weight of the child. Together, these factors have substantial effects on a child's subsequent success. Maternal education seems especially important.

The Social Genome Model, then, is a useful tool for looking under the hood at why some children succeed and others don't. But it can also be used to assess the likely impact of a variety of interventions designed to improve upward mobility. For one illustrative simulation, we hand-picked a battery of programs shown to be effective at different life stages – a parenting program, a high-quality early-edcation program, a reading and socio-emotional learning program in elementary school, a comprehensive high school reform model – and assessed the possible impact for low-income children benefiting from each of them, or all of them.

No single program does very much to close the gap between children from lower- and higher-income families. But the combined effects of multiple programs – that is, from intervening early and often in a child's life – has a surprisingly big impact. The gap of almost 20 percentage points in the chances of low-income and high-income children reaching the middle class shrinks to six percentage points. In other words, we are able to close about two-thirds of the initial gap in the life chances of these two groups of children. The black-white gap narrows, too.

Looking at the cumulative impact on adult incomes over a working life (all appropriately discounted with time) and comparing these lifetime income benefits to the costs of the programs, we believe that such investments would pass a cost-benefit test from the perspective of society as a whole and even from the narrower prospective of the taxpayers who fund the programs.

What Now?

Understanding the processes that lie beneath the patterns of social mobility is critical. It is not enough to know how good the odds of escaping are for a child born into poverty. We want to know why. We can never eliminate the effects of family background on an individual's life chances. But the wide variation among countries and among cities in the U.S. suggests that we could do better – and that public policy may have an important role to play. Models like the Social Genome are intended to assist in that endeavor, in part by allowing policymakers to bench- test competing initiatives based on the statistical evidence.

America's presumed exceptionalism is rooted in part on a belief that class-based distinctions are less important than in Western Europe. From this perspective, it is distressing to learn that American children do not have exceptional opportunities to get ahead – and that the consequences of gaps in children's initial circumstances might embed themselves in the social fabric over time, leading to even less social mobility in the future.

But there is also some cause for optimism. Programs that compensate at least to some degree for disadvantages earlier in life really can close opportunity gaps and increase rates of social mobility. Moreover, by most any reasonable reckoning, the return on the public investment is high.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in the Milken Institute Review.

Event Information

Despite being a developed and prosperous country, Japan faces a host of basic challenges today and going forward—some of its own creation and others beyond the country’s control. For example, Japan lacks essential natural resources, while also facing overcrowding in cities and depopulation in rural areas. As a result, food and energy self-sufficiency is low. Also, while the dual phenomena of a low birthrate and an ageing population have long been deemed problematic, these issues are rapidly growing more serious. The problems Japan faces today are potentially the same problems the rest of the world will face in the near future. Japan, therefore, may serve as a bellwether for the global community as many nations anticipate similar challenges in the future.  

On October 26, the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at Brookings and the U.S.-Japan Research Institute co-hosted Hiroshi Komiyama, chairman of the Mitsubishi Research Institute and president emeritus of the University of Tokyo, for a discussion of his recent book, “Beyond the Limits to Growth: New Ideas for Sustainability from Japan.” In this book, Komiyama examines the issues facing Japan—and the world—presenting a number of potential viable solutions and offering insights into Japan’s experiences and the lessons it can provide for a more sustainable future.

Audio

• Overcoming the limits to growth: Sustainability lessons from Japan

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20151026_japan_sustainability_transcript
• hiroshi komiyama presentation

Event Information

The financial sector has undergone major changes in response to the Great Recession and post-crisis regulatory reform, as a result of the Dodd-Frank Act and Basel III. These changes have created serious questions about the sector’s role in supporting economic growth and how it affects financial and overall economic stability.

On June 8, the Initiative on Business and Public Policy at Brookings explored the intersection of the financial system and economic growth with the goal of informing the public policy debate. The event featured a keynote address by Richard Berner, director of the Office of Financial Research and other participants with a wide range of views from a variety of backgrounds. Among other issues, the experts considered the changing landscape of the financial sector; growth-promoting allocation and investment decisions; credit availability for low- and moderate-income households; the ideal balance between growth and stability; and the impact of the 2014 midterm elections on regulatory reform.

 Follow the conversation at @BrookingsEcon or #Finance.

Video

• Keynote remarks by Richard Berner
• The financial sector: How has it changed?
• The view from the trenches
• The future of the U.S. financial sector

Audio

• Can the financial sector promote growth and stability?

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• Aaron Kleins presentation
• 20150608 BAER slides
• 20150608 MEHTA slides
• 20150608_financial_sector_stability_transcript

As government funding for disability insurance is expected to run out next year, Congress should re-evaluate the costs of the program.

Nine million people in America today are receiving Social Security Disability Insurance, double the number in 1995 and six times the number in 1970. With statistics like that, it’s hardly surprising to see some in Congress worry that more will enroll in the program and costs would continue to rise, especially since government funding for disability insurance is expected to run out by the end of next year. If Congress does nothing, benefits would fall by 19% immediately following next year’s presidential election. So, Congress will likely do something. But what exactly should it do?

Funding for disability insurance has nearly run out of money before. Each time, Congress has simply increased the share of the Social Security payroll tax that goes for disability insurance. This time, however, many members of Congress oppose such a shift unless it is linked to changes that curb eligibility and promote return to work. They fear that rolls will keep growing and costs would keep rising, but findings from a report by a government panel conclude that disability insurance rolls have stopped rising and will likely shrink. The report, authored by a panel of the Social Security Advisory Board, is important in that many of the factors that caused disability insurance to rise, particularly during the Great Recession, have ended.

• Baby-boomers, who added to the rolls as they reached the disability-prone middle age years, are aging out of disability benefits and into retirement benefits. 


• The decades-long flood of women increased the pool of people with the work histories needed to be eligible for disability insurance. But women’s labor force participation has fallen a bit from pre-Great Recession peaks, and is not expected again to rise materially. 


• The Great Recession, which led many who lost jobs and couldn’t find work to apply for disability insurance, is over and applications are down. A recession as large as that of 2008 is improbable any time soon. 


• Approval rates by administrative law judges, who for many years were suspected of being too ready to approve applications, have been falling. Whatever the cause, this stringency augurs a fall in the disability insurance rolls.

The American people deserve to have a federal government that is both responsive and effective. That simply isn’t the case for more than 1 million people who are awaiting the adjudication of their applications for disability benefits from the Social Security Administration.

Washington can and must do better. This gridlock harms applicants either by depriving them of much-needed support or effectively barring them from work while their cases are resolved because having any significant earnings would immediately render them ineligible. This is unacceptable.

Within the next month, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog, will launch a study on the issue. More policymakers should follow GAO’s lead. A solution to this problem is long overdue. Here’s how the government can do it.

Congress does not need to look far for an example of how to reduce the SSA backlog. In 2013, the Veterans Administration cut its 600,000-case backlog by 84 percent and reduced waiting times by nearly two-thirds, all within two years. It’s an impressive result.

Why have federal officials dealt aggressively and effectively with that backlog, but not the one at SSA? One obvious answer is that the American people and their representatives recognize a debt to those who served in the armed forces. Allowing veterans to languish while a sluggish bureaucracy dithers is unconscionable. Public and congressional outrage helped light a fire under the bureaucracy. Administrators improved services the old-fashioned way — more staff time. VA employees had to work at least 20 hours overtime per month.

Things are a bit more complicated at SSA, unfortunately. Roughly three quarters of applicants for disability benefits have their cases decided within about nine months and, if denied, decide not to appeal. But those whose applications are denied are legally entitled to ask for a hearing before an administrative law judge — and that is where the real bottleneck begins.

There are too few ALJs to hear the cases. Even in the best of times, maintaining an adequate cadre of ALJs is difficult because normal attrition means that SSA has to hire at least 100 ALJs a year to stay even. When unemployment increases, however, so does the number of applications for disability benefits. After exhausting unemployment benefits, people who believe they are impaired often turn to the disability programs. So, when the Great Recession hit, SSA knew it had to hire many more ALJs. It tried to do so, but SSA cannot act without the help of the Office of Personnel Management, which must provide lists of qualified candidates before agencies can hire them. SSA employs 85 percent of all ALJs and for several years has paid OPM approximately $2 million annually to administer the requisite tests and interviews to establish a register of qualified candidates. Nonetheless, OPM has persistently refused to employ legally trained people to vet ALJ candidates or to update registers. And when SSA sought to ramp up ALJ hiring to cope with the recession challenge, OPM was slow to respond.

In 2009, for example, OPM promised to supply a new register containing names of ALJ candidates. Five years passed before it actually delivered the new list of names. For a time, the number of ALJs deciding cases actually fell. The situation got so bad that the president’s January 2015 budget created a work group headed by the Office of Management and Budget and the Administrative Conference of the United States to try to break the logjam. OPM promised a list for 2015, but insisted it could not change procedures. Not trusting OPM to mend its ways, Congress in October 2015 enacted legislation that explicitly required OPM to administer a new round of tests within the succeeding six months.

These stopgap measures are inadequate to the challenge. Both applicants and taxpayers deserve prompt adjudication of the merits of claims. The million-person backlog and the two-year average waits are bad enough. Many applicants wait far longer. Meanwhile, they are strongly discouraged from working, as anything more than minimal earnings will cause their applications automatically to be denied. Throughout this waiting period, applicants have no means of self-support. Any skills applicants retain atrophy.

The shortage of ALJs is not the only problem. The quality and consistency of adjudication by some ALJs has been called into question. For example, differences in approval rates are so large that differences among applicants cannot plausibly explain them. Some ALJs have processed so many cases that they could not possibly have applied proper standards. In recognition of both problems, SSA has increased oversight and beefed up training. The numbers have improved. But large and troubling variations in workloads and approval rates persist.

For now, political polarization blocks agreement on whether and how to modify eligibility rules and improve incentives to encourage work by those able to work. But there is bipartisan agreement that dragging out the application process benefits no one. While completely eliminating hearing delays is impossible, adequate administrative funding and more, better trained hearing officers would help reduce them. Even if OPM’s past record were better than it is, OPM is now a beleaguered agency, struggling to cope with the fallout from a security breach that jeopardizes the security of the nation and the privacy of millions of current and past federal employees and federal contractors. Mending this breach and establishing new procedures will — and should — be OPM’s top priority.

That’s why, for the sake of everyone concerned, responsibility for screening candidates for administrative law judge positions should be moved, at least temporarily, to another agency, such as the Administrative Conference of the United States. Shortening the period that applicants for disability benefits now spend waiting for a final answer is an achievable goal that can and should be addressed. Our nation’s disabled and its taxpayers deserve better.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Politico.

Editor’s note: The remarks below were delivered to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget on release of their report on the SSDI Solutions Initiative. 

I want to thank Marc Goldwein for inviting me to join you for today’s event. We all owe thanks to Jim McCrery and Earl Pomeroy for devoting themselves to the SSDI Solutions Initiative, to the staff of CFRB who backed them up, and most of all to the scholars and practitioners who wrote the many papers that comprise this effort. This is the sort of practical, problem-solving enterprise that this town needs more of. So, to all involved in this effort, ‘hats off’ and ‘please, don’t stop now.’

The challenge of improving how public policy helps people with disabilities seemed urgent last year. Depletion of the Social Security Disability Insurance trust loomed. Fears of exploding DI benefit rolls were widespread and intense.

Congress has now taken steps that delay projected depletion until 2022. Meticulous work by Jeffrey Liebman suggests that Disability Insurance rolls have peaked and will start falling. The Technical Panel appointed by the Social Security Advisory Board, concurred in its 2015 report. With such ‘good’ news, it is all too easy to let attention drift to other seemingly more pressing items.

But trust fund depletion and growing beneficiary rolls are not the most important reasons why policymakers should be focusing on these programs.

The primary reason is that the design and administration of disability programs can be improved with benefit to taxpayers and to people with disabilities alike. And while 2022 seems a long time off, doing the research called for in the SSDI Solutions Initiative will take all of that time and more. So, it is time to get to work, not to relax.

Before going any further, I must make a disclaimer. I was invited to talk here as chair of the Social Security Advisory Board. Everything I am going to say from now on will reflect only my personal views, not those of the other members or staff of the SSAB except where the Board has spoken as a group. The same disclaimer applies to the trustees, officers, and other staff of the Brookings Institution. Blame me, not them.

Let me start with an analogy. We economists like indices. Years ago, the late Arthur Okun came up with an index to measure how much pain the economy was inflicting on people. It was a simple index, just the sum of inflation and the unemployment rate. Okun called it the ‘misery index.’

I suggest a ‘policy misery index’—a measure of the grief that a policy problem causes us. It is the sum of a problem’s importance and difficulty. Never mind that neither ‘importance’ nor ‘difficulty’ is quantifiable. Designing and administering interventions intended to improve the lives of people with disabilities has to be at or near the top of the policy misery index.

Those who have worked on disability know what I mean. Programs for people with disabilities are hugely important and miserably hard to design and administer well. That would be true even if legislators were writing afresh on a blank legislative sheet. That they must cope with a deeply entrenched program about which analysts disagree and on which many people depend makes the problems many times more challenging.

I’m going to run through some of the reasons why designing and administering benefits for people determined to be disabled is so difficult. Some may be obvious, even banal, to the highly informed group here today. And you will doubtless think of reasons I omit.

First, the concept of disability, in the sense of a diminished capacity to work, has no clear meaning, the SSA definition of disability notwithstanding. We can define impairments. Some are so severe that work or, indeed, any other form of self-support seems impossible. But even among those with severe impairments, some people work for pay, and some don’t.

That doesn’t mean that if someone with a given impairment works, everyone with that same impairment could work if they tried hard enough. It means that physical or mental impairments incompletely identify those for whom work is not a reasonable expectation. The possibility of work depends on the availability of jobs, of services to support work effort, and of a host of personal characteristics, including functional capacities, intelligence, and grit.

That is not how the current disability determination process works. It considers the availability of jobs in the national, not the local, economy. It ignores the availability of work supports or accommodations by potential employers.

Whatever eligibility criteria one may establish for benefits, some people who really can’t work, or can’t earn enough to support themselves, will be denied benefits. And some will be awarded benefits who could work.

Good program design helps keep those numbers down. Good administration helps at least as much as, and maybe more than, program design. But there is no way to reduce the number of improper awards and improper denials to zero.

Second, the causes of disability are many and varied. Again, this observation is obvious, almost banal. Genetic inheritance, accidents and injuries, wear and tear from hard physical labor, and normal aging all create different needs for assistance.

These facts mean that people deemed unable to work have different needs. They constitute distinct interest groups, each seeking support, but not necessarily of the same kind. These groups sometimes compete with each other for always-limited resources. And that competition means that the politics of disability benefits are, shall we say, interesting.

Third, the design of programs to help people deemed unable to work is important and difficult. Moral hazard is endemic. Providing needed support and services is an act of compassion and decency. The goal is to provide such support and services while preserving incentives to work and to controlling costs borne by taxpayers.

But preserving work incentives is only part of the challenge. The capacity to work is continuous, not binary. Training and a wide and diverse range of services can help people perform activities of daily living and work.

Because resources are scarce, policy makers and administrators have to sort out who should get those services. Should it be those who are neediest? Those who are most likely to recover full capacities? Triage is inescapable. It is technically difficult. And it is always ethically fraught.

Designing disability benefit programs is hard. But administering them well is just as important and at least as difficult.

These statements may also be obvious to those who here today. But recent legislation and administrative appropriations raise doubts about whether they are obvious to or accepted by some members of Congress.

Let’s start with program design. We can all agree, I think, that incentives matter. If benefits ceased at the first dollar earned, few who come on the rolls would ever try to work.

So, Congress, for many years, has allowed beneficiaries to earn any amount for a brief period and small amounts indefinitely without losing eligibility. Under current law, there is a benefit cliff. If—after a trial work period—beneficiaries earn even $1 more than what is called substantial gainful activity, $1,130 in 2016, their benefit checks stop. They retain eligibility for health coverage for a while even after they leave the rolls. And for an extended period they may regain cash and health benefits without delay if their earnings decline.

Members of Congress have long been interested in whether a more gradual phase-out of benefits as earnings rise might encourage work. Various aspects of the current Disability Insurance program reflect Congress’s desire to encourage work.

The so-called Benefit Offset National Demonstration—or BOND—was designed to test the impact on labor supply by DI beneficiaries of one formula—replacing the “cliff” with a gradual reduction in benefits: $1 of benefit last for each $2 of earnings above the Substantial Gainful Activity level.

Alas, there were problems with that demonstration. It tested only one offset scenario – one starting point and one rate. So, there could be no way of knowing whether a 2-for-1 offset was the best way to encourage work.

And then there was the uncomfortable fact that, at the time of the last evaluation, out of 79,440 study participants only 21 experienced the offset. So there was no way of telling much of anything, other than that few people had worked enough to experience the offset.

Nor was the cause of non-response obvious. It is not clear how many demonstration participants even understood what was on offer.

Unsurprisingly, members of Congress interested in promoting work among DI recipients asked SSA to revisit the issue. The 2015 DI legislation mandates a new demonstration, christened the Promoting Opportunity Demonstration, or POD. POD uses the same 2 for 1 offset rate that BOND did, but the offset starts at an earnings level at or below earnings of $810 a month in 2016—which is well below the earnings at which the BOND phase-out began.

Unfortunately, as Kathleen Romig has pointed out in an excellent paper for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this demonstration is unlikely to yield useful results. Only a very few atypical DI beneficiaries are likely to find it in their interest to participate in the demonstration, fewer even than in the BOND. That is because the POD offset begins at lower earnings than the BOND offset did. In addition, participants in POD sacrifice the right under current law that permits people receiving disability benefits to earn any amount for 9 months of working without losing any benefits.

Furthermore, the 2015 law stipulated that no Disability Insurance beneficiary could be required to participate in the demonstration or, having agreed to participate, forced to remain in the demonstration. Thus, few people are likely to respond to the POD or to remain in it.

There is a small group to whom POD will be very attractive—those few DI recipients who retain a lot of earning capacity. The POD will allow them to retain DI coverage until their earnings are quite high. For example, a person receiving a $2,000 monthly benefit—well above the average, to be sure, but well below the maximum—would remain eligible for some benefits until his or her annual earnings exceeded $57,700. I don’t know about you, but I doubt that Congress would favorably consider permanent law of this sort.

Not only would those participating be a thin and quite unrepresentative sample of DI beneficiaries in general, or even of those with some earning capacity, but selection bias resulting from the opportunity to opt out at any time would destroy the external validity of any statistical results.

Let me be clear. My comments on POD, the demonstration mandated in the 2015 legislation, are not meant to denigrate the need for, or the importance of, research on how to encourage work by DI recipients, especially those for whom financial independence is plausible. On the contrary, as I said at the outset, research is desperately needed on this issue, as well as many others. It is not yet too late to authorize a research design with a better chance of producing useful results.

But it will be too late soon. Fielding demonstrations takes time:

• to solicit bids from contractors,
• for contractors to formulate bids,
• for government boards to select the best one,
• for contractors to enroll participants,
• for contractors to administer the demonstration,
• and for analysts to process the data generated by the demonstrations.

That process will take all the time available between now and 2021 or 2022 when the DI trust fund will again demand attention. It will take a good deal more time than that to address the formidable and intriguing research agenda of SSDI Solutions Initiative.

I should like to conclude with plugs for two initiatives to which the Social Security Advisory Board has been giving some attention.

It takes too long for disability insurance applicants to have their cases decided. Perhaps the whole determination process should be redesigned. One of the CFRB papers proposes just that. But until that happens, it is vital to shorten the unconscionable delays separating initial denials and reconsideration from hearings before administrative law judges to which applicants are legally entitled. Procedural reforms in the hearing process might help. More ALJs surely will.

The 2015 budget act requires the Office of Personnel Management to take steps that will help increase the number of ALJs hired. I believe that the new director, Beth Colbert, is committed to reforms. But it is very hard to change legal interpretations that have hampered hiring for years and the sluggish bureaucratic culture that fostered them.

So, the jury is out on whether OPM can deliver. In a recent op-ed in Politico, Lanhee Chen, a Republican member of the SSAB, and I jointly endorsed urged Congress to be ready, if OPM fails to deliver on more and better lists of ALJ candidates and streamlined procedures for their appointment, to move the ALJ examination authority to another federal organization, such as the Administrative Conference of the United States.

Lastly, there is a facet of income support policy that we on the SSAB all agree merits much more attention than it has received. Just last month, the SSAB released a paper entitled Representative Payees: A Call to Action. More than eight million beneficiaries have been deemed incapable of managing $77 billion in benefits that the Social Security Administration provided them in 2014.

We believe that serious concern is warranted about all aspects of the representative payee program—how this infringement of personal autonomy is found to be necessary, how payees are selected, and how payee performance is monitored.

Management of representative payees is a particular challenge for the Social Security Administration. Its primary job is to pay cash benefits in the right amount to the right person at the right time. SSA does that job at rock-bottom costs and with remarkable accuracy. It is handing rapidly rising workloads with budgets that have barely risen. SSA is neither designed nor staffed to provide social services. Yet determining the need for, selecting, and monitoring representative payees is a social service function.

As the Baby Boom ages, the number of people needing help in administering cash benefits from the Social Security Administration—and from other agencies such as the Veterans Administration—will grow. So will the number needing help in making informed choices under Medicare and Medicaid.

The SSAB is determined to look into this challenge and to make constructive suggestions. We are just beginning and invite others to join in studying what I have called “the most important problem the public has never heard of.”

Living with disabilities today is markedly different from what it was in 1956 when the Disability Insurance program began. Yet, the DI program has changed little. Beneficiaries and taxpayers are pay heavily the failure of public policy to apply what has been learned over the past six decades about health, disability, function, and work.

I hope that SSA and Congress will use well the time until it next must legislate on Disability Insurance. The DI rolls are stabilizing. The economy has grown steadily since the Great Recession. Congress has reinstated demonstration authority. With adequate funding for research and testing, the SSA can rebuild its research capability. Along with the external research community, it can identify what works and help Congress improve the DI program for beneficiaries and taxpayers alike. The SSDI Solutions Initiative is a fine roadmap.

We can be sure that the 2016 presidential candidates, whoever they are, will be in favor of promoting opportunity and cutting poverty. The question is: how? In our contribution to a new volume published today, “Campaign 2016: Eight big issues the presidential candidates should address,” we show that people who clear three hurdles—graduating high school, working full-time, and delaying parenthood until they in a stable, two-parent family—are very much more likely to climb to middle class than fall into poverty:

But what specific policies would help people achieve these three benchmarks of success?  Our paper contains a number of ideas that candidates might want to adopt. Here are a few examples: 

1. To improve high school graduation rates, expand “Small Schools of Choice,” a program in New York City, which replaced large, existing schools with more numerous, smaller schools that had a theme or focus (like STEM or the arts). The program increased graduation rates by about 10 percentage points and also led to higher college enrollment with no increase in costs.

2. To support work, make the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) refundable and cap it at $100,000 in household income. Because the credit is currently non-refundable, low-income families receive little or no benefit, while those with incomes above $100,000 receive generous tax deductions. This proposal would make the program more equitable and facilitate low-income parents’ labor force participation, at no additional cost.

3. To strengthen families, make the most effective forms of birth control (IUDs and implants) more widely available at no cost to women, along with good counselling and a choice of all FDA-approved methods. Programs that have done this in selected cities and states have reduced unplanned pregnancies, saved money, and given women better ability to delay parenthood until they and their partners are ready to be parents. Delayed childbearing reduces poverty rates and leads to better prospects for the children in these families.

These are just a few examples of good ideas, based on the evidence, of what a candidate might want to propose and implement if elected. Additional ideas and analysis will be found in our longer paper on this topic.

As a rhetorical ideal, greater opportunity is hard to beat. Just about all candidates for high elected office declare their commitments to promoting opportunity – who, after all, could be against it? But opportunity is, to borrow a term from the philosopher and political theorist Isaiah Berlin, a "protean" word, with different meanings for different people at different times.

Typically, opportunity is closely entwined with an idea of upward mobility, especially between generations. The American Dream is couched in terms of a daughter or son of bartenders or farm workers becoming a lawyer, or perhaps even a U.S. senator. But even here, there are competing definitions of upward mobility.

It might mean being better off than your parents were at a similar age. This is what researchers call "absolute mobility," and largely relies on economic growth – the proverbial rising tide that raises most boats.

Or it could mean moving to a higher rung of the ladder within society, and so ending up in a better relative position than one's parents.

Scholars label this movement "relative mobility." And while there are many ways to think about status or standard of living – education, wealth, health, occupation – the most common yardstick is household income at or near middle age (which, somewhat depressingly, tends to be defined as 40).

As a basic principle, we ought to care about both kinds of mobility as proxies for opportunity. We want children to have the chance to do absolutely and relatively well in comparison to their parents.

On the One Hand…

So how are we doing? The good news is that economic standards of living have improved over time. Most children are therefore better off than their parents. Among children born in the 1970s and 1980s, 84 percent had higher incomes (even after adjusting for inflation) than their parents did at a similar age, according to a Pew study. Absolute upward income mobility, then, has been strong, and has helped children from every income class, especially those nearer the bottom of the ladder. More than 9 in 10 of those born into families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution have been upwardly mobile in this absolute sense.

There's a catch, though. Strong absolute mobility goes hand in hand with strong economic growth. So it is quite likely that these rates of generational progress will slow, since the potential growth rate of the economy has probably diminished. This risk is heightened by an increasingly unequal division of the proceeds of growth in recent years. Today's parents are certainly worried. Surveys show that they are far less certain than earlier cohorts that their children will be better off than they are.

If the story on absolute mobility may be about to turn for the worse, the picture for relative mobility is already pretty bad. The basic message here: pick your parents carefully. If you are born to parents in the poorest fifth of the income distribution, your chance of remaining stuck in that income group is around 35 to 40 percent. If you manage to be born into a higher-income family, the chances are similarly good that you will remain there in adulthood.

It would be wrong, however, to say that class positions are fixed. There is still a fair amount of fluidity or social mobility in America – just not as much as most people seem to believe or want. Relative mobility is especially sticky in the tails at the high and low end of the distribution. Mobility is also considerably lower for blacks than for whites, with blacks much less likely to escape from the bottom rungs of the ladder. Equally ominously, they are much more likely to fall down from the middle quintile.

Relative mobility rates in the United States are lower than the rhetoric about equal opportunity might suggest and lower than people believe. But are they getting worse? Current evidence suggests not. In fact, the trend line for relative mobility has been quite flat for the past few decades, according to work by Raj Chetty of Stanford and his co-researchers. It is simply not the case that the amount of intergenerational relative mobility has declined over time.

Whether this will remain the case as the generations of children exposed to growing income inequality mature is not yet clear, though. As one of us (Sawhill) has noted, when the rungs on the ladder of opportunity grow further apart, it becomes more difficult to climb the ladder. To the same point, in his latest book, Our Kids – The American Dream in Crisis, Robert Putnam of Harvard argues that the growing gaps not just in income but also in neighborhood conditions, family structure, parenting styles and educational opportunities will almost inevitably lead to less social mobility in the future. Indeed, these multiple disadvantages or advantages are increasingly clustered, making it harder for children growing up in disadvantaged circumstances to achieve the dream of becoming middle class.

The Geography of Opportunity

Another way to assess the amount of mobility in the United States is to compare it to that found in other high-income nations. Mobility rates are highest in Scandinavia and lowest in the United States, Britain and Italy, with Australia, Western Europe and Canada lying somewhere in between, according to analyses by Jo Blanden, of the University of Surrey and Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa. Interestingly, the most recent research suggests that the United States stands out most for its lack of downward mobility from the top. Or, to paraphrase Billie Holiday, God blesses the child that's got his own.

Any differences among countries, while notable, are more than matched by differences within Pioneering work (again by Raj Chetty and his colleagues) shows that some cities have much higher rates of upward mobility than others. From a mobility perspective, it is better to grow up in San Francisco, Seattle or Boston than in Atlanta, Baltimore or Detroit. Families that move to these high-mobility communities when their children are still relatively young enhance the chances that the children will have more education and higher incomes in early adulthood. Greater mobility can be found in places with better schools, fewer single parents, greater social capital, lower income inequality and less residential segregation. However, the extent to which these factors are causes rather than simply correlates of higher or lower mobility is not yet known. Scholarly efforts to establish why it is that some children move up the ladder and others don't are still in their infancy.

Models of Mobility

What is it about their families, their communities and their own characteristics that determine why they do or do not achieve some measure of success later in life?

To help get at this vital question, the Brookings Institution has created a life-cycle model of children's trajectories, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth on about 5,000 children from birth to age 40. (The resulting Social Genome Model is now a partnership among three institutions: Brookings, the Urban Institute and Child Trends). Our model tracks children's progress through multiple life stages with a corresponding set of success measures at the end of each. For example, children are considered successful at the end of elementary school if they have mastered basic reading and math skills and have acquired the behavioral or non-cognitive competencies that have been shown to predict later success. At the end of adolescence, success is measured by whether the young person has completed high school with a GPA average of 2.5 or better and has not been convicted of a crime or had a baby as a teenager.

These metrics capture common-sense intuition about what drives success. But they are also aligned with the empirical evidence on life trajectories. Educational achievement, for example, has a strong effect on later earnings and income, and this well-known linkage is reflected in the model. We have worked hard to adjust for confounding variables but cannot be sure that all such effects are truly causal. We do know that the model does a good job of predicting or projecting later outcomes.

Three findings from the model stand out. First, it's clear that success is a cumulative process. According to our measures, a child who is ready for school at age 5 is almost twice as likely to be successful at the end of elementary school as one who is not.

This doesn't mean that a life course is set in stone this early, however.

Children who get off track at an early age frequently get back on track at a later age; it's just that their chances are not nearly as good. So this is a powerful argument for intervening early in life. But it is not an argument for giving up on older youth.

Second, the chances of clearing our last hurdle – being middle class by middle age (specifically, having an income of around $68,000 for a family of four by age 40) – vary quite significantly. A little over half of all children born in the 1980s and 1990s achieved this goal. But those who are black or born into low-income families were very much less likely than others to achieve this benchmark.

Third, the effect of a child's circumstances at birth is strong. We use a multidimensional measure here, including not just the family's income but also the mother's education, the marital status of the parents and the birth weight of the child. Together, these factors have substantial effects on a child's subsequent success. Maternal education seems especially important.

The Social Genome Model, then, is a useful tool for looking under the hood at why some children succeed and others don't. But it can also be used to assess the likely impact of a variety of interventions designed to improve upward mobility. For one illustrative simulation, we hand-picked a battery of programs shown to be effective at different life stages – a parenting program, a high-quality early-edcation program, a reading and socio-emotional learning program in elementary school, a comprehensive high school reform model – and assessed the possible impact for low-income children benefiting from each of them, or all of them.

No single program does very much to close the gap between children from lower- and higher-income families. But the combined effects of multiple programs – that is, from intervening early and often in a child's life – has a surprisingly big impact. The gap of almost 20 percentage points in the chances of low-income and high-income children reaching the middle class shrinks to six percentage points. In other words, we are able to close about two-thirds of the initial gap in the life chances of these two groups of children. The black-white gap narrows, too.

Looking at the cumulative impact on adult incomes over a working life (all appropriately discounted with time) and comparing these lifetime income benefits to the costs of the programs, we believe that such investments would pass a cost-benefit test from the perspective of society as a whole and even from the narrower prospective of the taxpayers who fund the programs.

What Now?

Understanding the processes that lie beneath the patterns of social mobility is critical. It is not enough to know how good the odds of escaping are for a child born into poverty. We want to know why. We can never eliminate the effects of family background on an individual's life chances. But the wide variation among countries and among cities in the U.S. suggests that we could do better – and that public policy may have an important role to play. Models like the Social Genome are intended to assist in that endeavor, in part by allowing policymakers to bench- test competing initiatives based on the statistical evidence.

America's presumed exceptionalism is rooted in part on a belief that class-based distinctions are less important than in Western Europe. From this perspective, it is distressing to learn that American children do not have exceptional opportunities to get ahead – and that the consequences of gaps in children's initial circumstances might embed themselves in the social fabric over time, leading to even less social mobility in the future.

But there is also some cause for optimism. Programs that compensate at least to some degree for disadvantages earlier in life really can close opportunity gaps and increase rates of social mobility. Moreover, by most any reasonable reckoning, the return on the public investment is high.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in the Milken Institute Review.