Once More from the Top: Examining Macro-Social Structures of Inequality to Improve Youth Outcomes

This essay is meant to inspire thinking about how the reader might aim research toward finding policy solutions that disrupt the larger foundations of inequality in the United States to improve youth outcomes (in terms of upward mobility and the factors which promote it), as well as to find policies to promote the attributes that accompany a stable middle-class life for working-class families and their children. The author aims to address the broader "macro-social" context of inequality in two ways. First, most of this essay speaks from an economist-oriented macro view of social and economic inequality. Secondly, this essay acknowledges an even broader macro-social cultural context that concerns the way people are treated whose color, ethnicity, social class, and worldview differs from others. This essay will not dwell on the cultural issues where change is most difficult in these trying times. But the essay does not underestimate the effects of the cultural differences, ethnocentrism, and racism which people face. The hope here is that the micro solutions the Foundation works on to reduce racism and ethnocentrism within social institutions like schools, neighborhoods, and the penal system will complement the types of social and economic interventions outlined in this essay to change both the larger socio-economic and cultural foundations of inequality.