How Inequality Runs in Families ─ Unfair Advantage and the Limits of Social Mobility

While we like to think that our society gives everyone a fair chance to succeed—and, crucially, move up the social ladder—in reality, children are to an astonishing degree bound by their parents, and the class into which they are born. The children of disadvantaged parents typically achieve less financially and die younger than their peers who are born into better-off families. This book reveals how seemingly ordinary aspects of family life, as small as reading bedtimes stories and as consequential as inherited income, come together to alter children's life chances—and raise fundamental questions about social justice and opportunity.

Gideon Calder is professor of social ethics at the University of South Wales and a member of its Centre for Social Policy.