In my first ever Bloggingheads appearance, I told Conor Friedersdorf that I felt the traditional notion of meritocracy — that your economic outcomes are largely or solely the product of your work ethic and your talent, whatever talent is — was becoming empirically indefensible.

Take a look at this chart from this worthwhile piece by Matt O’Brien.

Students who grow up poor and graduate from college, in other words, are somewhat more likely to end up in the top 20% of all earners than students who grow up rich and drop out of high school. But they are no less likely to end up in the bottom 20% of all earners. Clearly, there is a college premium in these numbers; rich high school dropouts end up in the bottom 40% of earners a full 51% of the time, poor college grads only 33% of the time. But the advantage is far lower than you would believe given our national narratives about hard work and education being the ticket to the good life. The point isn’t to doubt the value of sending poor students to college — in fact, research suggests that they get the most benefit from a college degree — but to get real about the size and power of received economic advantage.

Here’s a related chart, from John Marsh’s excellent 2011 book Class Dismissed.

As we can see, parental income is hugely determinative of child income. More children born to parents from the bottom 20% of earners will end up in that quintile than will end up in the top three quintiles combined. Whatever is going on here, it is not a society where your economic outcomes are largely under your own control, no matter what Peter Thiel thinks.

Nor are educational outcomes immune. GPA by parent’s income band:

Chart via the AACU.

Dropout rate by family income:

Chart via the NCES (PDF).

This is true even concerning tests that are designed to measure “pure” ability.

Chart via The Wall Street Journal.

I am not the kind of person who thinks that every question is an empirical question or that the only way to answer questions usefully or truthfully is through a graph or numbers. Quite the contrary: I deeply believe in the need for humanistic and philosophical claims to truth, along with the empirical quantitative types of knowing that I frequently engage in when researching. The question is, what kind of claims are being made, and what kinds of evidence are appropriate to address them? The question of how much control the average individual has over his or her own economic outcomes is not a theoretical or ideological question. What to do about the odds, that’s philosophical and political. But the power of chance and received advantage — those things can be measured, and have to be. And what we are finding, more and more, is that the outcomes of individuals are buffeted constantly by the forces of economic inequality. Education has been proffered as a tool to counteract these forces, but that claim, too, cannot withstand scrutiny. Redistributive efforts are required to address these differences in opportunity.

In the meantime, it falls on us to chip away, bit by bit, on the lie of American meritocracy.