New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

White Mother: Great Grandparents rich oil $$$ in Texas. Wife no formal education, alcoholic. Father business degree white men making oil money in Texas. Had ONE child. The ONE child was a girl (My grandmother). Rich Girls in Texas are not allowed to learn how to handle money. She went to finishing school. She inherited the money, and did as she was told and taught, gave her money to the man to let men handle the money.

Married a Southern babtist preacher and he squandered it all in 5 years dont know how. BY the time my mom was born they lived on a farm in South Georgia and he was preaching at his church.

My mom was a preachers daughter who fell in love with the Poor Native American kid in South Georgia, from the Natives who refused to go on the trail of tears.

It was the beginning of a BEAUTIFUL LOVE STORY! lol. and the rest is history as they say.

and yeh, my mom is extremely religious as is all my family. I am not. So add that onto the list of socially isolating struggles and criticism I had to deal with. I was taught women are not supposed to talk about science or politics, and that science is a scheme to eliminate god from the equation. Ummm yup, it is! It's a pretty good one too, trying to replace God with understanding and answers.

So In Summary Background FEMALE NATIVE AMERICAN CHRISTIAN WELFARE POOR

goes to be an Electrical Engineer working in a male dominated environment, compounding every minority status to the extreme. Dude, its been an interesting ride but I can tell you one thing, I don't give a F^%& about what other people think now because I'm used to being an outlier, so I HAD to overcome that to do well and have good self esteem and tell myself I can keep learning and do well.

Some people would complain and say its been hard. It has been hard and socially isolating but actually if you choose and force yourself to look at your uniqueness as an advantage I think about things differently and it usually gives me an edge in applying ideas I have or understanding how to communicate and implement them. People get scared or attack things they don't understand. I'm not as understandable or relatable to other people but the more you hang out with intelligent people the less they do that so its just motivation to be around better people and do better things and work on more challenging things.

Also, people will try to tear you down at first, but if you hold your ground and respect yourself and respect other people regardless of how they respect themselves and how they respect you, eventually they will respect you, but theres not alot of instant gratification here, so I can only say this in retrospect.

The influence your community has on your personal decisions and how that impacts your personal wealth is significant.

Weve already witnessed highschool suicides tend to happen in clusters. Weve witnessed it as a nation at Gunn Highschool in SanFran and other areas. If one kid does it, the two others who were seriously considering it are more likely to follow through.

This is also a root cause of the housing foreclosure crisis. Wired Magazine did a piece. One of the missing pieces of analysis was the correlation noticed when one person on your street forecloses on a house, how much the likelihood goes up that other people on your street will too. They retroactively did that analysis and found a huge correlation.

We should do this type of correlation in alot more studies, particularly ones dedicated to trying to understand socioeconomic mobility.

I say correlation because correlation is not causation. The causation we can't know right away but it might be helpful to first look at some significant correlations and then try to understand if there is a cause and effect relationship. Or at the very least come up with some likliehood statistics.