4 The SCF is broadly consistent with other data that show widening wealth and income inequality over the past several decades, but I am employing the SCF because it offers the added advantage of specific detail on income, wealth, and debt for each of 6,000 households surveyed.
5 This detail from family balance sheets provides a glimpse of the relative access to the four sources of opportunity I will discuss. While the recent trend of widening income and wealth inequality is clear, the implications for a particular family partly depend on whether that family’s living standards are rising or not as its relative position changes.