[kudos200]

What proportion of the richest 1% (or 0.1%, or the top 1000 richest people) do you think came from families that were already in the top 1%?

How do you define "out of reach"?

[kudos200]

Well, I got curious and found an answer:

"In 1982, 60 percent of the people on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans came from wealthy families, compared with 32 percent in 2011."

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/joshua-rauh-what-f...

[lostcolony]

Which speaks nothing of policy changes today, and what effect it will have on the future. Nor what disruption will come about to ensure that that trend continues (we are given no data points in that post other than those two, and we had both the PC revolution and the internet in between 1982 and 2011 to massively shake up entire industries).

More to the point, it speaks nothing on how conditions for those not among the elite have changed in that time, and how they will change over time.

[testrun]

Which means that mobility increased.

[WalterBright]

85% of American millionaires are self-made. Source: "The Millionaire Next Door"

[colomon]

But probably mostly not from the bottom quintile, which means this doesn't show up much in income mobility discussions.