Writing assignment-Wage Gap

Writing assignment-Wage Gap

In their paper, Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman explore some of the effects of parents’ occupation (a proxy for a family’s social class) on their offspring’s earnings in elite professions. The key take-away from Laurison and Friedman’s work is that class matters: even in the apparently meritocratic system of elite professions like law, science, finance, and medicine (where salaries ought to reflect technical competencies), people who grew up in ‘lower class’ households earn less than those in similar jobs but who grew up in ‘upper class’ households, all things considered.

In a brief 750 word essay, I want you explain the wage gap observed in Laurison and Friedman’s paper in terms of Bourdieu’s idea of capital. For this, I want you to engage with the wealth of data and examples provided by Laurison and Friedman, showing the specific amounts that different individuals earn throughout their lives depending on their class backgrounds. I also want you to reflect on how this might work in the United States. Britain is heavily classed. Is the US different? Is it a classless society? Should we expect to find less wage penalties in the US? Or more?

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