The Pecking Order

by Dalton Conley

We want to think of the family as a haven, a sheltered port from the maelstrom of social forces that rip through our lives. Within the family, we like to think, everyone starts out on equal footing. And yet we see around us evidence that siblings all too often diverge widely in social status, wealth, and education. We think these are aberrant cases--the president and the drug addict, the professor and the convict. Surely in most families, in our families, all children will succeed equally, and when they don't, we turn to one-dimensional answers to explain the discrepancy--birth order, for instance, or gender. In this groundbreaking book, Dalton Conley shows us that inequality in families is not the exception but the norm. More than half of all income inequality in this country occurs not between families but within families. Children who grow up in the same house can--and frequently do--wind up on opposite sides of the class divide. In fact, the family itself is where much inequality i