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The embellishments that Alger made to the Cinderella story — the use of banking, the youthful initiative, the importance of education and prudent investment — carried much greater significance in the 19th century, when intergenerational mobility was in fact on the rise for a period.

The U.S. economy produces larger wage gaps, proportionately fewer high-quality jobs and less intergenerational mobility than most other developed nations do, the researchers found.

That data, constructed by researchers at Opportunity Insights, has separately been used to study patterns in intergenerational mobility by race and region in the United States.

The charts above suggest that sons of immigrants from nearly every country that sent large numbers to the United States had higher intergenerational mobility than sons of native-born fathers.

“Unbound” goes deeper, however, than merely recounting the now well-known facts that income and wealth have become increasingly concentrated and that intergenerational mobility has stagnated or fallen.