Lifetime Socioeconomic Attainments

The Environmental and Genomic Sources of Lifetime Socioeconomic Attainments
Understanding socioeconomic inequality throughout the life course is one of the most important issues in stratification research. Structural and institutional factors have been shown to be significant predictors of status attainment at different stages of life. Although researchers built theories to explain lifetime inequality patterns, seldom did they take human inheritance into account. Social scientists usually consider status attainments as outcomes of social inheritance. However, failure to discern the contributions of both social and biological pathways leads to a weak conclusion that the social status attainments simply represents the effect of social inheritance.

First, the Scarr-Rowe Hypothesis (Tucker-Drob and Bates 2016) contends that genetic potentials are realized more thoroughly when family SES is better, e.g., children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are often constrained from fulfilling their potentials (Guo and Stearns 2002). Second, in the Pareto Hypothesis (Pareto 1909), genetic potentials reach a peak when individuals are from middle class families, but are realized only weakly in both the poorest and the wealthiest families because the environments are too harsh and suppressed for the poorer children to mobile up and too protective and abundant for the rich children to mobile down. Hence, Pareto hypothesized a curvilinear relationship between genetic realization and SES. Third, the Saunders Hypothesis (Saunders 2010) suggests the opposite of the Scarr-Rowe Hypothesis. According to Saunders, the realization of genetic potentials is constrained by high status families by their preservation of higher education for their children irrespective of their innate abilities. However, unlike Pareto, Saunders did not hold that the low-status families restrict their children’s opportunities to realize their genetic

I will use the life course models Shanahan and Hofer (2011) proposed to understand how socioeconomic backgrounds and human inheritance independently and interactively influence status attainments at various life stages. Three models: sensitive period, accumulation, and pathway models, were used to explain how early life events and environments shape the later outcomes. The sensitive period model posits that the impacts of socioeconomic backgrounds in certain periods are long-lasting and critical to future developments. On the contrary, the accumulation model maintains that the early advantages and disadvantages initiate dependent paths that cumulate. Advantageous circumstances tend to be followed by favorable outcomes. Therefore, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Finally, the pathway model emphasizes the influences of favorable and unfavorable events that happen contingently and discontinuously on later outcomes. Individuals react to adversities differently. Although some could not afford to fall, some may be resilient to the challenges because they are socially, psychologically, or biologically