Why aren't you richer

Maybe you didn't choose your parents wisely, nor did your friends and neighbors. Were they married? Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez think it's better for the kids if they were;

...the strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure such as the fraction of single parents in the area. ... parents' marital status does not matter purely through its effects at the individual level. Children of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.

We note that Barack Obama recently ducked answering a question about just this fact, put to him by Bill O'Reilly. Ducked by saying something about how many speeches he'd made about how important it was to get fathers to make their child support payments.