The OECD has released a new study on intergenerational mobility.  The pretense: in healthier, growing economies, a person's social status is less dependent on that of their parents.  There are many factors that explain levels of mobility in OECD countries, but the key piece of the equation appears to be education, and how much your parents' education affects your education:

Intergenerational mobility depends on a host of factors that determine individual economic success, some related to the inheritability of traits (such as innate abilities), others related to the family and social environment in which individuals develop. Among environmental factors, some are only loosely related to public policy (such as social norms, work ethics, attitude towards risk and social networks), while others can be heavily affected by policies. Typical examples are policies that shape access to human capital formation, such as public support for early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary education, as well as redistributive policies (e.g. tax and transfer schemes) that may reduce or raise financial and other barriers to accessing higher education. Indeed, in an economic sense, intergenerational social mobility is generally defined in terms of the possibility to move up (or down) the income or wage scale relative to one’s parents. Such mobility is closely related to educational achievement, given the direct link between human capital and labour productivity.

Here is a look at the link between earnings of fathers and sons in some selected countries.  The height of the bar measures the "extent to which sons’ earnings levels reflect those of their fathers."  

Read the study, A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility across OECD Countries, here.