The goal is instantly familiar to any parent (and most children): the hope that one day, your kids will be able to make a better life for themselves than the one you were able to live, and, in turn, that they will provide greater opportunities for generations yet to come.

On the broad socioeconomic scale, there are two ways to judge success in comparison to your parents: “Absolute mobility” measures whether or not the child is wealthier than their parents at the same age; “Relative mobility” is more complicated, measuring where the child ranks on the socioeconomic class scale, again compared to their parents at the same age.

For much of the 20th century, relative mobility was not regarded as all that important. With the GDPs of developed countries consistently expanding and their populations enjoying rising standards of living across generations, simply making more than your parents was all it took to achieve greater success than them.

The definition is less clear today. The number of high-level jobs (i.e. those that pay well and/or are in positions of power) and the frequency and attainability of higher education are no longer increasing as quickly from one generation to the next, and today’s economic crises, from student loans to stock market bubbles, prevent the same rapid growth in standard of living. Upward relative mobility is now more desired than ever, and yet by the very nature of basic fractions, the top fifth of society cannot expand to accommodate more; not even the talented can move up without someone from the upper class simultaneously moving down. Just as poverty is understood to be cyclical or have a “sticky floor,” membership in the upper class self-perpetuates, keeping even those unmerited at the top.

“Opportunity hoarding” becomes an issue when the achievement gap moves beyond matters of homework help and parental attention into the arena of institutional bias.

To study this phenomenon, Abigail McKnight, a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, worked with a team to examined the social mobility

 of approximately 17,000 children born in the UK during the same week in 1970. Subjects’ initial cognitive scores were taken at age five, and the most recent follow-up conducted at age 42. The study unambiguously showed high-scoring five-year-olds should make for adults with high-earning or “top” jobs.

Troublingly, students’ cognitive scores skewed higher if they had wealthy parents: 37 percent of five-year-olds from the most-advantaged social class qualified as “high-skilled,” compared to just 8 percent of those from relatively disadvantaged families. The inverse was also true: 6 percent of those from advantaged backgrounds qualified as “low-skill,” while 35.8 percent of the disadvantaged fell into this category.

McKnight’s findings are unsurprising, though sobering. Among the children who scored low at age five in McKnight’s study, those from a more disadvantaged socioeconomic class were significantly less likely to be high-earners as adults, compared to low-scorers whose parents had higher income or higher educational attainment. Low-scoring children of parents with an upper-level degree had a substantially higher likelihood of making it into the top income bracket as adults when researchers controlled for differences in varying quality of British private and public education.

Differences can derive from natural potential and parenting from birth to age five (and onward). But there are profound socioeconomic influences on (and limits to) parenting. 

As Brookings expert Richard Reeves writes

, “If a parent works hard to help their infant become more skilled, this is unambiguously fantastic news. The fact that more affluent parents are more willing or able to do so simply means we have to work harder to help ensure poorer kids do not fall behind. Otherwise the parenting gap becomes an opportunity gap.” Opportunity hoarding becomes an issue when the gap moves past simple help and attention and become institutionally skewed (via privileged access to education, connections or other means) towards the rich and powerful.

Talented but underprivileged kids are met with fewer opportunities to translate their high potential into tangible career success. The high probability of the wealthiest, low-scoring children to stay the wealthiest contributes to less room at the top for those who are underprivileged-but-talented to succeed.

And yet, for a society ideally based off competitive merit, success is unnaturally skewed towards the already rich and powerful, not the talented. Success may occur when a little natural ability and preparation meet a little luck and opportunity, but when luck and opportunity are inherited institutional privileges, the importance of natural ability and preparation fades away.

“Downward Mobility, Opportunity Hoarding and the ‘Glass Floor,’”

 UK Social Mobility & Child Poverty Commission, June 2015.

 September 29, 2013. Accessed July 16, 2015.

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Just as poverty is understood to be cyclical or have a “sticky floor,” membership in the wealthiest class self-perpetuates, regardless of merit (or lack thereof).

As social mobility fades, so does meritocracy

confirmation bias — a cherry picked selection of the information we receive — in our choices of media

, often without even realizing it. Sometimes, it’s not only realized, but embraced: political liberals have MSNBC, and conservatives have Fox News. The human being, as Warren Buffett once helpfully explained, is best at “interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

This human tendency is not limited to the media. Science, oft 

sold as the clear-headed, unbiased answer to confirmation bias

, is open to the same human manipulations, purposeful and accidental — and significantly more often than we might guess.

Research scientists are under pressure to get published in the most prominent journals possible, and their chances increase considerably if they find positive (thus “impactful”) results. For journals, the appeal is clear, 

: they’ll make a bigger splash if they discover some new truth, rather than if they simply refuted old findings. The reality is that science rarely produces data so appealing.

The quest for publication has led some scientists to manipulate data, analysis, and even their original hypotheses. 

In 2014, John Ioannidis, a Stanford professor conducting researching on research (or ‘meta-research’), found that across the scientific field

, “many new proposed associations and/or effects are false or grossly exaggerated.” Ioannidis, who estimates that 85 percent of research resources are wasted, claims that the frequency of positive results well exceeds how often one should expect to find them. He pleads with the academic world to put less emphasis on “positive” findings.

Ironically, the scientific method is meant to combat confirmation bias: scientists are encouraged to search primarily for falsifying evidence, then confirmation of their hypothesis. The rigors of science, however, are often outweighed by the realities of getting and keeping a job. With their academic careers and tenure contingent on getting published, scientists have moved from testing “How am I wrong?” to simply asking “How am I right?” “At present, we mix up exploratory and confirmatory research,” 

Brian Nosek, a psychologist with the University of Virginia, told Philip Ball

. “You can’t generate hypotheses and test them with the same data.”

Though the scientific method’s elementary steps call for a preconceived hypothesis and purpose, these are rarely written down or explicitly defined. 

The “Chrysalis effect,” as psychologists at the University of Iowa call the bias

, is when scientists retroactively formulate their hypotheses, allowing for a cleaner, but biased presentation of data and analysis. When asked to explicitly define the purpose and hypothesis of their studies before beginning their experiments, researchers have been amazed by how conscious or subconscious decisions have caused their analysis to deviate significantly from their original objective. “Having this awareness helps me to separate which results I trust and which ones I trust less,” 

Susann Fiedler, a behavioral economist from Germany, told 

Perhaps more alarming than the retroactive manipulation of research is the effect of the original hypothesis and subtle biases of an experimenter on observable data. This can lead to problematic science, not because hypotheses or data are being manipulated, but because the data is wrong — biased from the point of collection. If the observer or collector intimately understands the experiment and naturally develops expectations or a preferred hypothesis, their observations will likely skew towards support their preferred hypothesis.

This phenomenon is apparent in the considerable difference between the findings of “blinded” scientists — those who have critical information that might cause a bias hidden from them — and non-blinded scientists.

. It is a common expectation that ants are significantly less aggressive among their own nestmates than when they are among ants from a different nest. In 156 published studies on aggression in ants — only 29 percent of which were conducted blind — “aggression among nestmates was three times more likely to be reported in blinded than non-blinded experiments.” Non-blinded experiments were less likely to report activity that fell outside what they believed to be regular, and reported twice as much aggression by ants that were surrounded by non-nestmates. Not only did researchers vulnerable to bias tend to ignore aggression among nestmates, they also exaggerated aggression between non-nestmates, creating much more definitive and exciting ‘discoveries’ than those found in blind experiments.

Protecting science from confirmation bias is relatively simple, at least in theory. In most cases, experimenters can be easily “

” simply by coding or concealing information too revealing of the hypothesis or sample being tested. Despite such an easy-to-meet standard, many scientific reports fall woefully short. When 

 University of Texas studied 248 bias-prone articles on ecology, evolution, or behavior, they found that just 13.3 percent were conducted blind. Though blinding is not always practical, 78.6 percent of these studies could have been easily blinded, either by masking the samples or with a second naïve experimenter. Even in studies of special education, where the role of confirmation bias has been significantly researched, 75 percent of studies did not take any precautions.

It is easy to be wary of ‘studies’ with an obvious bias — whether from 

corporate ads that promise “four out of five doctors agree”

 that their toothpaste is the best. It is much more difficult to be cognizant of the subtleties of bias existing in observable data. Distinguished, 

peer-reviewed science is not immune to human 

influence — a fact that many scientists recognize, but which laypeople may not know.

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Confirmation bias in the media is rampant and recognized. Why don't we acknowledge that peer-reviewed scientific papers are subject to the same human manipulations?

Science’s under-discussed problem with confirmation bias

The concept of banning the production and sale of alcohol began as a primarily religious grassroots movement in the 1870s. Prohibition, as it came to be called, experienced varying levels of popularity throughout the United States while becoming a cause célèbre for a mishmash of activists ranging from religious fundamentalists to 

suffragists (many of whom blamed alcohol for epidemic-level domestic abuse of women)

 to nativists (who associated drunkenness with undesirable immigrant populations). Ratified on January 16, 1919, 

 became just the second constitutional change to explicitly prohibit the conduct of the American people rather than that of the government (the 13th Amendment was the other). By then, some twenty-six states already enacted versions of the ban, mostly in heavily religious and the country’s more rural areas. For the pious, alcohol was a corruption — an evil that led only to greater evils — and prohibition a moral necessity for the sake of the social order and public welfare.

As hard times came, the Great Depression sowed doubt in any correlation between a dry country and a strong country. Public support for Prohibition plummeted. Compliance with Prohibition was no longer a moral obligation, but merely a legal one — popularizing a notion that certain conduct (e.g. consuming alcohol) was wrong simply because the law prohibited it, not because of any practical or moral consensus. Abiding by the law only so long as it is practical or follows your own moral values has its obvious problems, but, consciously or not, this is often what dictates how and when we follow the law. Many people illegally jaywalk across streets, but would never think to drive through a red light; practicality aside, they may believe that the latter law is integral to the social order of their community, while jaywalking does not yield greater mayhem.

, Andrew Moore argues that this Prohibition-era distinction between moral and legal acquiescence can be useful to facilitate a more productive public discourse on immigration, allowing the dialogue to move past flat arguments over whether or not a behavior broke the law and on to more meaningful nuances, such as 

 so many immigrants violated the law to live and work in the United States.

The historical narratives of Prohibition and the anti-immigration movements in America are intimately intertwined. Following relatively lax immigration laws in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Prohibition movement considered immigrants — many of whom came from cultures with more permissive attitudes towards alcohol, and who, in the United States, formed the backbone brewing industry — as the primary obstacle to a dry and morally-sound nation. Nativism and Prohibition worked side by side: the one-two punch of Prohibition and new, restrictive immigration laws 

led to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924

. Each movement has roots in moral obligation, with teetotalers (whether concerned about immigrants or alcohol) fretting that the nation’s identity and sovereignty is being diluted. Prohibition attempted to ‘correct’ the behavior of a country of heavy drinkers; the anti-immigration movement still attempts stop the flow of immigrants who come from sundry cultures and often do not speak English. The moral motivations of each movement are over-simplified, yet obvious: 

we need sovereignty to protect our identity

During Prohibition, as soon as the American people no longer saw the law as a moral obligation, enforcement fell apart. Parallels between the enforcement of immigration law and Prohibition abound: a border difficult to police, abusive policies by both law enforcement and smugglers, and dangerous implications from an unregulated market. Moore argues that America is unable to get past immigration enforcement as legal obligation, and either unable or unwilling to confront the complex moral and practical issues behind it. The tendency to conflate the moral and legal facets of law has stalled all dialogue and potential for reform.

Why, then, hasn’t America’s broken immigration system righted itself, just as Prohibition did in its mere thirteen years of existence? For one, few individuals need to make daily decisions as to whether or not they need to illegally cross the border, and those who do are generally geographically concentrated. This is quite different than Prohibition, when virtually the entire population had to decide almost daily whether to comply with the law, notes Moore. Secondly, while states have a limited role in enforcing immigration laws (immigration remains within the federal government’s purview), this is not the case on alcohol policies, which are the concern of state and local governments.

If states were given the same freedom of enforcement on immigration law they had during Prohibition, would the same trajectory play out, and immigration reform be allowed to happen? Doubtful. 

As the continued existence of “dry” counties attests

, even on matters of law long considered settled at the national level, individuals’ lived experiences can still run counter to the nation’s prevailing beliefs.

The Arc of Reform?: What the Era of Prohibition May Tell Us About the Future of Immigration Reform,

” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 28, no. 3 (2015).

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Are laws only effective when they have the moral consensus of society? Prohibition's failure seems to suggest so.

What Prohibition can teach us about immigration reform

“That is the equivalent of needing a babysitter and hiring a dingo.” It’s not a slogan you’d expect to 

transform the debate on net neutrality in the United States

 and mobilize 45,000+ comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s website in support of open-access internet. But with a combination of side-splitting wit and a critical eye, John Oliver, host of HBO’s 

, flung the issue — whether or not internet providers should be able to offer high speeds for certain websites or types of content — into the spotlight. Net neutrality, he argued, may be the most boring words in the English language, but twist it into a joke about coyote urine, Usain Bolt on a motorbike, or dingoes eating children, and suddenly America cares.

The satirical political humor employed by Oliver and his progenitor, Jon Stewart — and mimicked, often less successfully, by millions of self-styled commentators online — is known to some academics as “

”: the author may manipulate a common idea to disrupt (or “jam” up the culture) and publicly call out its hypocrisy. Jokes in this vein demand serious understanding on the part of the comic, but require minimal background knowledge on the part of the audience, sparking interest and understanding of an issue in a way that a book or essay might not.

A somewhat more lowbrow online cousin to Oliver or Stewart’s humor can be found in the form of 

memes, the funny images, video, or text that spread rapidly as crowdsourced in-jokes across the web

coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976’s 

 to understand the way cultural information spreads. Online, memes are easily shared across the internet in a way that “blurs the lines between readership and authorship,” 

. Sharing a meme on Facebook or Twitter — even without originating it — implicitly attributes enough credit to the individual that they feel cool and trendy among their peers.

“Culture jamming” is seen across all ideologies. While perhaps the most common form involves younger generations mocking the mainstream, conservative types have also employed this approach to poke fun at the more liberal or countercultural elements in society. Ultimately, political jams are made to persuade and bond any like-minded group together, while using wit to publicly ridicule the outsiders. Political jamming in the Western world is employed commonly in mainstream media, 

 are a primary news source for young people to understand current events. And this twenty-first century breed of news media actually affects public policy: 

John Oliver’s 13-minute “net neutrality” segment did just that

But what happens when this highly effective method is employed by a terrorist or terrorist organization? As James Farwell explains in 

, “Despite the expertise and sophistication of political communications … in the West, al-Qaeda is beating us at our own game. ... They know how to forge, protect, and drive messages that strike a responsive chord.” And the Islamic State (ISIS) is even more effective, bridging cultural gaps across the internet, not only through the romanticism of violent Islam that Western media seems to highlight daily, but also through normalized satire and humor.

ISIS effectively uses social media as an interactive outlet where frustrated youth do not necessarily create the jokes themselves, but still reap the benefits of recognition from their peers in the hip subculture of “jihadi cool.” Thus, teens change unknowingly from reading passively to sympathizing more easily with the broader jihadist movement, particularly as these memes get shared and their niche, online echo chamber gives them credibility.

Censoring this critical satire, writes Huey, is not the answer. There is still a large gap between the angsty teen looking at darker memes and the Western jihadist-wannabe traveling to Syria to wage a violent war. Merely condemning this dissatisfied community or labelling potential young jihadis as ‘brainwashed’ will not effectively combat ISIS’s recruiting techniques; part of the “cool” of jihad counterculture is the edgy outsider status that comes with being ‘misunderstood’ by the West.

It is essential to specifically counter this perception of cool that has seduced so many young Muslims. The U.S. government must continue to highlight not only how evil, but 

 ISIS is. As many Japanese Twitter users did in response to the ISIS ransom demand video of hostages 

humor, rather than fear, undermined the original intimidating goal of the video

While some were upset with the light-heartedness of the memes, 

 perfectly captured the necessary balance between mourning the hostages and mocking ISIS: “Tomorrow will be sad but it will pass and #ISIS will still be a big joke. You can’t break our spirit.” 

 wrote, “You can kill some of us, but Japan is a peaceful and happy land, with fast Internet. So go to hell.” It is important to understand the shock and aversion to brutality ISIS wants us to feel – and then use comedy to destroy the glamor of their violence.

, a senator from Connecticut recently used a 

, and the State Department dabbled with its first 

he U.S. government is still struggling to use the social media that some ISIS supporters use so adeptly

There are, however, some encouraging notes. Peer 2 Peer: Challenging Extremism is the State Department’s new semester-long program where college students create a social media campaign to counter terrorist recruiting. Other students have aimed at reinforcing positive Muslim communities, creating 

. At least for a moment, it seems that the online fight against extremism has been outsourced to the meme-armed experts: college students.

This is Not Your Mother’s Terrorism: Social Media, Online Radicalization and the Practice of Political Jamming

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Political comedy is used to persuade and bond likeminded groups together, while publicly ridiculing outsiders. That's true whether you're Jon Stewart or ISIS.

Molly Banta