perhaps no better indication of the scale of this support than the paths of household and business incomes during this period. at a time when economic activity contracted more and faster than at any time since the great depression in the 1930s, household disposable income actually increased ( graph 9 ). this is not the usual pattern in a downturn, to say the least. profits also increased, partly because jobkeeper covered more of many firms'costs than their revenues declined, and partly because other tax and business support measures improved their post - tax incomes. rent and loan repayment deferrals helped as well. some individual households and businesses are facing tough times. taking each sector as a whole, though, both the household sector and the business sector are entering the expansion phase with stronger balance sheets than they had before the pandemic. this is an exceptional, and welcome, outcome. graph 9 household income and business profits nominal, quarterly $ b $ b household gross disposable income ( lhs ) gross operating surplus ( rhs ) source : abs and again, policy support clearly affects people's responses. whether it's the consumer spending response to higher incomes, the response of residential construction activity to the homebuilder program and state - based measures, or the response of machinery & equipment investment to various tax incentives, policy support has worked. monetary policy support has played a role in supporting the economy, too. others have discussed the detail of the bank's policy measures recently, so i won't repeat much of that information today. the response has come in 2 main waves. in march of last year, the board cut the cash rate to 0. 5 per cent, and later that month made a further reduction to 0. 25 per cent as part of a larger package of policy measures. financial markets were quite dislocated at that time, so the bank used its existing market operations to provide liquidity to the market and address the dislocation. as part of that march package, the board introduced several new policy measures. it set a target for the 3 - year government bond yield and provided low - cost funding to the banking system, also with a 3 - year term, known as the term funding facility ( tff ). the tff was structured to encourage lending to business, and especially to small and medium - sized firms. the initial tranche of funding under the tff was available to be drawn down until the end of october. in

of children when two years old. how does socio - economic status then affect their educational progression? some studies have found that a low - ability child from a high - status group will exhibit higher levels of attainment by the age of six than a high - ability child from a low - status group. 69 and, thereafter, the differences begin to widen further. this evidence suggests it is far better to be born rich and stupid than bright and poor. moreover, these early - stage differences in educational attainment, shaped by socio - economic background, have a life - long impact. that is why there is a very high degree of intergenerational persistence in incomes and wealth, even once account is taken of ability. as one diagnostic on that, consider the following evidence, courtesy of the commission on social mobility and child poverty : although independent schools comprise only 7 % of pupils in the uk, the independently - educated comprise over 70 % of the upper echelons of the judiciary, 55 % of permanent secretaries in the civil service and 62 % of senior armed forces officers. 70 branching of the opportunity tree starts early, it appears, and then keeps widening. at present, as with cognitive diversity, there is often a lack of recognition of these inbuilt socioeconomic biases. and, as with cognitive diversity, one reason for this lack of recognition is a lack of measurement. there is no agreed set of metrics for measuring someone ’ s socioeconomic background. in the uk, the social mobility and child poverty commission has begun to develop some metrics. but there is widespread recognition that we are still in the early stages of measurement. measurement would enable organisations to draw their own experiential diversity maps. as with cognitive diversity, beyond that there is potentially value in making transparent those maps to provide incentives for purposive action if experiential diversity is found to be wanting. the bank has just begun to put in place a system for measuring the socio - economic background of its recruits. in future, that might help in sketching the contours of the bank ’ s own experiential diversity map. some organisations have taken more purposive action still to promote social mobility. for example, some have set themselves recruitment targets for employees drawn from lower socio - economic groupings. others have put in place so - called “ contextualised ” recruitment, adjusting their entrance requirements to prevent filtering out of candidates based on their socio - economic background. the