SOCIAL MOBILITY HASN’T FALLEN: WHAT IT MEANS AND DOESN’T MEAN

[arely staircase]

I’m fascinated by the finding, in an extensive new study, that social mobility in the United States has stayed pretty constant over the past few decades. This conclusion challenges the standard narratives presented by the left and the right, and its political implications will be much discussed.

But first things first: where did it come from?In one sense, the finding isn’t so surprising. While it has been widely assumed that social mobility is declining—in a speech last month, President Obama said as much—previous academic studies also failed to consistently identify any trend. Some showed a decline in mobility; at least one showed an increase; and most raised some tricky statistical issues. Perhaps the mostinfluential paper, originally published in 2006, was by Chul-In Lee, of Konkuk University, in Korea, and Gary Solon, of Michigan State University. Lee and Solon examined data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a long-running survey that tracks income and other characteristics of about five thousand families nationwide.By looking, over time, at the incomes individuals earned relative to their parents’ income, they were able to measure “intergenerational mobility”—broadly speaking, the extent to which people are able to escape their upbringings. Solon and Lee concentrated on individuals born between 1952 and 1975, and their calculations covered the two decades from 1981 to 2000, when income inequality was already growing pretty rapidly. This was their conclusion:

Our estimates are still too imprecise to rule out modest trends in either direction. For the most part, though, our results for the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975 suggest that intergenerational income mobility in the United States has not changed dramatically over the past two decades.

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2014/01/social-mobility-hasnt-fallen-what-it-means-and-doesnt-mean.html

While interesting, I still think wealth inequality is a serious problem. When a few hundred have more of the wealth than the bottom half, that means that there are people living in shit because those few hundred have been hoarding. Anyway, definitely interesting and if valid some reason for hope, maybe.

[GeorgeGist]

1. And 2006 was exactly like now.

[arely staircase]

2. huh? nt

[abelenkpe]

3. cohorts born between 1952 and 1975

Pretty sure that cohorts born after 1975 would tell you a different story.

[Egalitarian Thug]

4. Key weasel words; dramatically and past two decades.

Just another bullshit story put forth by the parasite class' propaganda machine to convince stupid people that reality is what they say it is, rather than what you experience.

[1000words]

5. It means we've been played for suckers for a long, long time

... and we've accepted it as "normal."