New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited • Hacker News Board

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#81

Post by skybrian » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #59

skybrian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical about whether they can really account for available financial resources, broadly measured. Not just how much money you have, or your parents have, but how much money your more distant relatives have, and your friends and neighbors and their friends. This can have implications that might not come out in the statistics. Even if you don't have any money, if most of the people you're connected to are mostly…

Do you think that hypothesis would hold up to twin studies and adoption studies? Or if you looked at immigrants who moved to countries with no familial ties?

Those sound like good ways to test it, though they have their limitations too. People looking to adopt probably have a stable situation, and immigrants are usually self-selected.

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#82

Post by smallnamespace » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 11:22 PM UTC

corecoder wrote: post #68

whenwillitstop wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But then, there should be little variability among successful unrelated families, and that is just not so." This does not follow from your first statement. It's not a logical conclusion. For your reduction to a binary set of alleles it does, but it does not come close to being an analogy for real life.

Let me try to be more clear: I make two opposite hypotheses: two alleles versus many alleles. The two alleles hypothesis would imply little variability among families, many alleles would imply much variability inside families. Where is my logical error?

Assortative mating: it would tend to reduce variability within families, while preserving inter-family variability.

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#83

Post by smallnamespace » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 11:31 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #15

glup wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this perspective frighteningly cynical and self-perpetuating. Government policy is one of the few mechanisms that has the possibility to address (if not fix) systemic inequality. And I think there's broad agreement across the political spectrum that inequality is a problem; rather, there are disagreements about how to best address it (social welfare and regulation vs. efficient markets). This isn't ammunition…

>And I think there's broad agreement across the political spectrum that inequality is a problem No, I don't think there is.

Just to inject some data into this discussion:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/03/business/incom...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/business/inequality-a-majo...

"Do you feel that the distribution of money and wealth in this country is fair, or do you feel that the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed among more people?"

'Should be more even': 44% for Republicans, 89% for Democrats, 66% for Independents

This was back in 2015 -- given the way the campaign has gone this year, I'd expect those numbers to have risen.

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#84

Post by nostrademons » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 12:05 AM UTC

corecoder wrote: post #68

whenwillitstop wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But then, there should be little variability among successful unrelated families, and that is just not so." This does not follow from your first statement. It's not a logical conclusion. For your reduction to a binary set of alleles it does, but it does not come close to being an analogy for real life.

Let me try to be more clear: I make two opposite hypotheses: two alleles versus many alleles. The two alleles hypothesis would imply little variability among families, many alleles would imply much variability inside families. Where is my logical error?

Many alleles does not imply more variability if there's a chance of some of those alleles cancelling out.

Think about it in terms of coin flips. One coin flip is random: you get heads or tails with 50% probability. A small number of coin flips can lead to large swings. However, many coin flips reliably produces a Gaussian, with only small statistical fluctuations.

Now imagine that you decree that for the first ten coin flips, if the result comes up tails you'll ignore it. With many flips, you will still get a (somewhat smaller) Gaussian, but with the mean # of heads shifted over by 5.

This is what natural selection & assortative mating does: it doesn't prevent the millions of coin flips from happening, but it eliminates some number of "known bad" outcomes, which will shift the mean over by some amount even as variability remains roughly constant.

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#85

Post by internaut » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 12:13 AM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #15

glup wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this perspective frighteningly cynical and self-perpetuating. Government policy is one of the few mechanisms that has the possibility to address (if not fix) systemic inequality. And I think there's broad agreement across the political spectrum that inequality is a problem; rather, there are disagreements about how to best address it (social welfare and regulation vs. efficient markets). This isn't ammunition…

>And I think there's broad agreement across the political spectrum that inequality is a problem No, I don't think there is.

Eli is right.

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#86

Post by FT_intern » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 1:25 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #16

This phenomena (that children are not statistically independent of their grandparents even when controlling for parents) has already been found to be robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book on it that was widely discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for…

I liked Gladwell's take in Outliers on this topic.

Impoverished immigrants are more successful than American born poor because of the belief that amount of effort has a high correlation with success/results. This belief is cultivated through culture values (ex: Chinese proverbs on working hard) and working in a profession with a direct link between effort and result (owning tailor shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, etc.).

That mentality is transferred to the immigrant's children, who end up becoming more successful than the children of the American poor despite their parents' inability to teach them English or American culture (advantages that the children of American born poor comparatively have).

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#87

Post by idrios » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:21 AM UTC

jimmywanger wrote: post #67

idrios wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about social/economic mobility and inequality. Poverty is very relevant here

FTA: The study focuses specifically on how the educational attainment of families changes over time, which the researchers use as a proxy for economic mobility. That use as a proxy has not been justified. It is a massive cognitive leap. Nobody brought up poverty in the article.

Also from the article

>Research by economists from Harvard and Berkeley found that fewer than 10 percent of people in the bottom fifth of the wealth distribution will make it into the top fifth.

Poverty is an arbitrary threshold. Its definition if you Google it is "the state of being extremely poor" and as you noted, you can eliminate poverty by reducing the threshold. This is why the article chose quintiles.

As someone else said here, the article is bringing attention to a problem--lack of intergenerational social mobility. This has a lot of implications, one of which is that families born into poverty are unlikely to get out. It has other implications too, such as that middle class families will stay middle class and the elite stay elite. From what I have seen, the middle class are pretty happy being middle class and the elite like being elite, but the anxiety and stress of the low-income lifestyle is pretty horrible for people living in it.

If people were happy at all tiers of the socioeconomic ladder, social mobility wouldn't be worth discussing. We brought up poverty because those are the people who are suffering the worst.

As for living better than Aztec kings, that's too sweeping a claim. Aztec kings might not have been able to enjoy hot pockets or McDonalds, but they knew they were going to have dinner every night.

Edit: I know what you're both saying that being in the bottom 20% does not imply a low standard of living in the same way that being in poverty does. But in the US, the bottom 20% implies a low standard of living. The median net worth for the bottom 20% in 2011 was about -$6,000 [1], which means the lowest income households are consuming more wealth than they are creating. Combine this with the article's thesis that people are stuck in their quintile, and it's a statement that our nation's poorest are not able to escape a cycle of living off subsidies, presumably from the government.

http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/files/Wealth%20distribut...

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#88

Post by ap22213 » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:36 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #16

This phenomena (that children are not statistically independent of their grandparents even when controlling for parents) has already been found to be robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book on it that was widely discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for…

Are you seriously suggesting that Humans who have migrated to America are somehow 100% identical to Europeans who have not migrated?

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#89

Post by ap22213 » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:39 AM UTC

FT_intern wrote: post #86

jessriedel wrote: post #16

This phenomena (that children are not statistically independent of their grandparents even when controlling for parents) has already been found to be robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book on it that was widely discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for…

I liked Gladwell's take in Outliers on this topic. Impoverished immigrants are more successful than American born poor because of the belief that amount of effort has a high correlation with success/results. This belief is cultivated through culture values (ex: Chinese proverbs on working hard) and working in a profession with a direct link between effort and result (owning tailor shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, et…

And, well, immigrants are somewhat more motivated than non-immigrants, all other factors held constant.

Re: New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited

#90

Post by ap22213 » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 3:41 AM UTC

whenwillitstop wrote: post #24

jessriedel wrote: post #16

This phenomena (that children are not statistically independent of their grandparents even when controlling for parents) has already been found to be robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book on it that was widely discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for…

It's genetics, why is this such a mystery? The whole point of evolution is that you pass on good traits. When people do well, they pair with other people who are good genetically, and through the generations, their children do well. Why is this such a mystery?

While I agree that genetics can play a part, it's certainly not the case that people who 'do well' necessarily 'pair with other people who are good genetically.'