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

washingtonpost.com

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

#91

Post by jimmywanger »

idrios wrote: post #87
jimmywanger wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

Understood. I am leery of the article because they're trying to conflate two studies, and statements like this:

TFA: Things weren't much better for the middle class: Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would rise into the top fifth over the course of their lives.

Isn't that expected? If you were to just randomly toss names into a hat, and pull out people who would be ranked on the order in which they got pulled out of the hat, wouldn't that be what statistics would say would be the case?

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

> 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.

Anybody in the United States can scrounge one meal a day. It might not be the best food, and not to your liking, but it would be food none the less. The main thing that makes people feel poor is that other people have more than they do.

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

#92

Post by Camillo »

shostack wrote: post #60
maxxxxx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only genetics. Parents who do well know how the system works and pass that knowledge on to their children. Children who come from poverty have a lot of learning to do and it's hard to do this without role models.

The compounding effects of this learning gap can't be overstated. One of my best friends who is very intelligent and successful came from a working class family that didn't emphasize sound personal finance education to say the least. He kept his savings in HS in his "sock in a drawer" account. I came from an upper middle class family that was the opposite. I was given a share or two of stocks for birthday gifts somet…

I have a friend who keeps lots of money in bank accounts, too. He is aware that he could be investing it, but he just doesn't seem to care. It appears to be half "everyone is expecting another financial crisis anyway, if you buy now you're buying high" and half "I just can't be arsed".

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

#93

Post by barry-cotter »

mc32 wrote: post #25
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…

Often times people will compare with Europe when it advances their agenda, or ignore Asia if it advances their pov or just focus on America when it's convenient. Seldom will people do cross country comparisons. So, whether your issue is guns, drugs, police brutality, censorship, inequality, bias, gender equality, etc. People tend to focus the studies in such a way to make their case and ignore things which would make…

Gregory Clark has compared social mobility across the U.K., China and Sweden at the least. The rates of social mobility are almost identical in all of them.

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

#94

Post by Camillo »

usmeteora wrote: post #70
shostack wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your story. How much weight would you put in the saying that you are the average of your five closest friends? Do you have any close friends who didn't make it out?

1. Yeh I would put alot of weight into that. It is honestly some of my closest friends now who said they saw potential in me when I was at my weakest who helped me and put me in touch with other good people. My exboyfriend and his friends were all Engineers but graduated and wanted to live a comfortable life. I was supposed to marry him and cater to him until I found out he was cheating on me. I left him but the hard…

Did you find this new group of friends before or after you left college? How did you find them? For many people, it's quite hard to find friends once out of university.

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

#95

Post by whybroke »

ap22213 wrote: post #88
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?

Of course. After all he is seriously suggesting that:

There are genes that are present in every rich person across the planet but absent in every poor one.

That the human genome is so poorly understood, there's plenty room for that hidden in it.

That these genes evolved in the last 15k years (because before agriculture, wealth was limited to what you could carry and everyone was a generalist and so there was no selective pressure)

That they did not evolve at a single site like every other gene (because then we would find all the rich people on earth clustered in one spot with no poor people around with a density spreading outward) so...

The genes appeared coincidentally in every civilization and society independently the same time. In the last 15k years. With very mild or no selective pressure.

And this was discovered by one person (Gregory Clark) with no background in genetics and in opposition to near universal criticism while, coincidentally, telling a story that comforts the rich.

But at least it's not eugenics.

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

#96

Post by mercer »

zeroer wrote: post #34
thucydides wrote: post #30

Here's a crazy thought that's illegal to think nowadays. If you want to avoid crazy, illegal thoughts, please stop reading. Maybe - just maybe - we're not all equal cyphers at birth like we learned in school. Maybe genes are part of the reason a successful person's daughter is successful. Maybe important character traits are heritable. Maybe the 20+ years we spend being raised is less consequential to our character a…

This sounds like a testable hypothesis -- that the effects of genetics should be separable from the effects of upbringing via twin and adoption studies. In fact, I'd wager it's already been done.

From what I understand many twin studies have been done, and generally they indicate a much stronger genetic effect than is generally thought.

But because these kinds of findings are so sensitive and have a long history of being abused, there's a tendency to downplay them or at least avoid discussing them. Maybe even a (slight?) tendency to avoid further research.

But please correct me if I'm wrong. Most of my thoughts on the matter come from one of Steven Pinker's books and I've never done a thorough review on the subject.

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

#97

Post by zo1 »

ap22213 wrote: post #89
FT_intern wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is also selection bias among them. I.e. It takes motivation/drive/purpose to become an immigrant and travel to another country for work, permanently.

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

#98

Post by mamon »

ap22213 wrote: post #89
FT_intern wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is kind of pre-selection. Immigrants are, by definition the people who were brave and clever enough to get out of their own country and come to their destination. Therefore they are better mentally prepared to succeed in life than general population.

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

#99

Post by loeg »

jimmywanger wrote: post #80
loeg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it is. If 100% of the population is above the poverty line, how much does mobility matter? Similarly, if 20% of the population is always below the poverty line, zero sum mobility means that for every person rising out of poverty, someone else sinks into it. I think the metric we should focus on is reducing poverty.

Even homeless people these days live better than Aztec kings a thousand years ago. To be facile, if you want to reduce poverty to zero, merely reduce the poverty threshold to zero - as long as you're alive, you're not living in poverty. Based on standards of living, nobody in the United States right now compared to the rest of the world throughout history is living in poverty.

I don't really agree with the claims made in your comment. idrios has a decent rebuttal.

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

#100

Post by genetixx »

No surprise in social mobility being unequal, but isn't years of education a poor measure to go by in the first place? They also mention 5% of the bottom 1/5th making it to the top 5th and 20% of the second fifth making it to the top fifth. Wouldn't a better measure be to feature the % of people that move up at least one fifth? That would tell a completely different story
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