<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">To continue to try to add raw material to the discussion that EricC took up on this when I made some overly-simple claims earlier, here is a Brookings summary article on work by Raj Chetty (cited in the earlier thread as well):<div class=""><a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/01/11/raj-chetty-in-14-charts-big-findings-on-opportunity-and-mobility-we-should-know/" class="">https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/01/11/raj-chetty-in-14-charts-big-findings-on-opportunity-and-mobility-we-should-know/</a></div><div class="">A thing I find striking in Chetty’s output is how many compilations he can produce that make statistical analysis superfluous. There are data that are so close to a perfect line that there is little for a regression to do, or that are so consistent with time-constancy that there is no suggestion of a signal to look for other than stasis. A lot of it seems to come from finding good conditions on which to bin data, though the bin categories do not seem highly artificial or cherry-picked, to me.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I got to the above from an article by Edsall that, again, seems to me well-sourced:</div><div class=""><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html" class="">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">So probably necessary to refuse to speak in sound-bites about income or wealth mobility, and to use more complete sentences that refer to specific conditions, even though if one has that granularity, there are interpretations of the sound-bite that mobility has been badly impaired that still seem correct, to me.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">EricS</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div></body></html>