[FRIAM] More on social mobility

[David Eric Smith]

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):
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/ <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 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.

I got to the above from an article by Edsall that, again, seems to me well-sourced:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html>

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.

EricS


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