[FRIAM] More on social mobility

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

I'm a little confused by these 2 plots from Chetty et al 2014: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/mobility_geo.pdf

>From the ranked plot, it seems like an equitable leveling/redistribution is at work. But from the raw income plot, it simply seems like children make less money than their parents (an absolute reduction in quality of life). These seem paradoxical to me, meaning that perhaps I haven't grokked all the data, or the particular data being plotted is inadequate to express the trend. I confess I'm motivated by stories from Pinker and Shermer about absolute improvements in the world (considered massively, not particularly), which leads me to the leveling interpretation.

On 12/9/20 5:25 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> 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.


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