"What's in a Name? Everything": New measure concludes social mobility is stagnant
07-24-2014, 12:12 PM
At the risk of coming off as privilege troll (as I've talked about before), I thought this article was interesting. It details a 'new' method to measure social mobility taking into account surnames and other measures of social standing, as opposed to the more traditional method of quantifying income differences between parents and their offspring.
What's in a Name? Everything.
Some choice quotes:
At the very least, interesting that the notion that the US as the land of opportunity may be incorrect, despite its attempts at constructing a social structure that, on the surface, would seem to make social mobility easier than it really is.
What's in a Name? Everything.
Some choice quotes:
Quote:Quote:
According to the World Values Survey, while 60 percent of Europeans say they think “the poor are trapped in poverty,” only 29 percent of Americans think so. Instead, 60 percent of Americans think “the poor are lazy,” compared with just 26 percent of Europeans.
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Mobility is hard to measure, however, turning not just on who earns what today but on how what people earn—and what they have—relates to their parents’ income and wealth, and their grandparents’ and prior generations’ too. Economists, to their credit, are increasingly stepping up to this difficult empirical challenge. Some are tackling the politically touchy question of whether mobility is greater in America than in western-European countries. (Our traditional civic myth notwithstanding, the answer is no.) Others are investigating whether mobility in America has declined in recent years. (Contrary to President Obama’s recent statements, it apparently hasn’t.)
Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California at Davis, has looked at these questions through a different lens. Clark, too, finds that mobility here is no greater than in Europe, and that U.S. mobility hasn’t declined. But he comes to a more fundamental, far more powerful conclusion. Clark argues that mobility is always the same—in all societies, and in every era. Mobility, he claims, is “a universal constant”; over time we thrive or not according to a “social law of motion,” a “social physics of intergenerational mobility.” And to make matters worse, the universal speed at which families and groups change their social position is slow—a lot slower than everyone thinks on the basis of previous research.
The implications are profound. If mobility is constant, then the ability of social institutions to affect it must be negligible. Clark points to such changes as the movement from feudalism to democracy and then the expansion of the franchise, as well as free public education and redistributive taxation. But if modern America and modern Sweden have the same rate of mobility, and that rate is the same as what prevailed in medieval England and in 19th-century China, then none of those changes mattered. And if the journey from unusually high or low status to the middle can, as Clark claims, “take ten or fifteen generations (300–450 years),” the mobility-based defense of inequality becomes strained, here and everywhere else.
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“By and large, social mobility has characteristics that do not rule out genetics as the dominant connection between the generations.” And elsewhere: “This is not to say that social status is determined genetically. But whatever drives it is, on the tests performed here, indistinguishable from genetic inheritance.” As the book moves on, however, it becomes ever clearer that Clark has our genes in mind.
This genetic perspective leads him to a further ambiguity. Clark concludes that pervasive economic inequality in America and elsewhere is the outcome of fair competition: what’s being rewarded in life—with income, wealth, good jobs, social prestige—is no more than the talent and energy that each individual brings to the contest. “The social world,” he writes, “is much fairer than many would expect.”
But it’s hard to see the fairness in having not just every person’s position but every person’s chances of moving up or down so dominated by whatever subcellular makeup he or she simply happens to inherit. Clark himself steps forward to acknowledge just that:
"An important corollary to the finding that social outcomes are the product of a lineage lottery is that we should not create social structures that magnify the rewards of a high social position … If social position is largely a product of the blind inheritance of talent, combined with a dose of pure chance, why would we want to multiply the rewards to the lottery winners?"
At the very least, interesting that the notion that the US as the land of opportunity may be incorrect, despite its attempts at constructing a social structure that, on the surface, would seem to make social mobility easier than it really is.
