
Social Inequality Worse Than Previous Estimates, According to Researcher - vinchuco
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/06/striking-new-research-on-inequality-whatever-you-thought-its-worse/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
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sctb
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667871)

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tdb7893
I find it weird that "only" 20% of the middle fifth will rise into the top
fifth. Isn't 20% equal to one fifth and is pretty much expected? It feels like
the Dilbert cartoon of the boss complaining that 40% of sick days being on
Mondays and Fridays. I think the article is right overall but I'm wondering if
anyone has some insight into why 20% is an unexpected number in the data.

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codemac
The 20% rising up out of the middle fifth and the middle fifth being a fifth
of total population are unrelated numbers. It's coincidence that they are the
same number.

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adevine
But the point is that, if where you ended up was completely unrelated to where
you started, you would expect 20% of the middle fifth to end up at the bottom,
20% the 2nd lowest fifth, 20% the middle, 20% the 2nd highest, and 20% the
highest. The article seems to be arguing there is NOT a lot of social
mobility, but if so you wouldn't expect more than 20% of the middle fifth to
end up in the top.

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anu7df
Ok. Here is an article that claims something in the headline and then repeats
it many times through out the text. In all that clutter and fear mongering;
claims of how much worse things are in the american society, the proof is the
new "research"\- if parents education level correlates well with the child's!
Wow.. never thought that could be true.. The only "new" thing seems to be that
the correlation coefficient is slightly higher. 0.1 higher.. What does that
mean? I am not sure. They define educational mobility as a proxy for social
mobility. By that definition any non negative correlation of education
achievement between generations implies increasing social inequality. They
bring up this statistic of "20% of middle fifth will rise to the top fifth" I
am not sure whether that is bad. Naively I would expect exactly that to happen
in an unbiased system without inequality. I guess I am saying, color me
confused.

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adevine
IIRC there was another recent article in Hacker News that looked back on
prominent families in Florence going back centuries. They _still_ found that
families who were prominent back during the Renaissance are still on top
today.

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niftich
Yes! The thread was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11731890](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11731890)

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the_watcher
This seems to insist that social mobility is _only_ moving into the top fifth,
and ignores that moving from the middle fifth to the second fifth (etc) is
still mobility

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francoisdevlin
Am the only one who is baffled by their explanation of correlation? FTFA:

"correlation in educational attainment between a parent and a child is
generally around .4 to .6. This basically means that, if my parent has one
more year of schooling than your parent, I will automatically end up with 4/10
to 6/10 of an extra year of school than you have, all else equal."

This doesn't line up with my understanding of statistics

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maxerickson
It's likely that the paper communicated the effect of the correlation and the
reporter butchered the explanation.

Can't get the paper though, so who knows.

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joshuaheard
I couldn't help but try to square this article with another article I saw
today that said a record number of people are graduating high school. So, this
article says that _relative to each other_ people are staying in the same
socioeconomic class, which they conclude is bad. But if _everyone as a group_
is doing better, then I think there really is no problem.

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adamnemecek
Fix the education system the rest will follow.

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zieski
So lets say that you "fix" the education system.

What does that mean for college enrollments? Do the ~70% of households making
less than 50k who were generating far lower percentages of college bound
children now boost enrollments for universities?

With a similar dropout rate or lower since education is "fixed" we now have a
ton more college graduates. Are there anywhere near enough jobs requiring a
college degree to satisfy the demand?

There is a much larger problem than some stock-phrase about education can fix.

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dv_dt
I see it as more of a failing of our current economic system if we don't know
how to use a surge in the number of college graduates.

