
New research suggests that social mobility in America may be more limited - mondaine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/06/striking-new-research-on-inequality-whatever-you-thought-its-worse/
======
jessriedel
This phenomena (that children are not statistically independent of their
grandparents even when controlling for parents) has already been found to be
robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book
on it that was widely discussed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_\(book\))

The point is that families transmit _something_ across multiple (> 5
generations) that's responsible for strong persistent effects on economic
success, and it's almost certainly not money (which can be measured and decays
faster).

How can the OP author honestly suggest conclusions about what this means for
America without contrasting with Europe, and the known hypotheses? Indeed,
Clark argues that multi-generational economic mobility is remarkably constant
across vastly different political and economic systems.

~~~
whenwillitstop
It's genetics, why is this such a mystery? The whole point of evolution is
that you pass on good traits. When people do well, they pair with other people
who are good genetically, and through the generations, their children do well.
Why is this such a mystery?

~~~
maxxxxx
It's not only genetics. Parents who do well know how the system works and pass
that knowledge on to their children. Children who come from poverty have a lot
of learning to do and it's hard to do this without role models.

~~~
shostack
The compounding effects of this learning gap can't be overstated.

One of my best friends who is very intelligent and successful came from a
working class family that didn't emphasize sound personal finance education to
say the least.

He kept his savings in HS in his "sock in a drawer" account.

I came from an upper middle class family that was the opposite. I was given a
share or two of stocks for birthday gifts sometimes (often at my request
instead of toys) when I was young to educate me on their value and was taught
from a very young age to invest, save in a bank, build credit, and live below
my means.

While my friend is doing well financially, you can perhaps guess at how much
of his money is invested vs mine.

This story plays out in numerous other ways that also can lead to compounding
effects with things like education, health, criminal activity, etc.

These things are picked up on by children from all parts of the family. If
your family generally has their act together, knows how to be smart with
money, etc. there's probably a good chance of that rubbing off on kids which
sets them down a certain path in life that might be very different otherwise.

~~~
maxxxxx
Did you want to say "The compounding effects of this learning gap can't be
overstated?"

~~~
shostack
Doh, thank you for the catch and pardon my sleep-deprived typo.

------
rileymat2
>fewer than 10 percent of people in the bottom fifth of the wealth
distribution will make it into the top fifth. Things weren't much better for
the middle class: Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would
rise into the top fifth over the course of their lives.

Maybe I am a bit confused, but isn't 20% the exact right amount to move into
the top fifth?

~~~
vacri
This is the problem with using a relative measure rather than an absolute.
There can only ever be 20% of people in each relative quintile, but the
percentage of the population above and below a given wealth line can change
dramatically. If through some social magic, everyone was elevated above the
poverty line, you'd still have a lowest quintile.

------
thucydides
Here's a crazy thought that's illegal to think nowadays. If you want to avoid
crazy, illegal thoughts, please stop reading.

Maybe - just maybe - we're not all equal cyphers at birth like we learned in
school. Maybe _genes_ are part of the reason a successful person's daughter is
successful. Maybe important character traits are heritable. Maybe the 20+
years we spend being raised is less consequential to our character and
intelligence than who mom and dad chose as partners.

For example: IQ is highly heritable, and IQ is positively correlated with
income, employment status, military rank, having a "socially desirable" job,
etc. [1] Perhaps other traits are similarly heritable and correlated with the
attainment of traditional markers of success.

Studies like this one on inequality are common - and useless. They ignore the
genetic confound, the possibility of genetic influence on the object of study.
In this case, why not look at identical twins of rich and poor parents who
were raised apart in different environments?

My own suspicion is that our social rules play some role in inequality, but
genes play a much larger role than is commonly accepted.

[1] [http://www.gwern.net/iq](http://www.gwern.net/iq)

~~~
zeroer
This sounds like a testable hypothesis -- that the effects of genetics should
be separable from the effects of upbringing via twin and adoption studies. In
fact, I'd wager it's already been done.

~~~
mercer
From what I understand many twin studies _have_ been done, and generally they
indicate a much stronger genetic effect than is generally thought.

But because these kinds of findings are so sensitive and have a long history
of being abused, there's a tendency to downplay them or at least avoid
discussing them. Maybe even a (slight?) tendency to avoid further research.

But please correct me if I'm wrong. Most of my thoughts on the matter come
from one of Steven Pinker's books and I've never done a thorough review on the
subject.

------
chillingeffect
> Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would rise into the top
> fifth over the course of their lives.

In an equal system, the middle fifth would be expected to migrate into any of
the other four fifths equally. Which means _exactly 20 percent_ of them would
head into the top as often as 20 percent would head into the bottom.

This is almost identical to the notorious Manager's Complaint: that 40% of
sick days are Mondays and Fridays, insinuating employees aren't really sick
because "so many" of them extend the weekend. But with a perfect random
distribution of sickness (which is an acceptable assumption), precisely 20%
would be on Monday and another 20% would be on Friday.

------
pmoriarty
_"...suppose you have a banker whose son decided to become a poet,
surrendering a huge income in favor of a more fulfilling career._

 _" If you just looked at the poet and his daughter, you might think that
economic mobility is alive and well in America -- she probably makes a lot
more money than her father does. But actually, the daughter might be drawing
on much older, preexisting family resources – such as financial resources,
personal connections, or knowledge about how Wall Street works from her
grandfather – that make it easier for her to become a banker than it is for
the average kid."_

This sort of thing sounds like a plausible explanation for what happened in
America during the 60's and 70's, when there was a huge social movement that
rejected the materialism and self-centeredness of earlier generations. But
then starting with the 80's, most everyone seems to have gone back to trying
to make as much money as possible and "looking out for #1" (themselves).

------
bronz
why does the article never consider IQ to be a factor in success? in almost
every success story that i come across, the story is about someone who is
obviously very smart. and rags to riches stories, stories where a successful
person bootstraps him or herself out of an impoverished family, almost always
begin with accounts of their gifted childhood.

also, is it not obvious that social mobility is fucked? without unskilled
labor, you need capital to get a nice job _or_ start a business.

------
jimmywanger
This is inequality over generations.

If you seek to remove this, you remove one of the main reasons to strive for
success, the means to pass down success to your children.

I don't understand what this study is advocating. Government run orphanages
that raise all children so that nobody gets an advantage?

~~~
tmhrtly
A study doesn't necessarily have to advocate a solution - it can just bring
attention to a problem.

~~~
loeg
Is it a problem?

~~~
corecoder
Yes, poverty is a problem, more so the seeming fact that people yet to be born
is condemned to poverty.

~~~
jimmywanger
The study mentions nothing about poverty, just how educational levels seem to
be preserved across generations.

~~~
idrios
It's about social/economic mobility and inequality. Poverty is very relevant
here

~~~
loeg
I'm not sure it is. If 100% of the population is above the poverty line, how
much does mobility matter?

Similarly, if 20% of the population is always below the poverty line, zero sum
mobility means that for every person rising out of poverty, someone else sinks
into it.

I think the metric we should focus on is reducing poverty.

~~~
jimmywanger
Even homeless people these days live better than Aztec kings a thousand years
ago.

To be facile, if you want to reduce poverty to zero, merely reduce the poverty
threshold to zero - as long as you're alive, you're not living in poverty.

Based on standards of living, nobody in the United States right now compared
to the rest of the world throughout history is living in poverty.

~~~
loeg
I don't really agree with the claims made in your comment. idrios has a decent
rebuttal.

------
usmeteora
This is anecdotal in some ways but I think some of my observations can be
generalized and observed consistently as I've moved to various places.

I have (not a graduate degree but a Bachelors) a degree in Engineering from a
top Private University but neither of my parents or their parents even
graduated from highschool, much less went to college. I loved to read and
learn from a young age, made straight As and thought Engineering would be cool
because I liked math and Science but I knew being a Scientist meant long turn
around times for learning cycles and now I do software dev because, learning
cycles are fast! and I enjoy it, alot.

My parents lived in a trailor park, both druggies, I eventually got an
academic scholarship to a private school while my Brother failed out of
highschool. My dad has been in and out of prison and my mom would be at home
drunk meanwhile I'm going to school day to day with kids who drive beamers to
highschool and parents land helicopter to their kids crew meets.

It has been a bizarre experience to be able to be friends with people from my
hometown in trailor parks who go to church and walmart and have babies at 17
(basically all of my cousins) and also know and become intimate and working
peers with "the super elite".

I want to make a disclaimer that Yes, I acknowledge that some people start off
in worse situations and that should be accounted for. This is not an opinion
about who deserves what and what is fair and what is not. It's about observing
issues people have when they are poor.

When it comes to trying to calibrate and be fair to historically economically
disadvantaged ethnicities and demographics, the Government sucks at that.

My dad is full blood Native American (I'm half, and for those of you wondering
already. nope. I did not put it on my college application, I left it off and
wanted my perfect SAT Score and 3.986 unweighted GPA to be enough to get me
into my dream school, and it was).

Welfare and closed off land for Native communities feels (and yes I say feel
because I've LIVED in these places) more like a closed off culture for self
perpetuating destruction from what I've experienced and also continued to
witness from my extended family and their lives.

Issues of proper ways to calibrate disadvantaged people aside. Debates about
whether people can get out of those situations and whether some deserve to be
there aside.

For all people who are really poor in America, whether fair or right or how
they got there, I've noticed that poor people across the board tend to have
the following issues:

1\. Their economic neediness attaches them to other economically needy people
to pool resources like ride sharing, furniture, food, childcare. Therefore,
their social networks are closely linked to other needy people. If one person
becomes less needy, the balance is offset, people notice and immediately try
to maximize the other persons resources because they can benefit greatly from
it, obliterating the gains the increased wealth could be used to invest in
more long term purchases to set that person up for a more stable life.

It can be done, but usually requires being a black sheep and experiencing an
extreme amount of social isolation.

We already know strong social networks correlate with less depression so this
creates an incredibly hard to document relationship when it comes to someone
breaking out of their network of other economically needy people.

2\. They don't realize this is happening. People who are the most self
destructive tend to not realize when they are engaging in self destructive
habits and with self destructive people. If this is how you grew up, it's hard
to understand you deserve to be treated better, and that there are more
productive ways to sooth yourself through stressful situations.

3\. It is not rocket science for me. I know firsthand there is alot of
unintentional emotional manipulation from people who feel threatened by
someone else doing better. If you are born to an economically needy and
codependent family in an economically needy and codependent community who
exists by pooling resources because they are caught in a cycle of being
desperate to meet basic life needs and self soothing with instant
gratification that is self destructive, it is hard to take increased wealth,
keep it to yourself or use it for the good of the community to invest in long
term benefits for yourself and the people around you.

4\. Investing in education is hard when you are poor, and trying to overcome
the learning curve that other more privileged kids around me took for granted
like connections to elite companies and institutions, having a dad who was an
Engineer help you with your math homework, having a family who stays healthy
and has healthy habits, took even more time.

When you are poor, being broke, dealing with stressful relationships and
maintaining social connections to people who need you economically takes up
time, time that you have even less of when you are making up for the learning
curve just to calibrate to the elite.

Most people cannot overcome this even if they try because the emotional and
cultural imprisonment, intentioned or not, can be soul crushing, and the guilt
tripping associated with "thinking your better than everyone else" forces
people in these intermediate situations to "choose sides" and some people
don't make the best long term decision for themselves here.

For me, I moved far away for college, and have consistently relocated myself
and each time associated with smarter people more aligned with my goals. If I
still lived in my hometown and had people whose lives are going poorly around
asking me for favours and wanting me to come to family events all of the time,
I would not be as successful.

You want to believe that everyone will work as hard as you to make their lives
better but the truth is alot of people are scared, don't believe in themselves
and American poverty is comfortable enough that its easier to surround
yourself with other people in that situation than experience the soul crushing
isolation of trying to make yourself better without the full support of your
community while also entering into a new community and trying to overcome the
inferiority complex.

I'm a female Engineer Age 26 and now I make 6 figures, almost done paying off
student loans, which were steep going to a private university, don't tell my
family how much I make, live far away from them and am doing freelance
software on the side outside of work, working 70hours a week to make passive
income and invest more in software and bring those skills back to my niche
industry so I can increase my salary even more.

Alot of people tell me "all you care about is money". No, you obviously have
never lived on food stamps, lived with a single working mother whose father is
in prison, and been sent to live with aunts and uncles when your mother
couldnt afford to have you. Being broke is stressful and all consuming and
forces you to be dependent on other people who are stuck on making short term
economic decisions because they can't save up enough (for whatever reason,
legitimate or lack of planning or putting in enough effort, stress, too busy
working long hours at min wage etc) to invest in a better life.

Screw you. It's not about the money, its about creating a stable life so I can
invest and focus on what I love to do. If I love what i do and I invest in
that, I'll get a job doing something I really like, and I will be good at it
and want to spend my time doing that, and I'll have the opportunity to work on
big problems that help alot of people, and I won't be distracted by my lack of
ability to take care of myself or pay my bills.

I've had fake hipsters who are Art Majors "living at home" buying a $5 latte
not realizing what an economic luxury it is to sit a coffee shop and
"contemplate" life, tell me all I care about is money has never really been
poor, and thinks backpacking and asking people for money here and there is a
cool socioeconomic experiment (that can be cushioned by crashing at your
parents house when it doesnt work out), has idea what they are talking about.

~~~
sprafa
This is an incredibly interesting story. I haven't been through nearly
anything as bad as you, but my insight onto the issues of my family were
similar - poverty and lack of knowledge and hard psychological issues. Because
our society doesn't consider (yet) psychological issues to be "real" in the
sense that any other illness is, we get this dumb talk about how "you can get
out of it if you want". Yes that might be true, and you are the proof of it.
But there is a huge denial going on in our society about how psychology
actually works and how bad it can really get before you get marked as a
"clinical" case. Society is bleeding people to cure them, to make the analogy
with an old medical practice that we now know is insane.

~~~
usmeteora
Yeh, I think people underestimate the power of influence and people do not
correlate it or study cause and effect enough in studies.

The influence your community has on your personal decisions and how that
impacts your personal wealth is significant.

Weve already witnessed highschool suicides tend to happen in clusters. Weve
witnessed it as a nation at Gunn Highschool in SanFran and other areas. If one
kid does it, the two others who were seriously considering it are more likely
to follow through.

This is also a root cause of the housing foreclosure crisis. Wired Magazine
did a piece. One of the missing pieces of analysis was the correlation noticed
when one person on your street forecloses on a house, how much the likelihood
goes up that other people on your street will too. They retroactively did that
analysis and found a huge correlation.

We should do this type of correlation in alot more studies, particularly ones
dedicated to trying to understand socioeconomic mobility.

I say correlation because correlation is not causation. The causation we can't
know right away but it might be helpful to first look at some significant
correlations and then try to understand if there is a cause and effect
relationship. Or at the very least come up with some likliehood statistics.

------
cobbzilla
Is this headline not the very definition of scare-mongering? I'm all for a
rational discussion of inequality; but my experience with similarly-titled
articles suggests I will find just the opposite therein.

~~~
glibgil
_"...conventional measures of immobility, which just look at parents and
children, have underestimated mobility by 20 percent compared to looking at
three generations or more"_

20 percent of anything is a pretty big difference. If the study has merit then
the news could be called "striking".

------
genetixx
No surprise in social mobility being unequal, but isn't years of education a
poor measure to go by in the first place? They also mention 5% of the bottom
1/5th making it to the top 5th and 20% of the second fifth making it to the
top fifth. Wouldn't a better measure be to feature the % of people that move
up at least one fifth? That would tell a completely different story

------
losteverything
Anyone have a link to the complete study?

I would love to know how they link 3,4 And 5 generations, being an amateur
genealogist.

Speaking personally, Family pressure to obtain degrees came from gggGF. But
"women don't go to college." meant the females went only After their mother
paid. (And could). Marrying "up" was the only obvious decision looking back on
female members of our tree (from 1853-1946)

~~~
reqctomaniac
There is a link in the article -
[http://www.nber.org/papers/w22635.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w22635.pdf)

Seems like they used a PIK number created by the census bureau to track
individuals and same address to create parent-child link.

~~~
losteverything
Thanks. But I got a denied Access.

What is a PIK?

------
whenwillitstop
A diverse society over time will converge to where people's abilities are.

As t -> infinity, social mobility -> 0

~~~
intjk
Is "ability", or market value, static over time? I don't think it is, wrt both
an individual's ability to change learn and grow (short term), as well as
natural changes in the market (long term).

This doesn't disprove your statement--social mobility can still go to zero--
but I think it's something that people can, should, and do strive to make as
large as possible, be it individually, through legislation, etc.

------
necessity
[http://paulgraham.com/sim.html](http://paulgraham.com/sim.html)

------
dysfunctor
The irony of WashPo publishing this article when Bezos has been under fire for
near-servitude conditions in AMZN facilities for years, is palpable.

It's common sense that certain people are predisposed to learning certain
fields quickly, especially given a family tradition.

I mean, consider a family where the husband is a carpenter. Then, one day his
son decides that he's going to be a carpenter, but his dad has retired so he
find another carpenter to apprentice under. That very same day, the carpenter
actually hires another apprentice from a family of bankers. Which apprentice
would be MOST LIKELY to become the superior apprentice, learn quicker than the
other one, complete more satisfactory work, etc?

Multiply that by a hundred years or so, thousands of industries, millions of
families, and there it is. Maybe the banker-family-apprentice has a knack for
it, and becomes a carpenter one day. If he sticks with it long enough, surely
he'll figure the work out. That's what mobility is all about anyways, being
able to adapt to new circumstances.

I don't really buy in to this idea that there's shame in coming from a family
that has done well. Now, this is from someone (me) who comes from a "family"
that has done very poorly, and I've done sorta kinda good. The banker-
apprentice has as much chance and opportunity to become a carpenter as the
other one, since they were both chosen in the first place.

Knowledge isn't some heirarchical weapon that only the privileged elite can
obtain.

 _" – such as financial resources, personal connections, or knowledge about
how Wall Street works from her grandfather – that make it easier for her to
become a banker than it is for the average kid."_

What about the library? The NYPL SIBL has an entire section of FREE textbooks.
You want to learn about Wall St? Free. You want to take the series 7? Free.
You want to take the series 66? Free.

The phrasing of "surrendering a larger income to write poetry" or whatever it
was, is some sort of prose gymnastics that I think is trying to imply that
people are "destined" to become poets, and that there's some boogieman to
point the finger at and scream about inequality. If you wanna get rich, maybe
you should think twice about writing poems. If you want to create art and have
some sort of impact on the social sphere, maybe you should think twice about
sacrificing your life for FINRA's sick amusement, - I mean premiere regulatory
excellence.

Anyways, this was an OK article. I chuckle whenever I see WashPo trying this
pandering to try and convince ambitionless people it's the rest of the world's
fault, somehow.

