Egalitarianism and Mobility

 Ran across a statement in a discussion of declining social mobility in the US that these days the more equal societies have more social mobility.

I wonder if there's math working here.  Consider the US--our top income class has been gaining wealth for some time now.  It used to be the CEO earned 20 times (figure pulled out of the air) what the lowest paid employee in the company did.  Now it's more like 100 times.   Doesn't that make it more unlikely the employee will ever get into the top 20 percent of earnings? 

Migrating to Opportunity

 David Brooks has an column in today's NYTimes on the question: "How racist is America?" His answer seems to be--getting less so, when you look at long range changes.  I recommend it.

But he had an observation about how immigrants are doing better than you might expect, particularly if you focus on prejudice against foreigners.  He noted that immigrants move to places of opportunity.  The implication is it gives them an advantage over native-born, who tend to live where they grew up, or at least some natives are less mobile.  You can pick holes in such a generalization: for example the Amish are notably mobile, and people flocked to North Dakota during the oil boom. 

But I buy it. By moving from one country to another you break a lot of the habits and constraints you'd have if you remained.  That's true for the vast majority of movers.  But the majority of Americans aren't moving, even within the country.

I think it's true that our mobility has decreased over the years.  I think a minor factor is the end of the draft, which broke some of the ties men had.  (Though as a creature of habit myself I may be overestimating their role in life.)

Upward Mobility

 Ran across a statistic about the Forbes 400 billionaires so did a search with this result:

"When we first created the self-made score [see the article for an explanation of how they scored], we went back and assigned scores for the members of  the 1984 list. Less than half of them were self-made. By 2014, 69% of the list was deemed self-made. Fast forward to the present list, and that figure has inched up to 69.5%. All but one of the 18 newcomers this year are self-made.   [Oprah Winfrey is an example of someone who's entirely self made]

I don't know how this compares to other nations.  But China is an easy case:

The pandemic has proved no match for China’s wealth juggernaut. The total wealth of the China’s 400 Richest soared to $2.11 trillion, from $1.29 trillion a year earlier. The 64% gain was due to the easing of capital-market rules and an economic rebound that enabled China to pull ahead of the world’s other large economies in recovering from the pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of the listees saw their fortunes climb in the past year. The minimum net worth needed to make the list rose to $1.55 billion, compared with $1 billion a year ago. 

While not everyone on this list is also on the overall Forbes list, we can, I think, assume that many (almost all?) of the Chinese billionaires (I still have trouble comprehending the concept when typing it) are "self-made".  Some proportion of them are likely children or grandchildren of the bigwigs of the original Chinese communist party. 

Modern Loneliness--Brooks and Sasse

Arthur Brooks has an op-ed in the Times on loneliness in modern times, partially keyed off Sen. Sasse's book.  (DA paragraph:

Mr. Sasse worries even more, however, about a pervasive feeling of homelessness: Too many Americans don’t have a place they think of as home — a “thick” community in which people know and look out for one another and invest in relationships that are not transient. To adopt a phrase coined in Sports Illustrated, one might say we increasingly lack that “hometown gym on a Friday night feeling.”

This tweet by Adam Rothman includes some pushback to the position.

I agree there can be loneliness and social isolation in the city or suburb. Some of that is shaped by the social structure, some is chance, and some is personal choice.  The city has always been a place of freedom and opportunity, and it remains so.  The thick society found in rural areas and the smaller towns often has its downsides.  

There have been some reports that American mobility is down, both mobility among classes and geographic moves.  I suspect some of the people who are concerned with the lack of a "thick" community are also concerned with the lack of mobility.  IMHO the two go together in many cases.

Upward Mobility Revisited

Robert Samuelson has a column in the Post on the decline of upward mobility in America.

What's being measured is inflation-adjusted incomes, comparing children and parents.  So the percentages of children who exceed their parents income has declined. A Brookings study tries to parse out which classes and which age cohorts see the change.

A couple of observations strike me:  it's (relatively) easy for poor kids to beat their parents; it's hard for rich kids to beat their parents.  The child of a welfare mother with no job only has to make it into a lasting job while the child of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates will never beat her parents.

The 1940 cohort has the greatest success, so using it as the baseline for comparison skews the results.  People like me profited by the post-war boom, the increase in productivity, which hasn't been matched in later years.

One thing the discussions, particularly Samuelson's, don't approach is a hobbyhorse of mine: in a steady-state economy every person who is upwardly mobile has to be matched by another who is downwardly mobile. That's apparent when, as here, you use inflation-adjusted income as your measure; it's less apparent when you talk about people moving from one level (decile, quartile) to another.

With dollars of income, it's possible for everyone to out earn their parents, provided only that the economy grows enough.  (Think of China, where the income measure means everyone is upwardly mobile.)

Brooks: The Pictures We Have in Our Head

In some of the commentary on David Brooks column, or rather one paragraph in his column, I think I see some different answers to the question: who was Brooks' friend with a high school diploma?

I suspect most or all of those who commented saw her as a white woman, perhaps young, perhaps a contemporary.  If true, that shows our blinders.  IMHO it's quite as likely that she's a minority, perhaps given his social milieu an immigrant. I'm further dealing in stereotypes when I suggest that a well-to-do media person is more likely to come into contact with an immigrant in his/her daily life than with a white person with only a high school diploma.  It would be interesting to know more, but for me the bottom line is his example doesn't do the job he wants it to in his column.  On the other hand, the fact that all of us commenters focused on that one paragraph rather than his more general point suggests to me that we're guilty about our privilege and about pulling up the ladder behind us.

David Brooks and American Class Strata

David Brooks has an op-ed in the Times today outlining many ways in which he sees the richest among us making sure that others don't move up and join them. The basic idea is that once you have some money, you invest and invest and invest in your children.  It's an arms race among parents, and the richest have the most arms (pre-K education, elite college admissions, restrictive zoning, etc. etc.).  To me it all seems fairly obvious.

Brooks is catching flak on twitter and elsewhere, however, for one paragraph:

"Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican."

 What Brooks is getting at, which is lost in the twitter comments, is there's lots of less visible barriers to advancement, particularly for those of us who are a little less socially adept in adapting to our surroundings, and picking up on social cues. 

Where I disagree with Brooks is his history.  America has always had a class structure.  See Edith Wharton's fiction for one.  The ways in which the structure is maintained may have changed over the years; that's something Brooks should have acknowledged.

A Puzzle: Increasing Education and No Mobility

In recent days some seemingly solid articles/posts have reported the following:

• over the past 40-50 years the average American has gotten more education (i.e., more people graduating high school, more people going to college, more people graduating college, etc.)
• over the past 40-50 years the added income attributable to education, the education "premium", has increased.
• over the past 40-50 years the earnings of the average American is no greater than his/her parents.

My knee-jerk reaction is that if the first two are right, the third can't be right.   There must be something else which I'm missing.

More Divorce Equals Less Geographic Mobility

Joel Achenbach has a good post tied to his article in the Post on the increase in mortality rates among middle-aged white women.  This from a comment started me thinking:

"(Before you ask why he didn't just move to find a job: he couldn't leave the area because his ex-wife was still alive and he couldn't move the girls more than an hour from their mother, so he was pretty much stuck.) "

To the extent we have increased the number of children living in one-parent households over the years, we may have increased the obstacles to moving for jobs.  Similarly, the number of two-job households would also increase the obstacles.  For example, in the most extreme case a two-professor marriage needs complex negotiations with a new school in order to obtain new jobs for both.

Net result, the decline in mobility noted here.(Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution says it's land use restrictions.)

Mobility and the Draft

Here's a piece on the decline of geographic mobility in the US.  The focus is more on short distance moves than long distance moves.  I don't know why the decline and haven't seen a recent discussion.  I do wonder though whether the ending of the draft in the Nixon administration had anything to do with it--the draft was on my mind because I recently argued that a grandparent of several grandsons didn't need to worry about a Republican president getting us into a war and reactivating the draft.

The draft might have affect mobility of young men two ways:

• they got out of their home and into the world, even if they were never stationed overseas. That might have made them more comfortable with traveling and moving.
• they got to know and become friends with men from other parts of the country, perhaps informing them of job and/or educational opportunities outside of their community.

On Mobility--the Differences Within the Fifths

I seem to be in a conservative mood.

Mobility is often measured by dividing the population into fifths by earnings, then determining the number of people moving from one fifth to another.  For example, probably all of the first round picks in the recent NFL draft are  moving into the top fifth of earnings from a lower fifth, perhaps in many cases the lowest fifth.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but when I read about "fifths" I don't think about differences among the people comprising the "fifth", I think about a stereotype: "top fifth" would be a lawyer or financial type; middle fifth would be a white collar worker, bottom fifth would be manual laborer.  That's not quite right, but I hope it conveys my idea: I'm imagining a lot of people with the same characteristics.  In reality, of course, I should be thinking about pro athletes and entertainers and business owners being in the top fifth.

And in the bottom fifth, I should be thinking about the people within the correctional system, the people on SSDI because of physical or mental disability, the illiterate, and so forth.  In other words, when we talk  about the possibility of people moving up from the bottom fifth, there's a good proportion, perhaps 40 percent, for whom a miracle must happen to be able to move up. 

The End of the Clerk

Washington Post had an article on the vanishing clerk in government offices which was good.  Down to 4 percent of employees.

Two points:

• back in the day, way back in the day, a "clerk" was a high ranking position. The early Patent Office for example had a chief and a clerk, if I remember correctly.  As government offices grew, we kept inserting positions between the top and the bottom.  
• back in my day, the clerk position could be a stepping stone to advancement, though not always.  I remember a clerk in my first office, who was a spinster from Boston who'd come to DC for WWII and never advanced above that rank.  But I remember more clerks who showed intelligence and diligence and were able to transition out of the clerk to the technician and later the analyst positions.  In the days when many smart women didn't go to college, that was a well-established pathway to advancement.  And when the Feds started emphasizing EEO, we had various programs which enabled black to make a similar transition.  One downside of our current emphasis on meritocracy and college is we make the road to the top much more difficult for those who don't check all the educational checkboxes.  Then we complain about a lack of upward mobility.

I can't resist being chauvinistic enough to mention that some women clerks/secretaries advanced by marrying someone in the office.  These days what people have a fancy name (which I forget) which means college grads marry college grads, no more male boss marrying female secretary.  That's good on equality grounds, but it also limits mobility.

A Shortage of License, Where Are Sodom and Gomorrah?

Marginal Revolution links to a nice piece on meritocracy, as in the decline of.   It's good, though a bit light on solutions to our problem of declining mobility. 


I may have done this before (the problems of a blogger with a faulty memory) but it's possible we have a shortage of vice in the country.  After all, if we want people to rise in socio-economic class from one generation to the next, and I do, we equally want people to fall in class.  I can't get into the Four Hundred unless one of the existing elite disgraces himself.  With that perspective, one of our problems may be there's not enough vice, not enough ways in which the idle rich can go to hell, or the dogs, not enough ways to dissipate wealth. 

It certainly seems as if society is getting more conservative in some ways: less crime, less divorce, less flaunting of wealth. 

So my sermon for today is addressed to the 1 percent: go forth and sin some more.

Rural Areas the New Blacks?

Back in the day, in Vietnam, black Americans were disproportionately 11B's (the MOS for rifleman) and suffered casualties in excess of their proportion of the population.  Today it seems men and women from rural areas, especially upper Midwest and Great Plains, are suffering casualties in excess of their proportion of the population.

"The study does not look into reasons why soldiers from rural areas have experienced a higher death rate in the Iraq War"

My memory is the 1960's military, at least the Army, was draft-based.  People with the poorest scores on the test tended to end up as 11B's.  Blacks were drafted relatively equally with whites but had the poorer education and poorer scores, so ended up in the most dangerous positions.

When Nixon took us off the draft, blacks would enlist for the opportunity.I remember reading somewhere blacks now are more heavily concentrated in the Army's "tail"--the administrative support services.  As a result, although the current wars are dangerous for truck drivers, the casualty rate for blacks is probably less than their proportion, certainly less than for rural areas.  (Given the loss of black farms over 40 years, I assume without checking that the black population is disproportionately urban and suburban.)

I'm a bit amused by the quote. The illustrious Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, has a book arguing that the South, particularly the Appalachians, is home to natural-born fighters, based on their Scots-Irish heritage.  Maybe the area has lost its edge, in favor of the German-Scandinavian Lutherans of the upper Midwest/Plains.  

I'd think in reality the key question is economic opportunity.  In the past blacks and the upcountry whites Webb writes about have had little opportunity, so ended up as fighters.  In the present the northern rural areas have little opportunity, so end up as fighters.  (In the remote past, Scots and Irish had little opportunity, so ended up as fighters.) And immigrants end up as fighters.

There's a more troubling possibility however. Blacks are disproportionately imprisoned. And, for those who watched The Wire, the prisoners include some of the most talented leaders.  I think that's a big change since the 1960's, so it's possible if academicians are using as their baseline the number of people 18 and over they're getting a different result than if they used the number of people not institutionalized and with no criminal record 18 and over.

"Rootless Americans"

I ran across that term in this post on The Edge of the American West: "Our natural condition, as Americans, is rootlessness — immigration, internal migration, the “melting pot”.

It may be true, but it's easy for academics to overemphasize. Academics are probably the most mobile workers in the country (except for the military) so it would be easy for them judge the world by themselves. In researching genealogy I've seen a lot of stability (except for my grandfather, the Presbyterian minister). And most movements seem to have been either in company with friends, relatives, co-religionists or to areas where the same were already located.

There's an interesting map I forgot to link to showing the counties where Sen. Clinton has done well--it also corresponds to a map of where the Scots-Irish settled 200 years ago.

Crab Antics in India

The NY Times has an interesting article on a man (an economist who's studied remittances by immigrants) who made it from a small village in India to the World Bank, and is returning to his home village (the native language has no script) for a visit. To quote:

Back in Sindhekela for the first time in three years, Mr. Ratha went from being a migration expert to mere migrant again, with the attendant tensions. He was annoyed that the money he sent his father for medical treatment went to a relative’s wedding. His father was annoyed that Mr. Ratha refused to honor his caste by wearing a sacred thread.

Father and son had long wrangled over the house that Mr. Ratha had built as a gift. The son is proud of the big master bedroom. His father finds its size off-putting and sleeps on a living room cot.

Mr. Ratha gave the village high school a new classroom, which he intended as a science hall. The state never sent the equipment, and the room houses some aging computers of uncertain utility.

Mr. Ratha, who named the building for his long-deceased mother, professes no donor’s remorse. “The building has served a great purpose,” he said.

He does worry that his generosity may have hurt his half-brother, Tarun, who spent the money on gadgets and a motorcycle and did not finish high school. At 23, he is unemployed and the family blames remittance dependency. “I think it has affected his drive in a negative way,” Mr. Ratha said.

At the same time, his sister Rina said that without his support she would not have earned her degrees or married an architect. “Whatever I am, I am because of him,” she said of Mr. Ratha.

The headmaster wanted another classroom. A neighbor needed medical care. Mr. Ratha needed no reminder that his 9-year-old’s tuition at a Washington private school, $26,000, would support 65 villagers for a year.

Still, he was surprised at the recent progress that Sindhekela had made. The road had been widened and partly paved. Three cellphone towers rose overhead, and the children all wore shoes. In a village once thick with beggars, he saw only one.

There were a variety of possible explanations, including an irrigation project that expanded local harvests. It was no surprise that Mr. Ratha emphasized another: India’s vast internal migration, which was luring villagers to distant cities and bringing rupees home.

You see the familiar discrepancy between what the locals want and what the rational outsider (i.e., bureaucrat) wants--as with the half-brother the locals often want immediate gratification.

The thing that struck me--the reactions to his remittances share features with those an anthropologist saw on a Caribbean island (wrote a book called "Crab Antics") and which have been reported in the inner city by Jason DeParle and others. That is, one's relatives, friends, and neighbors always have expectations of any success. It's like a tax and friends are more efficient collectors than the official tax collector. As such it may discourage initiative.

Changing Contours of Class

Joel Achenbach has an article on class in the US in today's Washington Post. One thing toward the end of the article struck me. Someone is discussing current class lines: today, the rich have staff, a personal assistant or whatever.

I think it's true before WWII most upper middle class families had staff--i.e., maids/cooks. Electric appliances in the home, the spread of restaurants, and processed food reducing cooking time has had an impact. I wonder, is it easier to accept inequalities of income when there's no employer/employee relationship involved?

Mobility Rates--Shocking Downward Rates

Here's a link to a Brookings institution study on mobility across generations. What's amazing and distressing is that 33 percent of Americans are downwardly mobile (they end up lower in the income distribution than their parents were, i.e., falling from the top 10 percent to the bottom quarter). I hope some of our Presidential candidates will pick up on this. Where is the man or woman who will come forth and promise to reduce this rate to zero, to guarantee that no one will end up lower than his or her parent? Surely that's a goal we can all rally around. Whatever our race or religion, our background or aspirations, everyone wants to do better than our parent, to rise at least one rung on the ladder of success.

Write the candidates, strike a blow for clear thought and achievable goals.

Mobility--The Importance of Heritage

Henry Louis Gates, Jr, had an op-ed article in yesterday's Times citing the importance of a family heritage of success (my words). The article is "Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth" and he says that of the prominent African-Americans he has studied, the big majority had ancestors who had been able to buy land. He takes off from that to the importance of middle-class values, and to a vague call for action.

Greg Mankiw, another Harvard prof, is skeptical. 3 generations means 8 grandparents, only one of whom has to have land to meet Gates' criteria.

I'm more with Gates, though he'd need a much bigger sample and to do the mirror image study to be convincing. (What proportion of inner city welfare recipients had ancestors who had property or position?)