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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 yo

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 10y ago
A study doesn't necessarily have to advocate a solution - it can just bring attention to a problem.
- loeg 10y ago
  Is it a problem?
  - corecoder 10y ago
    Yes, poverty is a problem, more so the seeming fact that people yet to be born is condemned to poverty.
    - ksdale 10y ago
      Poverty and inequality and mobility are all different things, and I think it's perfectly valid to ask what the right amount of mobility is. Obviously it's not 100% of people in the bottom 20% moving to the top because that would just mean that the top moves elsewhere.
    - jimmywanger 10y ago
      The study mentions nothing about poverty, just how educational levels seem to be preserved across generations.
      - idrios 10y ago
        It's about social/economic mobility and inequality. Poverty is very relevant here
        jimmywanger 10y ago
        FTA: The study focuses specifically on how the educational attainment of families changes over time, which the researchers use as a proxy for economic mobility. That use as a proxy has not been justified. It is a massive cognitive leap. Nobody brought up poverty in the article.
        idrios 10y ago
        Also from the article >Research by economists from Harvard and Berkeley found that fewer than 10 percent of people in the bottom fifth of the wealth distribution will make it into the top fifth. Poverty is an arbitrary threshold. Its definition if you Google it is "the state of being extremely poor" and as you noted, you can eliminate poverty by reducing the threshold. This is why the article chose quintiles. As someone else said here, the article is bringing attention to a problem--lack of intergenerational social mobility. This has a lot of implications, one of which is that families born into poverty are unlikely to get out. It has other implications too, such as that middle class families will stay middle class and the elite stay elite. From what I have seen, the middle class are pretty happy being middle class and the elite like being elite, but the anxiety and stress of the low-income lifestyle is pretty horrible for people living in it. If people were happy at all tiers of the socioeconomic ladder, social mobility wouldn't be worth discussing. We brought up poverty because those are the people who are suffering the worst. As for living better than Aztec kings, that's too sweeping a claim. Aztec kings might not have been able to enjoy hot pockets or McDonalds, but they knew they were going to have dinner every night. Edit: I know what you're both saying that being in the bottom 20% does not imply a low standard of living in the same way that being in poverty does. But in the US, the bottom 20% implies a low standard of living. The median net worth for the bottom 20% in 2011 was about -$6,000 [1], which means the lowest income households are consuming more wealth than they are creating. Combine this with the article's thesis that people are stuck in their quintile, and it's a statement that our nation's poorest are not able to escape a cycle of living off subsidies, presumably from the government. http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/files/Wealth%20distribution%202000%20to%202011.pdf http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/files/Wealth%20distribut...
lomnakkus 10y ago
So, success == wealth? That's quite a myopic view, IMO.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  In a rich country, that's a very easy thing to say. In most of the world and most of human history, success definitely equates to wealth, because the poor are permanently one bad harvest away from starvation. Wealth is the only road towards securing safety for you and your progeny. Even today in the US, wealth might not imply success, but when unexpected bad things happen, money is the best safety net.
RodericDay 10y ago
you have to weigh the removal of that incentive against the degree to which the ability to give your offspring a leg up makes the system inefficient and unappealing see Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers on eg. inheritance taxes: http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_... > "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  We're not even talking about money at this point. The study is talking about educational level of children vs. the education of parents and grandparents. It stands to reason that highly educated parents produce highly educated children - they've been through college, probably know what to do in college wrt financial aid, and probably have more books in the house and talk about more educated things around the dinner table. How is that ability to give your offspring a leg up going to be removed?
  - RodericDay 10y ago
    I'm talking generally about "removing the incentive", using the estate tax as an example of removing an incentive that may nevertheless be desirable for efficient market outcomes. I'm not saying that it maps out 1:1 with this situation. Just observing that the fact that something being a positive incentive isn't sufficient to justify its persistence.

tmhrtly 10y ago

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

loeg 10y ago
Is it a problem?
- corecoder 10y ago
  Yes, poverty is a problem, more so the seeming fact that people yet to be born is condemned to poverty.
  - ksdale 10y ago
    Poverty and inequality and mobility are all different things, and I think it's perfectly valid to ask what the right amount of mobility is. Obviously it's not 100% of people in the bottom 20% moving to the top because that would just mean that the top moves elsewhere.
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    The study mentions nothing about poverty, just how educational levels seem to be preserved across generations.
    - idrios 10y ago
      It's about social/economic mobility and inequality. Poverty is very relevant here
      - jimmywanger 10y ago
        FTA: The study focuses specifically on how the educational attainment of families changes over time, which the researchers use as a proxy for economic mobility. That use as a proxy has not been justified. It is a massive cognitive leap. Nobody brought up poverty in the article.
        idrios 10y ago
        Also from the article >Research by economists from Harvard and Berkeley found that fewer than 10 percent of people in the bottom fifth of the wealth distribution will make it into the top fifth. Poverty is an arbitrary threshold. Its definition if you Google it is "the state of being extremely poor" and as you noted, you can eliminate poverty by reducing the threshold. This is why the article chose quintiles. As someone else said here, the article is bringing attention to a problem--lack of intergenerational social mobility. This has a lot of implications, one of which is that families born into poverty are unlikely to get out. It has other implications too, such as that middle class families will stay middle class and the elite stay elite. From what I have seen, the middle class are pretty happy being middle class and the elite like being elite, but the anxiety and stress of the low-income lifestyle is pretty horrible for people living in it. If people were happy at all tiers of the socioeconomic ladder, social mobility wouldn't be worth discussing. We brought up poverty because those are the people who are suffering the worst. As for living better than Aztec kings, that's too sweeping a claim. Aztec kings might not have been able to enjoy hot pockets or McDonalds, but they knew they were going to have dinner every night. Edit: I know what you're both saying that being in the bottom 20% does not imply a low standard of living in the same way that being in poverty does. But in the US, the bottom 20% implies a low standard of living. The median net worth for the bottom 20% in 2011 was about -$6,000 [1], which means the lowest income households are consuming more wealth than they are creating. Combine this with the article's thesis that people are stuck in their quintile, and it's a statement that our nation's poorest are not able to escape a cycle of living off subsidies, presumably from the government. http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/files/Wealth%20distribution%202000%20to%202011.pdf http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/files/Wealth%20distribut...

lomnakkus 10y ago

So, success == wealth? That's quite a myopic view, IMO.

smallnamespace 10y ago
In a rich country, that's a very easy thing to say. In most of the world and most of human history, success definitely equates to wealth, because the poor are permanently one bad harvest away from starvation. Wealth is the only road towards securing safety for you and your progeny. Even today in the US, wealth might not imply success, but when unexpected bad things happen, money is the best safety net.

RodericDay 10y ago

you have to weigh the removal of that incentive against the degree to which the ability to give your offspring a leg up makes the system inefficient and unappealing see Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers on eg. inheritance taxes: http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_... > "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."

jimmywanger 10y ago
We're not even talking about money at this point. The study is talking about educational level of children vs. the education of parents and grandparents. It stands to reason that highly educated parents produce highly educated children - they've been through college, probably know what to do in college wrt financial aid, and probably have more books in the house and talk about more educated things around the dinner table. How is that ability to give your offspring a leg up going to be removed?
- RodericDay 10y ago
  I'm talking generally about "removing the incentive", using the estate tax as an example of removing an incentive that may nevertheless be desirable for efficient market outcomes. I'm not saying that it maps out 1:1 with this situation. Just observing that the fact that something being a positive incentive isn't sufficient to justify its persistence.