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Unless you can reduce inequality to zero - Harrison Bergeron style [1] - you can't fix this by reducing inequality. It's an ironclad law of mathematics that 20%
by yummyfajitas 10y ago
Unless you can reduce inequality to zero - Harrison Bergeron style [1] - you can't fix this by reducing inequality. It's an ironclad law of mathematics that 20% of the population will be part of the bottom fifth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
- noelwelsh 10y agoI believe the level of inequality, and the level of social mobility (which is probably related to the magnitude of inequality), is more important than the existence of inequality.
- cheald 10y agoAre you aware of any academic literature on the subject?
- noelwelsh 10y agoIt's not my area, but putting some keywords in Google Scholar yielded some results pretty quickly. E.g. this paper http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504850701720197 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504850701720197 "We investigate the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. Proxying fathers' earnings with using detailed occupational data, we find that sons who grew up in countries that were more unequal in the 1970s were less likely to have experienced social mobility by the late-1990s."