>Frankly this entire thread is you leaping from one myth to another. You claimed a paper about Florence had wider applicability than it does, by ignoring what

>Frankly this entire thread is you leaping from one myth to another. You claimed a paper about Florence had wider applicability than it does, by ignoring what the authors specifically wrote to make your claim. I quoted the statement from your own paper contradicting your claims and I presented more recent papers on the US that show you're incorrect. So I don't think I'm the one making mythical leaps. >All of the recent research shows that there is far less competitiveness across firms and that net social mobility has collapsed. I just cited one of the most cited paper in this area, the Raj Chetty one, and it directly contradicts your statement. Did you look at it? They had unprecedented access to all US taxpayer records, making their study vastly more comprehensive than anything before (and since as far as I can tell). They analyzed every single person in the US income for the period in question. You're not going to get a much better dataset than that. >I'm not sure what you imagine this proves. It is evidence for the claim this started with: the rich get poorer, where you take some definition of wealth, take all people in that group, and see what happens to them over time. One such metric is the top X people, and demonstrating that they do not remain is one data point showing this statement true. I've yet to see a dataset for which you can answer this statement that does not support. The Forbes 400 is a particularly easy one for anyone to check. Or simply google what percentage of millionaires or billionaires are first gen, and again you'll see most wealthy are new, not inherited. So, do you have any dataset showing for everyone of some level of wealth in the US, that over time that same set of people don't regress to mean? I've just given several places showing exactly this. >net social mobility has collapsed FRED, Raj, BLS, and Census disagree. Even your Wiki link states "A large academic study released in 2014 found US mobility overall has not changed appreciably in the last 25 years ". I don't think the word "collapsed" means "has remained fairly constant".