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I found the article to be weak, throughout. Shoddy analysis dressed up with citations of marginal importance. It starts by just asserting that the American dr

by shasta 16y ago

I found the article to be weak, throughout. Shoddy analysis dressed up with citations of marginal importance. It starts by just asserting that the American dream is that America is a meritocracy. The section with with tables showing American wealth and income distributions concludes with this bit of "reasoning": > The highly skewed distribution of economic outcomes, however, appears quite in excess of any reasonable distribution of merit. Something that is distributed “normally” cannot be the direct and proportional cause of something with such skewed distributions. There has to be more to the story than that. Right, so the American Dream is a perfect meritocracy AND that doesn't just mean wealth caused by merit, but it means wealth is supposed to be directly proportional to merit (e.g. contains no winner-take-all dynamics). It's a long article and I'm not going to address everything it contained, but the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
...it means wealth is supposed to be directly proportional to merit (e.g. contains no winner-take-all dynamics). And that merit is assumed to be normally distributed. They also seem to make some fairly strong independence assumptions: If poverty were exclusively due to individual differences, we would expect rates of poverty to be randomly distributed throughout the county. This of course makes the implicit assumption that individual differences are neither correlated with location, nor do individuals of high merit change their location. The latter is certainly false...
rtperson 16y ago
> the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful. That I agree with. More interesting was the recent Pew study of what US citizens perceive as wealth distribution versus what it is in reality: http://baselinescenario.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/screen-shot-2010-09-28-at-1-22-48-pm.png http://baselinescenario.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/screen-s... It's increasingly depressing the extent to which this isn't news any more. But the truth is, it's not at all clear what, given the global economy, can or should be done about it. We could offer free education and health care to everyone, and that still wouldn't bring factory and construction jobs back.

by shasta 16y ago

yummyfajitas 16y ago

...it means wealth is supposed to be directly proportional to merit (e.g. contains no winner-take-all dynamics). And that merit is assumed to be normally distributed. They also seem to make some fairly strong independence assumptions: If poverty were exclusively due to individual differences, we would expect rates of poverty to be randomly distributed throughout the county. This of course makes the implicit assumption that individual differences are neither correlated with location, nor do individuals of high merit change their location. The latter is certainly false...

rtperson 16y ago

> the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful. That I agree with. More interesting was the recent Pew study of what US citizens perceive as wealth distribution versus what it is in reality: http://baselinescenario.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/screen-shot-2010-09-28-at-1-22-48-pm.png http://baselinescenario.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/screen-s... It's increasingly depressing the extent to which this isn't news any more. But the truth is, it's not at all clear what, given the global economy, can or should be done about it. We could offer free education and health care to everyone, and that still wouldn't bring factory and construction jobs back.