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Why is the American dream dead in the south?
- twoodfin 13y agoI'll repeat my usual complaint about the 2009 intergenerational mobility survey cited in the article as demonstrating the U.S. has lower income mobility than, say, Denmark. It's a survey of relative mobility, which in a society with a much narrower ("equal") income distribution will show more "mobility" even with much smaller absolute income changes. Suppose the middle 80% of earners in nation A make between $50,000 and $70,000, while the middle 80% of nation B make between $20,000 and $100,000. If across one generation a father in nation B making $50,000 has a son who makes $100,000, that represents substantially less "mobility", as this survey defines it, than a father in nation A making $50,000 who has a son that makes $70,000. The difference between income distributions in Denmark and the U.S. are likely not this stark, but I bet it's significant. AFAIR the survey makes no attempt to account for this.
- _delirium 13y agoThat's a fair criticism. It's certainly true that given some assumptions about random income changes, there's more mobility in narrower income distributions than wider ones without anything "real" happening. I do think it depends on what the study is trying to show, though, which in part depends on where in the web of arguments and counterarguments in falls. One very common argument I hear from Americans is something like this: it's true that (some of) Europe has lower income inequality than the US. However, Europe's inequality is more entrenched and hereditary, and therefore actually worse than America's in social effects, even though in magnitude it seems less bad. The difference between wealthier and poorer parts of society, this argument goes, is higher in America, but this is not as harmful because the divergence is just based on what you make of yourself and changes generation to generation, rather than being based on rigid notions of class or heredity like in Europe and persisting across generations. So the European rich man might only be 10x as rich as the poor man, while the American one is 100x, but the European has this 10x difference predestined from birth, whereas the American's 100x arises only during life. This study seems to show that particular narrative doesn't quite go through: the U.S. has a larger class divide and it persists across generations more than Europe's smaller class divide does. The second part may well be redundant, as you point out (it might only persist more because it's larger), but that doesn't necessarily make the problem any less bad.
- twoodfin 13y agoMy point is that I don't think it shows that, and just because the U.S. is such an "unequal" society. Moving from the 40th income percentile to the 20th in the U.S. represents a major absolute gain in income and presumably quality of life. I suspect it's not as dramatic a change in Denmark along either measure. To the survey, they're the same magnitude of change, and there's no accounting for the more impressive absolute change in the American case.
- _delirium 13y agoBut flipped the other way around, the more impressive American absolute change is only an artifact of its larger inequality. Danes are not moving around between $15k and $40k incomes, because nobody makes a $15k income (minimum wage is $38k/yr). So that whole bit of the "American dream" mobility has just been cut off, with no loss to society... Relative position also matters quite a bit. In Denmark, you can be born on the lower end of society, and end up as one of the country's elites, with greater probability than is the case in the US. I take this as the "Horatio Alger" myth: you are born to a dock worker, and end up President of the USA, or CEO of a Big Company, a unique trajectory only possible in America. But you are actually more likely to make this dockworker-to-PM or dockworker-to-CEO transition in Denmark, contrary to the myth! Put differently, who constitutes the elite in Denmark is less determined by parentage, whereas the American political/economic/cultural elite is more heredity-determined, because the differences from birth are too large to overcome. I think this question of which stratum of the previous generation's families this generation's CEOs/etc. come from has significant implications for society: if it's only from last generation's top-20%, this produces a multi-generational elite, which is generally bad. It could well be that one way to combat the emergence of a multi-generational elite is simply to reduce income inequality.
- judk 13y agoHmm. Steve Jobs Sergey Brin Jeff Bezos David Koch Michael Dell Bill Clinton
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- rcthompson 13y agoPage 82 of the study [1] has two maps: one for absolute upward mobility and one for relative upward mobility. They look mostly the same. I guess you're talking more about comparing the U.S. to Denmark, but as the maps show (and the linked article mentions), taking the U.S. as a whole is absurd anyway. [1] This one: http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_geo.pdf http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_geo.pdf
- twoodfin 13y agoI was referring to this survey on international intergenerational mobility, not the U.S. specific one: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp111.pdf http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp111.pdf
- rcthompson 13y agoAh, I see. I didn't look closely at that one. I was more interested in the differences-within-USA aspect.
- silvestrov 13y agoAccounting for the difference would be an advantage for Denmark: the poor in Denmark gets much more money than the poor in the US in addition to having free healthcare. To be poor in Denmark [1]: 36 year old woman on welfare, single, 1 kid at home. She gets $2884 per month AFTER taxes, free healthcare. After paying for rent, utilities, internet, TV licence, dog food and vet bills, kids football expenses, medicine, private debts, and cigarettes, she has (by her own calculation) $917 left over each month for food, clothing and housekeeping. She has been on welfare for the last 20 years. This example made a huge media storm in Denmark because she gets more money than those working minimum-wage jobs. 1: http://cphpost.dk/news/poverty-media-stunt-backfires.153.html http://cphpost.dk/news/poverty-media-stunt-backfires.153.htm...
- dalke 13y agoMy first thought is "sounds like it's time to raise the minimum wage." Then I wondered. Should someone who is physically or mentally unable to work always, for the rest of their entire life, get less than minimum wage? I mean, an employee at McDonald's takes home, what, $28,000 a year post-tax [1]? That's $2,300/month, which isn't much below the $2,884 you quoted. Except most McDonald's employees have the ability to get jobs in the future which pay much more. So shouldn't the debate include not only a comparison to low-end jobs but the average lifetime earnings? [1] http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_minimum_wage_and_the_danis.php http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_minimum_wage_and_the_danis....
- OoTLink 13y agoWhy should someone that is mentally/physically unable to contribute to society live in poverty?
- dalke 13y agoMmm, you changed my wording from "unable to work" to the much more ambiguous "unable to contribute to society." But otherwise, yes. Given the massive improvements in efficiency over the last 200 years, why should the relatively small number of people who are unable to work be forced to live in poverty?
- Retric 13y agoDenmark's average income is higher than the US so the comparison does not favor the US. Basically, there poor make more money than our poor. And there mobility is higher so moving to denmark looks like a great idea for the average American who wants to get ahead. Denmarks per capita GDP 56,210.23 USD USA per capita GDP 49,965.27 USD. They also have lower per capita public debt and universal healthcare. Largely because they don't waste as much money on useless military expenditures and a pointless war on drugs / terror. Edit: US government spending 40% of GDP, Denmark's is 57% GDP so there still spending significantly more. PS: Denmark also had a much higher GDP growth 2000-2013 than the US granted lower last year.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoYour point is irrelevant to this discussion.
- spikels 13y agoThe Danish GDP number you quote is based on the Danish Kroner to US Dollar exchange rate. This does not take into account the much higher cost of living in Denmark. This is why it is generally preferred to use Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) to compare incomes across countries. This tells a very different story: Per Capita GDP (PPP) 2012 USA 51,704 USD Denmark 37,324 USD So after taking into account the much higher cost of living in Denmark the per capita GDP in the US is actually 38% higher! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_... Edit: Accidentally hit submit before I was ready to post...
- rektide 13y agoThe swarths of pure white just left of center indicate the problem exactly. These are not some ideal perfect American dream-land. Follow the graph and one might think Nebraska, the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota were some kind of dream land. The graph measures who gets to the top quintile (1/5). Yet the article only mentions quintile once, in nondescript passing.
- ronaldx 13y agoI feel like you've defined the point of the mobility study, so I don't believe it ought to be accounted for. The person who earns $100,000 in nation A can now comfortably afford a top 10% lifestyle in that country. For example, the very best housing of the country is reserved for them (if they want it: they have first dibs). They now have significantly more economic power than their parents had, at least within their country. That would seem to be less true in nation B - person B might have observed their objective wealth to have increased similarly to person A, but they have been less able to change their relative status in the world and are less able to move up any ladder-based system (I propose that land ownership/housing is typically one such system) and are more dependent on factors outside of their control.
- nodata 13y agoThis seems to be the "upward mobility" version of the American dream. Not the white fence+wife+dog one.
- PythonicAlpha 13y agoI would say, that you are right, but I would define the "fence+dog" one as not the original "American dream", even when many people are content with fence+dog.
- nodata 13y agoSo many people seem to think that that's the dream that I've almost given up saying anything. #3 and the Carlin quote from #2 probably make a good point: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=american%20dream http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=american%20dr...
- PythonicAlpha 13y agoThe Carlin quote makes a good point here. Also #3 really summarizes what I think about the American dream. I think, historically, the American dream makes some sense, when people had to flee from Europe, to have any possibility at all to live a free and content life. But even in this time, this dream did not come true for everybody. Today, we have a different setting: The American dream is hold on, to appease the masses of people that never have any chance to get in reach of the American dream at all.
- turar 13y agoRe #3: Were Clinton and Obama in top 1% when they were born?
- PythonicAlpha 13y agoThe point is not, who is President of the US, but who says what the President of the US has to do.
- PythonicAlpha 13y agoI would not say, that the American dream is dead completely, but I would say, that it is dead for very big parts of the US people in practice, even if they still dream the American dream.
- froglet 13y agoI lived in the New Orleans suburbs (metairie) and then Georgia. Neither place had any decent public transportation. Metairie at least had sidewalks something Georgia just does not have. I cannot safely walk to any store. I cannot even safely walk around my neighborhood. Cars own the roads and pedestrians have to move out of the way or get hit. I hate it. Luckily I can afford a car, something that I can't imagine living without. I have friends that have lost jobs because their car broke down and they couldn't afford repairs. Then they don't have any job which leads to even more issues.
- afhsfsfdsss88 13y agoThe American Dream is a logical fallacy. It has but only outcome which is self-destruction. How can the normal distribution exist without mediocrity and poverty? What's truly disturbing how conservative politics can flourish so predominantly amongst the least likely to benefit from them[the south].
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- MarkPNeyer 13y agoyou can have a normal distribution without poverty. poverty isn't 'having less than everyone else', poverty is struggling to survive. the american dream isn't "nobody is poor", the american dream is "work hard and you won't be in a struggle to survive."
- hueving 13y agoIncome doesn't have to follow a normal distribution.
- sp332 13y agoWell if you define "mediocrity" to be "most people", and "poverty" as "the bottom 15% of incomes", then you would be right.
- darkarmani 13y ago> How can the normal distribution exist without mediocrity and poverty? So you think wealth distribution follows a normal distribution in the US?
- ableal 13y agoWhen I found H.L.Mencken, I was somewhat astonished at the essay "The Sahara of the Bozart". A search will produce the text, and Lew Rockwell has a good piece about it here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/gail-jarvis/h-l-mencken-neo-confederate/ http://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/gail-jarvis/h-l-mencken-n...
- csense 13y agoI live in the Rust Belt and this headline reads strangely to me. My personal experience is that times are tough in the northern US too. Anecdotally, I've heard that many of the places in the US that are growing economically are in the South.
- taivare 13y agoI would like to verify this account of the Rust Belt. The manufacturing jobs that were not exported ,relocated mostly to the Southeast leaving only Healthcare and lower paying Retail and Service sector jobs.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoA large portion of lifetime earnings variation is genetic. http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/46326/ http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/46326/
- paul_f 13y agoI think we have our answer. From the study: Finally, the strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure such as the fraction of single parents in the area. As with race, parents' marital status does not matter purely through its e ects at the individual level. Children of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents. Here's the map of incidence of single parents by region of the country: http://www.nccp.org/publications/images/svf04a_fig3.jpg http://www.nccp.org/publications/images/svf04a_fig3.jpg
- skybrian 13y agoThis is tricky because correlation != causation. It's also plausible that poverty results in fewer marriages, rather than the other way around. A decent argument to that effect: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4938.html http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4938.html
- 001sky 13y agoIt's also plausible that poverty results in fewer marriages This an interesting link, but it is a garbage argument. Marriage as a time series is just as plausibly (if not more-soe) inversely related to wealth. People were more poor and more likely to be married in the pre-war years (one example). Furthermore the rate of dissolution in marriages is also (in recent times) correlated with increases in wealth (postwar prosperity). Its far more likely that social causes (both technological and cultural) drive family structures. Wealth is perhaps a boundary constraint in some contexts. This latter would best explain recent trends that show a bifurcation (but this is more ~last decade or two).
- ewoodrich 13y agoI wouldn't be so dismissive. The Hamilton Project has found marriage rates are decreasing across the board, but far faster in lower-income groups [1]. The marriage rate of those in the lowest income percentile have dropped almost 30%, while the highest income percentile has dropped less than 10%. Of course, these are not absolute values, but I think it's hardly a "garbage argument" that poverty results in fewer marriages. There a number of other sources that have similar conclusions. [1]http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/jobs/posts/2012/02/03-jobs-greenstone-looney http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/jobs/posts/2012/02/03-jobs-gr...
- rayiner 13y agoCross-county comparisons are useless without adjusting for race, especially looking at the south where a major fraction of the bottom 20% are black. This is a group that faced de jure segregation until just a couple of generations ago, and continued to face de facto segregation today. Making it just about the "super rich" whitewashes the legacy of segregation,that continues to affect income mobility in the U.S. versus Europe. And its something even liberals are eager to do, because frankly its shameful that in places like Atlanta, most of the poor blacks still live in the neighborhoods their grandparents were segregated into.
- notdrunkatall 13y agoI'm from the South. I'm also a high school dropout. I won't go into the various vices I've had over the years since, but suffice to say there have been many. After dropping out and putzing around my hometown for a few years, I did a few years in the Army, then a couple of years as a contractor. I traveled the world for a while, and when the money ran out, I decided to go back to school and to get serious about it. For the last few years, I've busted my ass working and going to school full time. I started in remedial math, and last semester, i finished the last of the core math/science classes necessary to be awarded a degree in engineering. I have a very high GPA as a result of all of my hard work, and I'll be transferring to a top ten school next fall to finish up the last few years. I have an old friend, one I used to share vices with back during our high school days. While I was doing time in the Army, he was learning a trade. After spending a few years in that trade, he felt that he'd become good enough at it to strike out for himself. He focused on making the customer happy, and did the best job he possibly could, every time. Fast forward to today, and he now makes six figures a year. In five years, I'll be making six figures too. We took different paths to get there, but we will both move up at least one layer on the socioeconomic strata within our lifetimes. Neither of us were lucky. We were both born poor. He's half black, half native American. My parents divorced when I was young, and I grew up in a single-parent household in a bad neighborhood. The common thread between us is that we were both willing to work hard to move up. The American Dream is alive, but you have to work for it. People just don't want to work for it. I have a few other friends, people I've also known since high school. They're good people, but they have almost zero ambition. One guy still lives with his father, in the ghetto. Another lives in the house his grandfather left him, which is falling down around him due to lack of maintenance. The former has been unemployed for years and plays online poker all day. The latter works and has a decent job, but he spends it all on premium beer, video games, and movies. Neither are likely to move up very far in life. Both are very intelligent, white males. They're just lazy. They just choose to be lazy. Economists (and others) tend to think that given the opportunity, people will choose to work hard, to get out of poverty, to move up in life, rather than to stay poor and be lazy. Well, I grew up in the ghetto - I still live there, in fact - and my experience tells me otherwise. Most people aren't there because they lack opportunity, they're there because availing themselves of the opportunities they do have is hard work. I have another friend. She's the mother of some of my old friends. She still lives in the same house, which is near where I live now. I visit her regularly, and she's always telling me about her financial woes. She doesn't have any skills to speak of, but she's worked all of her life. Her husband left her when her kids were young, and she put in a solid 20 years raising them (and still helps them today). She never had much of a chance to move up in life because she was busy with kids, and now that she's older, she's wondering how she's going to be able to afford to retire. She deserves help, in my opinion, and if I ever strike it rich, I'm going to be sure that she doesn't have to worry any more. The problem is that a government agency cannot separate the people who are or have been willfully lazy their entire lives from those who have legitimately tried, so it ends up having to treat everyone the same. This is the ultimate problem with welfare, and no matter how you reform it, it will always be a problem. In order to help the few who do deserve help, you're going to have to help the many who don't. Such is life.
- oscargrouch 13y ago"American dream" is a lie rich people tell you so you will work for them til exaustion, you know: "because if you work hard you get there".. meanwhile they are in their big yachts, playing poker and laughing at you.. :) Do what you love... work hard in it because your work is just fun.. make time for your family and loved ones.. you may or may not do enough money from your work.. to support your family, friends and the good moments with them.. Of course.. society must support people movements towards prepare them to work in whatever field make them happy.. If everyone is in the place its supposed to be.. the world would be a better place.. If you think like everybody else, you will end up like everybody else.. so live up your own dream.. find it out.. dont follow this sort of hivemind dream.. this is something from the television/radio era.. where people were supposed to listen and obey (you know.. the elite).. Now its the internet era, a era where your interaction counts, where you can count as a individual even in million-people societies Have the courage to be a individual
- saraid216 13y agohttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...
- oscargrouch 13y agoThis article is full of logical holes in it.. im kind of lazy right now to argue about it.. but its trying to prove a point it dont prove, and yet.. it argues about a lof of other things that have nothing to do with their first statement.. For instance, if we really think in social inclusion, we can reform our educational systems, in a way it will matter less the individual social class, and more its talent and its own potential.. So maybe the people that would be real out of the DWYL would be the less "gifted" people and not the individual in the lower social classes.. And for people that didnt find its own way in life.. may experiment to work with the DWYL folks.. doing some work that are more manual.. they may find their own ways like that.. experimenting.. Also, when im washing the dishes for instance.. its a very good time for me to do some zen meditation.. it really clean up my head.. and i have new perspectives over things im thinking of.. What i've noted is that, by starting to do one thing that you love (and i do not come from upper class) , i started to love other things that i do not love at first.. And in my "past life", where i did not like most things i was working on.. (for several different reasons).. it starts to bitter even sweet things with time.. and i've stopped before everything became bitter.. myself included.. So no, thank you! The people that created this article can do what they dont want if they like.. because of the greater good.. you will ending doing what they tell you.. you know.. the big guys in whatever game you are on.. I believe in organic structures.. if you stop to observe nature.. things are pretty well organized.. and working very well (we are a proof of it) without anyone managing it.. everything fits well, and each individual do whatever it has to do.. there some inherent natural order in it.. we have it too.. and we can do it even better giving the amount of intelligence we have
- 001sky 13y ago5. Family Structure. Forget race, forget jobs, forget schools, forget churches, forget neighborhoods, and forget the top 1—or maybe 10—percent. Nothing matters more for moving up than who raises you. Or, in econospeak, nothing correlates with upward mobility more than the number of single parents, divorcees, and married couples. The cliché is true: Kids do best in stable, two-parent homes. This is classic.
- dantheman 13y agoI think it doesn't make sense to compare wealth across the nation due to different costs of living. In some areas top wages are extremely rare since the cost of living is very low. For instance, the average salary in NYC is much higher than one in kansas, so the chance of moving from the lowest to the highest will be higher in nyc since there almost no chance of the highest in kansas at all.
- ctdonath 13y agoYes. There is a tendency for some to grossly misunderstand the sheer scale of the USA. We have cities with populations of whole countries, able to support extremely high wages, and remote sparsely populated areas completely unable to support any "upward mobility". The South areas being derided suffer relatively higher populations with no ability to support higher wages so there is no mobility other than move to Atlanta or the like, which does nothing for local wage increases. The Northeast has more world class cities to lift the surrounding counties, as does the West coast.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago"...Because the American Dream is dead in too much of America..." We are quickly reaching the point on HN that we are becoming a parody of ourselves. What is this tripe? Why are we consuming it so greedily? Look, the poor in America today are tremendously better off than before. And yes, I find it interesting as a hacker to observe statistical data, I also know enough to know that methodology and meaning count for a hell of a lot here. It's one thing to note relative percentage differences in relative quintile rankings. It's quite another to end your article with this over-the-top emoting. Come now, is it not obvious that the quintiles area completely different now than, say, 40 years ago? Is it not obvious that things like public transportation are probably meaningless when applied to a geographic area this size? How about the fact that the people in, say, rural Florida in 1980 are probably not the same ones that would be there in 2010? Does migration between states play a role? Illegal immigration? Do poor people self-select certain areas? More provocatively, what's the actual movement compared to the movement desired? I love statistics, but far too often we try to beat meaning out of aggregate information that just isn't there. Then we bandy around whatever meaning we've drudged up to support our pet theories. One of the reasons I love startups so much is that to address a market you take statistical data and then test it. That's what we're missing here. We have a lot of hand-waving, correlation, generalizing, and blame. Not so much with the reproducible testable hypotheses. A little more of that and a little less soft, squishy social sciences, please. Otherwise this place is going to start looking like a meeting of the royal astrologers: lots of posturing and invective but very little of value. You guys are consuming this great fluffy social sciences mish-mash and treating it as if it were the same as recent results on the mass of the Higgs-Boson. They're different categories of information. All science is provisional, but the soft sciences are the most provisional of all. Bears remembering.
- RodericDay 13y agoYou think HN is becoming a parody... because people are starting to be concerned with income inequality? This whole business about the poor having it better than ever is literally pap produced to assuage the conscience of white collar americans- only slightly more sophisticated than "how can you be miserable if you have a refrigerator?". If you think books like Better Angels of Our Nature, or whatever else informs your idea that we're barreling towards a bright utopia, constitute some sort of vanguard in the Social Sciences you're just intellectually lazy.
- skywhopper 13y agoThe study compares numbers who reach the top quintile of national income levels on a regional basis. It's no surprise, then that the poorest part of the country has the fewest people who reach the top quintile. I'd like to see the numbers if you control for regional income differences. How often to kids born into the lowest quintile of Charlotte's income distribution make it into the top quintile of Charlotte's income distribution? And how many people in Charlotte are in the top quintile of national income distribution. I'm guessing it's a lot less than 20%.
- thehattrick 13y agohttp://www.dcfpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/03-08-12incomeinequality1.pdf http://www.dcfpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/03-08-12inco... In Charlotte, the average income of the top fifth is $194,778, for the lower fifth, $11,170. I don't know if you know this, but Charlotte has something like over 50,000 bank employees.
- laurencerowe 13y agoRegional income variation certainly seems significant for the single measure picked for the article. There's more detail in Derek Thompson's article [1] with maps for both "absolute upward mobility" and "relative mobility" measures. Even though it uses national income rankings as a base, the "relative mobility" measure compares outcomes between people growing up in the same commuting zones. That should exclude the affect of differing regional incomes. It's broadly similar, but more variation is visible in the South than in the other maps. Area income seems to offer a compelling explanation for one local result highlighted in the paper [2]: "San Francisco has substantially higher relative mobility than Chicago: y ̄100 − y ̄0 = 25.0 in San Francisco vs. y ̄100 − y ̄0 = 39.3 in Chicago. But part of the greater relative mobility in San Francisco comes from worse outcomes for children from high-income families. Below the 60th percentile, children in San Francisco have better outcomes than those in Chicago; above the 60th percentile, the reverse is true." Someone on a >60th national income percentile in San Francisco is going to be in a much lower local income percentile. That would make them relatively disadvantaged in comparison to someone on a >60th national income percentile in Chicago. And if they leave the city for somewhere with a lower cost of living, even if they stay in the same local income bracket as their parents they will appear to be doing worse in terms of national income ranking. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-geography-of-the-american-dream/283308/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-geog... [2] http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_geo.pdf http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_geo.pdf
- bertm 13y agoI noticed that Eastern Nevada has one of the highest mobility rates according to this study. This surprises me. That side of the state is one of the least populated areas and the most desolate. I wonder if there is a statistical bias at work here.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y agoIt's easier for noise to have large effects in small populations.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- moocowduckquack 13y agoPerhaps they woke up. No wonder they are moody. I'm always a bit moody when I wake up.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoRegarding the old canard that low marriage rates cause poverty: Iceland is a pretty solid counter example. High rates of single motherhood and low rates of poverty.
- fleitz 13y agoI havent seen any causational data, merely correlational data.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoThe claim is made in the article.
- fractal618 13y agoit's dead in the north too. I just marched through New Hampshire with both liberals and conservatives that are fed up with big money in politics. there's still time to renew our democracy, but it's running out fast. http://nhrebellion.org http://nhrebellion.org
- nilkn 13y ago> So what makes northern California different from North Carolina Did this study take into account cost of living differences? California's more expensive. There are a number of reasons for that, some historical, some coincidental, some because of the weather. But, regardless of the reasons, if you're measuring income on a national scale it is simply far easier for someone in CA to be in the top 20% than for someone living in a comparatively cheap area of the country.
- pistle 13y agoBoy, when you overlay their map with this one, something sort of jumps out at you... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law There is no mobility without stability. The south is so levered in favor of owners and controllers of capital that the poor have no shot. Double this up with per capita spending on students k-12 and this gets generational really fast.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoAn article similar to this one also showed divorce rates being higher in Conservative areas (the South) due to stress and strain on families caused by: 1) A lack or limitation of contraception, planned parenthood programs, sex education and abortion options which lead to more children being born when the family isn't ready yet. 2) Marriage at a younger age when families aren't yet stabilized. 3) A focus on a family over education and career stability.
- pistle 13y agoThis whole thread should devolve into the death spiral of poverty you are leading towards here... you can pick many down-ramps in. Institutional lubrication for an unmanageable impact due to child birth being encourage or enforced upon the poor. This further reduces that wealth per capita of the poor which spreads institutional support thinner, increases demands upon those trying to work, adds perverse incentives to NOT have more than a single income in a household, segregation of rich/poor, etc. Each stressor for those on the lowest rung reinforces or draws them into other rational decisions which lock the poor into being poor. Don't be poor Don't be uneducated Don't be a single parent Don't be a woman Don't be disenfranchised politically Don't be unemployed Don't be short-term-viewed in financial habits Don't be sick Don't drink/smoke/cope with chemicals or food Don't be fat Don't be injured without adequate health insurance Don't live in poor areas Don't work in labor-unfriendly areas etc. etc.
- georgeecollins 13y agoI hate when people make a generalization like "the south" to grab headlines. If you look at the map you can see the story is more complicated. Liberals and conservatives both do this. Conservatives complain about California, liberals complain about Texas. But the truth is there are regional economic and ideological diversities in both states.