Tag: social mobility

I’ve been blogging for five years, and here are my 10 favourite posts

~ MilesCorak ~ 2 Comments

With the New Year approaching, permit me the opportunity to wish you and yours peace and prosperity.

The end of 2016 marks the fifth year of my blog, and I’m grateful to my students and readers for making it worthwhile, and particularly to those who have taken the time to reblog, comment on, or otherwise share one of my 148 posts.

Rather than offer you the usual top ten most popular posts, here are links to my favourite posts written at some point since I started blogging in November 2011. They are not necessarily the most viewed, but I like them because they best illustrate the principles motivating my writing:

  1. Write about what you know, and give readers the opportunity and resources to learn more.
  2. Focus on what is relevant—what people want to read, and what contributes to a constructive conversation about public policy.
  3. Do this in a professional way that uses the principles of economics.

Here are links to my ten favourite posts of the last five years.

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How The Great Gatsby Curve got its name

~ MilesCorak ~ 5 Comments

Great Gatsby Curve

On January 4th, 2012 The New York Times published an article called “Harder for Americans to Rise from Lower Rungs.” I had spent a considerable amount of time during the New Year’s holidays talking with Jason DeParle about the comparative literature on intergenerational income mobility, and was pleased to see his article on the front page.

So pleased that I emailed Alan Krueger, the Princeton University economist who at the time was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, to draw his attention to it, though I don’t know why I imagined that Krueger and his staff in the White House would not be reading The Times.

That is how “The Great Gatsby Curve” was born.

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Sons of low-income parents are more likely to grow up to be poor than daughters

~ MilesCorak ~ 3 Comments

Children of low-income parents are more likely than not to grow up to be low-income adults. This is true for both boys and girls, but more so for boys.

the-intergenerational-cycle-of-low-income-for-boys-and-girls
(Click on the image to enlarge.)

This figure shows the rankings of children from low-income Canadian families, what fraction stand on each of the 100 rungs defined to equally divide the population across their adult income distribution. Their parents stood on exactly the bottom 5th rung of their income ladder, and the likelihood of them not advancing very much or even falling lower is clearly evident.

If adult incomes were completely independent of family income background, then we would expect 1 percent of these children to be on each of the 100 divisions of their income distribution. If this were the case children of low-ranking parents would be as likely to rise to middle incomes, or even to the very top, as they would be to stay on the same rung as their parents, or fall lower.

But in fact, this cohort of Canadians (those born in the 1960s) are much more likely to be the low-ranking adults of the next generation and are more likely to repeat the experiences of their parents.

This inter-generational cycle of low-income is more likely for boys. Although there is considerable upward rank mobility among these children, men raised by parents who were outranked by 95 percent of their counterparts are most likely to fall even lower, to be outranked by 99 percent of their cohort. Their chances of falling to the bottom 1 percent are more than 4 percent.

They are most likely to remain in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution. Although an intergenerational cycle of low-income is also the most likely outcome for women, the chances are significantly lower, hovering in the neighbourhood of 2 percent for each of the rungs up to about the 10th.

[ This post is an edited excerpt from a forthcoming paper I have written called “‘Inequality is the root of social evil,’ or maybe not? Two stories about inequality and public policy”, which is published in the December 2016 issue of Canadian Public Policy. If you have any feedback please feel free to let me know in the comments section. ]

Should we worry about the top 1%, or praise them?

~ MilesCorak ~ 4 Comments

Every Statistics Canada data release on the share of the economic pie going to the top 1% elicits strong opinions, the most recent being no exception. Do top earners elicit rather dishonourable sentiments such as envy that should be given little weight? Or do they challenge our need for community and inclusion, influencing the way we live our lives in more fundamental ways? Should we praise the top 1% or worry about them?

It depends. We would be in a better position to answer this question if we put aside questions of merit and just deserts and focused more on the sources of social mobility and the capacity to conduct policy to support it in an era of higher inequality.

Earnings mobility for children from the very broad middle—parents whose income ranges from the bottom 10 percent all the way to the cusp of the top 10 percent—is not tied strongly to family income. These children tend to move up or down the income distribution without regard to their starting point in life. This may be one element of insecurity among the middle class: in spite of their best efforts, their children may be as likely to lose ground and fall in the income distribution as they are to rise.

the-intergenerational-transmission-of-priviledge
Children raised by parents in the top 1% are most likely to grow up to be the next generation of top earners

The situation is very different for children raised by top-earning parents, as the above figure illustrates. It shows the intergenerational cycle of privilege, the percentile rank in adulthood of children raised by top-1-percent parents. This playing field is clearly not level. If it were, all the points in the figure would be the same, all lining up along the dashed horizontal line drawn for reference at 1 percent.

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How much social mobility for America? More, but it won’t happen without inclusive growth

~ MilesCorak ~ 1 Comment
shania-twain
Shania Twain, the legendary country-pop music star, personifies the “rags to riches” mobility at the core of the American Dream, and what’s so amazing she’s not even American. (Click image to read her bio.)

A common way to think about social mobility is in terms of “rags to riches” movement, a type of mobility that is central to the great defining metaphor of the United States, “The American Dream.” Indeed, policy makers often frame their discussion of social mobility in these terms, as for example in a May 2016 speech by the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Upward movement is a natural way to think about social mobility, and Americans should have more of it. But this won’t happen without lowering the chances of intergenerational cycles of poverty, and promoting inclusive economic growth.

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Higher inequality leads children to drop out of high school

~ MilesCorak ~ 2 Comments

I am in Washington DC at the Brookings Institution participating in a conference based on the papers that will appear in the next issue of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, and specifically to discuss a paper called “Income Inequality, Social Mobility, and the Decision to Drop Out of High School.”

The authors, Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine, say in the abstract of their paper:

we posit that greater levels of income inequality could lead low-income youth to perceive a lower return to investment in their own human capital. Such an effect would offset any potential “aspirational” effect coming from higher educational wage premiums. The data are consistent with this prediction: low-income youth are more likely to drop out of school if they live in a place with a greater gap between the bottom and middle of the income distribution. This finding is robust to a number of specification checks and tests for confounding factors. This analysis offers an explanation for how income inequality might lead to a perpetuation of economic disadvantage and has implications for the types of interventions and programs that would effectively promote upward mobility among low-SES youth.

You can learn more and download the paper from the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity web site for the 2016 Spring conference.

The slides for my discussion of the paper are here.

Corak Comments on Kearney and Levine income Inequality Social Mobility and the Decision to Drop Out of High School

My comments revolve around three questions raised by this nicely crafted paper:

  1. Inequality of what?
    • the authors focus our attention on the degree of inequality in the lower half of the income distribution
    • but they also use a measure of inequality based upon all sources of income, including benefits from government transfers
    • so policy makers might wonder about the scope and design for government transfers to lower inequality in the lower half, and in particular of expanding the EITC to include men
  2. Social Mobility for whom?
    • state-level inequality raises the chances that boys from low status backgrounds will drop out of high school, there is no statistically significant influence for girls
    • but these patterns also depend upon the abilities that these boys have when they start high school
    • I show that these abilities are actually correlated with the abilities children have when they were kindergarten age, so we might also wonder about whether policy should be directed to individuals and high schools, or to families and young children
  3. Whither Dropping Out?
    • the trend in dropping out of high school has actually been on the decline since about 2000, yet inequality has not changed that much during this period
    • but this paper helps us to think more constructively about trends, it may be that the degree of disenchantment about future prospects have changed

Figure 1 Richard Murnane US High School Graduation Rates Journal of Economic Literature