I'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.
That'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.
My 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.
But 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.
And it may also have to do with your definition of 'dockworker' ; Dell's mom and dad were a stockbrocker and an orthodontist; Clinton was working-class but not poor; same with Jobs (he was adopted at birth, dad was a mechanic, and mom an accountant); Brin's dad is a Math prof and his mom works at NASA; seems Koch's grandad was wealthy (I can't find more on wikipedia; it also says he went to MIT and doesn't mention scholarships, so his family was probably well-off).
I didn't argue that no Americans from poor families become part of the elite, only that it seems to happen at a lower rate than in Denmark. That's what the quintile-mobility figures are measuring, after all.
Something to remember though is that Europe is large and diverse, and while a similar map to this one would show really light areas in the Scandinavian countries, it would also have large darker parts in other regions.
Denmark'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.
The 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!
PPP seems like a weird attempt to decide what the exchange rate "should" be for things to be "equivalent". Why not let the market decide? DKK vis-a-vis USD is a floating exchange rate, where the market can decide how much they think is equivalent. Obviously a house in Copenhagen costs more than one in Nebraska, but that's because it's a better product, just like a good car costs more than a cheap car, and a fine restaurant with ocean view costs more than a taco truck. You can even apply it within countries: the cost of living is higher in Half Moon Bay than Detroit, but that's because living in Half Moon Bay is actually more desirable in real terms, not because dollars in Half Moon Bay are somehow devalued.
PPP was developed for exactly this purpose - to understand differences across areas with different currencies. While it is not perfect it attempts to take things like quality differences into account. Real estate if pretty difficult to compare as it is unique but for many other goods it is much easier.
For example you mention cars. The almost identical VW Golf (know as a Rabbit in the US) cost more than twice as much in Denmark as in the US.
> The almost identical VW Golf (know as a Rabbit in the US) cost more than twice as much in Denmark as in the US.
Yes, but the VW Golf is relevant in the U.S., and irrelevant in Denmark. In the U.S. you have to drive, and in Denmark you don't (and most people don't). The modal share of bicycle commuting in Copenhagen is >50%, because the bike infrastructure is good. I sold my car when I moved from the SF Bay Area to Copenhagen, and now I spend less on transportation, with a better quality of commute (in my subjective estimation). Yet PPP would probably claim transportation costs more! Besides the nice bike infrastructure, I have an unlimited-rides metro pass for $50/mo, which includes very good 24/7 service. How much would it cost me to buy 24/7 transportation in the SF Bay Area, where I don't have to drive the vehicle myself? (Night buses that come once an hour don't count.)
You are highlighting a fundamental brokenness of he concept of GDP, the fallacy that only market transactions contribute to quality of life.
I would rather work for 10 months in NY and live in Maui for 2months vacation than spend $15000 traveling to Maui five times for a week each, but GDP says the latter is a higher standard of living.
There is not perfect way to measure output. If you can come up with something better please let everyone know. There are thousands of experts who have spent their entire professional lives on these issues. Good luck!
There are plenty of alternatives out there GDP is simply vary generic and became the most well known outside the field of economics. Depending on what your trying to measure other other tools are much more accurate.
Sort of like your doctor wanting to know your blood pressure for somethings and your weight for others. They can both tell say something about your risk of heart attack but blood pressure also indicates other more immediate issues and your weight is vital when prescribing medication.
EX: Subtracting exports and adding imports is useful when tracking quality of life adding exports and subtracting imports is useful when measuring economic strength. However, the difference between exports and imports tends to make up a small fraction of the economy so it's not that important.
It's difficult to arb those opportunities though, because while we have pretty decent freedom of capital and goods between the US and DK, we still have pretty piss poor free movement of labor -- both as a matter of formal barriers (i.e. immigration rules) and informal ones (e.g. different languages).
It's hard to use those as a firm ranking system. For example, it looks like it doesn't include health care, child care, family leave, and other things which are covered by taxes/employer social fees in Denmark but are out-of-pocket in the US. About $3,000 of that difference is health insurance.
Better might be to ask Danes and Americans "are you happy with your life?"
I would argue that PPP is better than exchange rate based comparisons and I think most experts agree.[1]
GDP per capita includes everything produced by the country including health care, child care, etc. So that is not the issue here.[2]
In the US only about a quarter of GDP is spent by the government while in Denmark about half is spent by the government.[3] So in the US we pay directly for some services like healthcare that in Denmark are paid through the government with taxes.
Sorry, yes, I meant to agree that PPP is better than exchange rates.
PPP is difficult because there is no international common basket of goods. Danes get 52 weeks of paid parental leave, of which 18 are to be taken by the mother, 2 weeks by the father, and the others split at the parent think is appropriate, and their job position is waiting for them when they return.
What's the equivalent for the US?
Some of the leave pay comes from the company. Some from the state.
How does the 1 year of overall leave measured in the PPP? How much would it cost to get the same benefits in the US?
You consume more goods and services. If you want to spend time out of the workforce you can reduce your consumption of goods and services. Most people in the US don't do this because they value consumption more than leisure.
If anything, this cuts against quality of life in Denmark. If a significant number of Danes prefer consumption to leisure then they are harmed by parental leave. They are forced to trade consumption for leisure even though they don't want to. In much the same way, if you forced me to trade my Thinkpad for an equally priced Macbook, I'd be worse off in a manner that is not reflected in GDP.
No need to apologize. I agree the PPP basket weights is a problem without a perfect solution but I has been studied extensively. My understanding is that most experts don't think it is a huge problem. I think most people would agree that Denmark is more expensive that the US but we can certainly argue about how much more expensive[1].
I'm not expert in the details of either GDP or PPP calculations but here is my understanding of how parental leave would be treated. It would show up in GDP because wages are included under the "income approach", one of the three main approaches used. I don't believe it would directly show up in PPP as it is not a good or service that people buy. I don't think is means anything to say parental leave is less or more expensive.
Anyway I don't think it would have a big impact as there only about 50,000 births every year in Denmark in a population of 5.5 million. So if they max out the benefit it is only 25,000/5,500,000 = 0.45%. This is a good example why GDP and PPP work in practice - all these random errors tend to cancel out.
If you are interested I suggest you read up on how GDP is calculated. The Wikipedia article if pretty good[2].
Good point regarding the number of births, but I don't think the ratio is quite correct. The denominator should likely exclude those too young to work. There's about 1 million under 15 years old (and another 800,000 65 or older, who likely aren't working).
How did 50,000 births turn to 25,000 in the numerator? There's 1 year of leave, so that's 50,000, no?
I get 50,000/4,500,000 => 1.1% . Still relatively small, yes.
I noticed a few things about the [1] you mentioned. It's mostly meant for 20-somethings. That is, it doesn't compare health care costs, daycare costs, etc. which older people and parents would be interested in.
> this series of taxes was put into place to try and discourage people from driving but also to try and win some money back for society for the destructive nature of automobiles. We know, for example, that for every kilometre ridden by bike, the Danish coffers recieve 23 cents. For every kilometre driven by car, the Danish state pays out 16 cents.
I've read through the GDP many times before. I still don't have a good grasp on it. It seems that having a poorly insulated house, for example, is better for the GDP because I need to work more in order to pay the higher heating bills. Or having more road damage because of automotive traffic is better because it means more government funding to rebuild the road system. Or it's better to use MS Windows than OpenBSD because the latter doesn't cost anything and so doesn't appear as part of the GDP.
These are listed as 'externalities', but it's these externalities which contribute to happiness, enjoyment of life, etc. So while GDP per capita is used as an approximate measure for the ability to carry these out, it doesn't mean that it's actually being done.
Since you are so interested why don't you do a little research yourself. This has been extensively studied but I think you need to start with the basics.
GDP includes government spending, so all the things you mentioned are included. You'd have a point if he provided statistics for post-tax wages (excluding benefits) or something like that.
Accounting 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.
My 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?
"Poverty" is a term that pretty much scotches any chance at reasonable discussion from the start.
What's "fair" for someone who really can't contribute? Is it fair for them to live better than those who are paying for their life style? What about the fact that the person who really can't contribute probably also seems some sort of relatively expensive accommodations? "Minimum living + basic accommodations" may still come out to more "money" being spent on them than a normally-abled person making a reasonable low-end wage, even if it initially appears they're living in "poverty". Is that fair?
When it comes to fair, you have to remember that the money is coming from somebody else, who has their own claim to "fairness" themselves. There's no infinite money fountain that allows us to simply forget that; it's always a balance. How much work should the normally-abled be forced to do by the men-with-guns (government) for those who can't contribute? It's a really, really hard question. I don't have answers for my rhetorical questions in the previous paragraph.
There's an easier reformulation, at least for Denmark. Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage. Instead, many wages are set via collective bargaining. (The unions argue that this is more effective than a national minimum wage.)
So for Denmark let's not talk about "poverty" but "below the minimum wage for all private and public sector collective bargaining agreements", which Wikipedia tells us is 109 kroner ($19) per hour.
"There's no infinite money fountain" ... how come with all of the advances in efficiency over the century, we're still working roughly the 8 hour days from factories 100 years ago? While not infinite, surely we should be better at using that fountain by now.
I read "forced to do by the men-with-guns" often, though of course not always, from libertarians. I've always had a problem with that. There's coercion by force, certainly, but there are other ways to coerce. The government can also deny you access to things. For example, to a working water supply and sewage system, to the banking system, to telephones, to health care, to parental leave, to the judicial system, to weather reports, and so on.
Some of that can be worked around, like by going off the grid, but not all. It's very hard to travel internationally if the US refuses to issue a passport. If you don't have access to the court system, then what do you do when your neighbor decides to move the fence 3 meters closer to your house?
Indeed, I can easily consider a government based completely on the threat of the withdrawal of services rather than force. Some very rich people, and certain groups like the Amish, may be able to go it alone. Otherwise, the switching cost of leaving government services will be too high.
So no, I don't think that it's reasonable to think of government as synonymous, even poetically speaking, with coercion by force. You need only look at, say, the Viking sagas of Iceland to see how governments can exist to help reduce the overall need for coercion by force.
"While not infinite, surely we should be better at using that fountain by now."
Simple: We are. Or at least, there's a lot more to go around for everybody, even if overall efficiency may or may not have dropped. However, as long as resources remain finite, there are still tradeoffs; we can not escape that. I think the reason we believe we are so much poorer than we were a hundred years ago is that we got ten times richer, but our desires grew twenty times larger. We are still ten times richer even so. (Numbers made up. Especially the desires one.)
"The government can also deny you access to things." Which they will be doing with force, unless you have this mental model in which the government announces "Oh, BTW, we're not letting you have any water" and your mental model's citizens just say "Oh, OK then, we'll just peacefully crawl over here and die then. Would you like us to bury ourselves for your convenience?" Indeed many people do seem to operate with this model, but I find it models reality poorly and makes bad predictions. I suppose it comes from a multigenerational civilization where government and citizens have mostly managed to live in peace, and it seems to me that seems to produce a dangerous situation in which both sides eventually forget what that peace is built on.
I think you've made an unstated assumption that it will go around to everybody. If wealth concentrates to the top over time, then most people could be worse off, and a few be spectacularly rich, even if desires remain unchanged.
"Oh, OK then, we'll just peacefully crawl over here and die then."
If the government utilities stop providing water and power to your house, what do you do? (I assume you want those things.)
Yes, you could switch to solar, or a generator. And you could drill a well and harvest rainwater. These are high costs. Can most people afford doing that? And afford the higher maintenance?
Or you might get a non-government utility to come in. Which means they need a line from the power plant and a pipe from the water works, both to your house. There's a lot of people in between who might say "no" to the request to string a power line or dig a trench across their property. (The concept of "right-of-way" requires some sort of coercion.)
Yes, it's doable. There are entire communities which are off the grid. But costs time and money, which most people aren't interested in doing.
Or you could sneak in and hook up to the government utilities, so each time they'll disconnect and make it harder.
Or you could connect to your neighbors. Then the government disconnects them.
This is inconvenience, not violence. Where's the government force in my example? But yet it is coercive, yes?
When I graduated from college, I had to pay off a small library fine before I could get my diploma. The college didn't force me to pay the fee. But the threat that I wouldn't get my diploma unless I paid was a very big incentive. So I know at least one case where this model of mine makes a good prediction.
"what that peace is built on". The "men-with-guns" models simplifies that to the point of farce. There are incentives to having and being part of a good government. There are means of coercion other than force. And there are men-with-guns in places without government.
"I think you've made an unstated assumption that it will go around to everybody."
No. I've simply observed there is a lot more to go around.
"f the government utilities stop providing water and power to your house, what do you do?"
In general, and under the conditions you've stipulated where the government is also preventing me from taking any other options, start rioting. This is what I mean by your model failing to accurate predict the real world; you need only look out there to see this happening. If the government wishes to make this stick, they are going to have to use violence.
You seem to simply be unable to conceive of the possibility that violence is an option for the non-government as well, which will require either violence or acquiescence from the government in response. I assume this is because you live in a place that has probably been civilized for centuries. But it's all ultimately based on violence. Try to not pay your taxes, and not go to jail. Sure, the enforcement starts nonviolently; it isn't in anybody's best interests to escalate that fast. But if you've done anything the government cares about at all, sooner or later the police come out. If they don't, then it is because the government didn't care in the first place.
"Where's the violence?" Why, of course you don't see any. You've carefully crafted your examples to stop right where the violence would start in real life.
"There are means of coercion other than force."
Which, by definition, can therefore be resisted by force.
"And there are men-with-guns in places without government."
Which is actually an important point to why the "men-with-guns" model is not actually bad. Government centralizes the men-with-guns, so they fight each other with methods other than raw violence (voting, bureaucracy, etc.) and allow us to get on with our non-violence-related lives. The government monopoly on violence is a brilliant civilizational innovation, not something to be deplored. But it is also something not to forget. Laws either are backed by violence if you persist in violating them, or are ultimately irrelevant, and I wish people would treat passing laws a bit more seriously, instead waving the laws and consequently the guns around so casually. This is part of how the police have gotten so militarized in the US, by being so casual with our drug policy, among others.
My assertion is that reducing government to "people-with-guns" is not useful, because there are non-force means of state coercion.
You say that without the ability to project force, then a response from someone being denied services is force, and when that happens, the government responds with force.
So be it. Yes, that's almost completely true. At some point, every single action can be trumped by someone with bigger guns, and everything recast into a force viewpoint.
There's a few which cannot and were not trumped by guns. Under the old laws, someone had to plead innocent or guilty before being tried, and lands could not be confiscated without trial. Giles Corey famously resisted the torture of being pressed to death, calling out "more weight!" instead of pleading innocent or guilt. As there was no trial, his lands were not forfeit to the government. Having the biggest guns didn't work there.
As a more hypothetical example, it's hard for you alone to force a doctor to do a quadruple bypass on you, because at some point you will be unconscious, and the doctor can simply stop working. You might try various dead man options, but the odds of success for you are very small. Nor can you and a thousand others, by threat of force, get people to build you a spacecraft to travel to the Moon and back - there are too many points of failure where a single person, through deliberate negligence, can stop that from happening.
In any case, a government does not need to claim a monopoly on violence, nor does civilization need that as a prerequisite. I pointed to the Viking sagas as a case in point. Look specifically at Grettir's Saga. It's acceptable to kill someone, so long as you are willing to pay the weregild. That's part of medieval Scandinavian law, which is not based on a central authority.
In this saga, the people involved could not settle on the payment themselves, so they consulted the lawman. (The lawman was the sole government office of the medieval Iceland.) Thorkel Moon decided on how the weregild was to be paid from the lands. In addition, the killing started because of a disagreement in who gained from a beached whale. The lawman decided "henceforth be it made law, that each man have the drifts before his own lands." Based on the previous paragraphs of the saga, which describe the violence between the different parties, I easily draw the conclusion that people decided it was better to follow that edict than to undergo the deadly fighting every time this might happen in the future.
Clearly civilization can exist and has existed where the government does not claim a monopoly on violence.
Even in US law, the government has explicitly stated that certain types of violence by non-state actors are explicitly allowed, and the government will not interfere. For example, parents are allowed to beat their children, to some extent, even when a government actor cannot do so.
Yes, you can recast this as the government allowing some sort of devolved violence, but as it's indistinguishable from saying that the government has a non-monopoly on violence, and there's clear examples where government didn't have a monopoly on violence, I conclude that your view is too reductionist to be useful.
"Laws either are backed by violence if you persist in violating them, or are ultimately irrelevant"
shrug Everything is ultimately irrelevant. The US will crumble and/or be replaced someday. All acts of violence any of us do will eventually be meaningless in the face of entropy.
In the shorter term, consider the US Pledge of Allegiance, probably the most recited socialist-derived words in the US. US law - the Flag Code - describes the pledge. The Supreme Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette said that the government could not force child to state the pledge, as it was a violation of the First Amendment. Further court decisions said that a child could not be punished for not standing up for the pledge, and that recitation must be voluntary.
Thus we have a law which has no "guns" behind it. When teachers have tried to punish students for not saying the pledge, the government courts have reprimanded and fined the schools.
And yet that law has a coercive ability even though there is no state force. It's backed by social ostracism, yes, but that's certainly not part of "the government's monopoly on violence."
Its silly to argue all govt ends in violence. I guess all child-raising ends in violence too. And all commerce. Etc.
Of course if you don't follow SOME rules, in the end a civilized society has to attempt to corral you or eject you. What other course do you suggest? Sedation?
You aren't helping. This sort of statement is why debates about poverty end up all over the place.
Yes, computers were once so expensive that, quoting Professor Frink, "only the five richest kings of Europe would own them". Now they just about come free in a box of cereal.
The usual solutions are either 1) use something like the OECD approach, where poverty is the number of people making under 1/2 the median income, or 2) use a "relatively absolute" basket of goods concept, which includes housing and food.
Instead, you hand-wave "faaaaar better", without explaining what you mean.
For example, it is not "faaaaar" easier for said unskilled person in NYC to find affordable housing now than 1914. For one, zoning laws and regulations have reduced the number of boarding houses, cage hotels, and flop houses over the last century.
You can have all the bandwidth you want, in your proverbial shelter under the bridge, but it won't keep you warm.
Mmm, 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?
The lowest paying union job in Denmark is just under US$20/hour. Figure 1550 hours per year (the Danish average) gives US$31,000. The article I referenced uses "full-time equivalent", which is likely a 2000 hour measure, or US$40,000.
My estimate sets the baseline, but the actual wages might be higher. The article I mentioned quotes $45K/year, and links to a McDonald's document .. which is in Danish, and I don't know Danish.
I see you did not follow the link I posted, which give the exact answer:
> a Big Mac extra value meal costs 58 kroner, or $10.25, while the Dollar Menu is the 10 kroner menu, which means it’s the dollar-seventy-seven menu here. In Denmark, taxes are included in list prices, unlike in the US, so backing out the 25 percent VAT gives us $8.20 for a Big Mac meal and $1.41 for the “dollar” menu. That compares to $6 and $1 in Seattle.
(It's not quite right to compare VAT and sales tax, but so be it.)
Page 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.
I 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.
"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
This 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
This may be a good advice, but for a lot of people that were not so blessed with imagination, this same advice may also appear just... hollow! It may not necessarily be a mater of courage, because they don't really know what they want until a commercial tells them (and probably they won't do anything with their life if the primary needs won't push them to). For such people here's the template thinking labeled "American Dream". When there isn't anything better and more personal, it's a good direction, for both the prosaic soul and overall for the society. So yeah - work hard, have fun/kids/etc. and pay taxes! ...at least till you'll figure out something better.
I 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.
Cross-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.
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:
One of the reasons for the very high amount of single parents in the South is the VERY harsh sentences for non-violent drug crime, especially among African Americans. Sometimes 10 years for first offenses [1]. Yikes.
Even worse, many in the past ten years are being denied parole [2].
Why the high recidivism? I'm glad you asked. The culprit is For-Profit Prisons [3]. They come in to an area, pay off local judges and congresspeople, and watch the money roll in. Absolutely despicable, and something I am working to end. If you only read one link, read number 3.
>One of the reasons for the very high amount of single parents in the South is the VERY harsh sentences for non-violent drug crime, especially among African Americans. Sometimes 10 years for first offenses
Outkast (from GA) mentions this in their song Gasoline Dreams (from 2000)
65% (59,253) of children whose parents do not have a high school degree live in poor families.
42% (72,939) of children whose parents have a high school degree, but no college education live in poor families. [1]
There are a number of factors that contribute to child poverty and upward mobility, but it may be a bit hasty to suggest that the primary hindrance to upward mobility is single parenting per se. The study states that they are strong predictors, but that does not preclude other factors that may be correlated with single parenting.
This is hinted in the final sentence of your quote. If children of married parents have lower rates of mobility in communities with more single parents, this would suggest that the effect may be not the sole result of the parental structure, and instead associated factors such as socioeconomic status, social norms, education, etc.
This 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:
It'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).
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.
This is quite similar to my comment in the last sentence.
But more importantly, the broad counterfactual that before WWII, broadly speaking, people were more married and less wealthy.
Furthermore its highly plausible that (so-called) breakdown of marriage (in the post-war) is correlated with non-wealth effects, such as the sexual revolution fostered by hormonal birth control and the spread/use of class A drugs (ie: culture, technology). So, in addition to wealth not explaining marriage rates (broadly) at the scale of long- time, in the short term it has competition as an explanatory variable in the micro-analytic sense. Thirdly, and importantly, the relationship of marriage as a utilitarian tool for <gaining> wealth is an altogether diferent layer of abstraction. It may be, for example, that people (in the jane austen era) married into wealth as a tactic of wealth-creation. Or, alternatively, people are for-going marriage (as in the "cant have it all generatinon") as a means to facilitate of wealth creation (or, even: protection). But these are wholly different effects/causes than the broad relatinships of wealth to marital status. They involve the precise staus of marriage itself. Furthermore, they may or may not have any bearing on the develepment of Children...so far, children haven't even been a consideration in the determinants of marriage (ei, access to sex, wealth acquisition, weath protection). The status of children may wholly be an emergent phenomenon (of marriage) or it may actually be linked to the quality of the principals (absent special instituyional support).
So, in the big scheme of things, waving around macro stuff is a bit hand-wavey. It's quite a bit more important to look at the micro-analytics and actually (a) assess them; and (b) apply them to the context at hand.
On that, I think I agree with the author of the linked essay.
The cause of low marriage rates is obviously not economic poverty. It's obviously social poverty: lack of social cohesion, punitive child support and alimony laws which incentivize single motherhood, super high incarceration rates, so on and so forth.
That's a really really bad map. Bucketing to "lower than", "same as", and "higher than US rate"?
Even accepting their statistical significance qualification, you could have a .1% difference in the percentage of single-parent families between two states, and as long as you have enough samples, your result could be statistically significant and so bucketed with different colors, implying a much greater disparity since you would also bucket two states with a 20% difference in the same way.
And you can see similar issues with their bucketing (why cut off at those particular numbers?), but far more importantly they provide the actual percentage per state. And here we can see (to take the submission's comparison) that what makes California and North Carolina different when it comes to single-parent households is only 4% (33% vs 37%).
Now there may be more to this when we look at the numbers for smaller regions, but at least at the state level that your map showed, there are significant confounding factors that single-parent status would not explain.
The 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%.
Regional 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.
I 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.
Yes. 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.
"...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.
You 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.
Whether it assuages the conscience of white collar Americans or not, the fact is that the poor in America have it pretty good. The average poor person in America is overweight, not starving, and enjoys a standard of living far better than most people in developing countries. I have trouble relating to anyone for whom that isn't a relevant fact in any discussion of poverty.
I grew up poor, in the south, and am now comfortably middle class (still in the south). In my experience, the thing that keeps poor people poor is an unwillingness to put long-term success above short-term pleasure. Poor people buy cars they can't afford; they blow off work to go to the club with their friends; they have children young. Many poor people work hard, but very seldom are they working _toward_ anything beyond the next paycheck, or the next beer.
to what do you attribute your ability to overcome the trappings that keep your peers down? genetic makeup?
a huge chunk of HN directly or indirectly makes their money from advertising. what do you think that industry is about if not fine-tuning the mechanisms that get people to buy stuff that they don't need?
I 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.
I 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.
The 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].
you 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."
I 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.
The 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.
I 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.
5. 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.
I 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.
> 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.
An 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.
This 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.
I 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.
it'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
Regarding 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.
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.