The Sources of Intergenerational Mobility in Denmark and the US
nber.org
nber.org
Slavery is freedom, or some such thing. "Only when 50% of the population is in danger of homelessness will there be incentive to get advanced education". OK, it doesn't say that, but part of the conclusions seem to lean that way: security is bad for educational level, which is an end unto itself???
> Scandinavia invests heavily in child development and boosts the test scores of the disadvantaged. It then undoes these beneficial effects by providing weak labor market incentives.
> The U.S. excels in incentivizing educational attainment. The Danish welfare state promotes cognitive skills for the disadvantaged children.
" While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility"
As the equality of outcomes is achieved by transfers, it makes the equality of opportunities meaningless (money-wise), and therefore makes education hereditary.
It's actually worse than that; Danish equality of opportunity isn't just "meaningless", it doesn't exist (relative to the US). There was a recent study done that indicated that income mobility (after taxes and transfers) in Denmark isn't any higher than in the US. This means that the taxes and transfers aren't actually having much of (any?) effect on equality of opportunity, as measured by the outcomes of the next generation.
It's not just material advantages that child members of a class or subculture receive relative to peers. It's soft education, example and such. A child of a doctors and lawyers extended family is more likely to conform to this pattern than a child of a subculture where this is foreign.
Educational parity and even parental income parity can narrow the gap, but it can't close it. Who your parents are matters, apples fall close to trees.. Pick your cliché
Page 44: 3.5 Welfare Levels and Educational Incentives
It is well established that the economic returns to education are substantially lower in Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries than in the U.S. (see, e.g., Fredriksson and Topel, 2010; Harmon et al., 2003) ... As noted in Edin and Topel (1997) and Fredriksson and Topel (2010), incentives to pursue education diminish as returns to education decrease and welfare benefits increase.
That's just the first few lines, the argument is hashed out (with references) over the next couple of pages.
"The results presented here establish a negative relationship between educational enrollment and the level of public benefits, albeit with two caveats. First, it is beyond the scope of this paper to estimate the underlying behavioral parameters—we strongly encourage future research to explore this relationship further. Second, we neither have precise estimates of [...] the disincentives for educational attainment that wage compression and public benefits constitute. Hence, we cannot determine whether the similarities in educational mobility in the two countries occur because the effects offset each other, though we find this to be a plausible explanation given the evidence at hand."
The premise seems flawed on its face. If people are able to make a living wage and are happy with what they do, why do they need to worry about an advanced education?
Having a better educated populace regardless of how they choose to proceed from it seems like a positive outcome on its own.
Similarly, if a Danish person can have a good quality of life without having to engage in an American-style employment grind, why would they choose to follow that path?
The scope of this paper seems entirely too narrow.
Winning.
YMMV - your value system could be more in line with Mel Brooks' History of the World Roman Senate: "F--k the poor!" (vs more like that 1st century jewish guy...)