Social Inequality Worse Than Previous Estimates, According to Researcher | Hacker News Reader

Social Inequality Worse Than Previous Estimates, According to Researcher

washingtonpost.com

22 pointsvinchuco19 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667871

I find it weird that "only" 20% of the middle fifth will rise into the top fifth. Isn't 20% equal to one fifth and is pretty much expected? It feels like the Dilbert cartoon of the boss complaining that 40% of sick days being on Mondays and Fridays. I think the article is right overall but I'm wondering if anyone has some insight into why 20% is an unexpected number in the data.

The 20% rising up out of the middle fifth and the middle fifth being a fifth of total population are unrelated numbers. It's coincidence that they are the same number.

But the point is that, if where you ended up was completely unrelated to where you started, you would expect 20% of the middle fifth to end up at the bottom, 20% the 2nd lowest fifth, 20% the middle, 20% the 2nd highest, and 20% the highest. The article seems to be arguing there is NOT a lot of social mobility, but if so you wouldn't expect more than 20% of the middle fifth to end up in the top.

That makes sense. With the top fifth being 20% of the population isn't 20% going into the top fifth what would be expected?

Ok. Here is an article that claims something in the headline and then repeats it many times through out the text. In all that clutter and fear mongering; claims of how much worse things are in the american society, the proof is the new "research"- if parents education level correlates well with the child's! Wow.. never thought that could be true.. The only "new" thing seems to be that the correlation coefficient is slightly higher. 0.1 higher.. What does that mean? I am not sure. They define educational mobility as a proxy for social mobility. By that definition any non negative correlation of education achievement between generations implies increasing social inequality. They bring up this statistic of "20% of middle fifth will rise to the top fifth" I am not sure whether that is bad. Naively I would expect exactly that to happen in an unbiased system without inequality. I guess I am saying, color me confused.

IIRC there was another recent article in Hacker News that looked back on prominent families in Florence going back centuries. They still found that families who were prominent back during the Renaissance are still on top today.

Yes! The thread was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11731890

This seems to insist that social mobility is only moving into the top fifth, and ignores that moving from the middle fifth to the second fifth (etc) is still mobility

Am the only one who is baffled by their explanation of correlation? FTFA:

"correlation in educational attainment between a parent and a child is generally around .4 to .6. This basically means that, if my parent has one more year of schooling than your parent, I will automatically end up with 4/10 to 6/10 of an extra year of school than you have, all else equal."

This doesn't line up with my understanding of statistics

https://xkcd.com/552/

It's likely that the paper communicated the effect of the correlation and the reporter butchered the explanation.

Can't get the paper though, so who knows.

I couldn't help but try to square this article with another article I saw today that said a record number of people are graduating high school. So, this article says that relative to each other people are staying in the same socioeconomic class, which they conclude is bad. But if everyone as a group is doing better, then I think there really is no problem.

Fix the education system the rest will follow.

Absolutely - rising income and upward mobility inequality are, in my opinion, a direct result of knowledge inequality.

We should also value better the rest of the jobs that are needed for society to function.

So lets say that you "fix" the education system.

What does that mean for college enrollments? Do the ~70% of households making less than 50k who were generating far lower percentages of college bound children now boost enrollments for universities?

With a similar dropout rate or lower since education is "fixed" we now have a ton more college graduates. Are there anywhere near enough jobs requiring a college degree to satisfy the demand?

There is a much larger problem than some stock-phrase about education can fix.

I see it as more of a failing of our current economic system if we don't know how to use a surge in the number of college graduates.

There's a Supreme Court case I wish more people heard of called San Antonio Independent School District vs Rodriguez.

It’s basically thanks to this decision that kids who grow up with wealthy families get good clean schools and well-paid teachers and kids in poor families get leaky roofs and hand-me downs. This decision crushed social mobility in America.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/15/how-a-1974-...

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