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Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

One important impact he had on my thinking is that he rejects groupings of people based on snapshots in time.

For instance, it is very common to use income as a proxy for your economic success, and then to group people into quintiles, calling the bottom quintile "the poor". It seems reasonable, but it's wrong enough to lead to very wrong conclusions. A college student living on their own will appear to be a "poor household", even though many are likely to be in the top quintile later on in their life. These scenarios seem like exceptions, but when you add them up (as Dr. Sowell does), they show a very different picture.

Following people (statistically) through their lives, and across generations, is a common theme in his work. It's harder to get good data than the snapshot-in-time approach, but he does the work, and it's so much more informative.

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> A college student living on their own will appear to be a "poor household", even though many are likely to be in the top quintile later on in their life.

A great example from the other side of the spectrum is house sales: Anyone who needs to move and owns a house typically sells their house and buys a new one. During that year, they'll sometimes show up as having extremely high income. Depending on how often they move, this could have a real impact.

I don't know if that's true. A house sale goes on a Schedule D, which gets pulled into Gross Income. I don't think Gross Income is what's used in those income calculations in the stats being discussed here?

A researcher having the tools to exclude a particular type of income that throws off a statistic is a different matter than that researcher having the knowledge of those tools or the lack of ideological bias required to use them.

Exactly. And when you try and track people across decades, things start to look different.

https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-...

What I've seen contradicts the authors rosy glasses. 5 to 10 really good years often doesn't add much to 40 iffy years. And 5 bad years does a complete number on people.

Interesting read, but supposedly when we're talking about changes in social mobility we really care about the change in the percentage of people that are richer than their parents? Indeed towards the end of the article the author says:

> There is one study of progress over time that follows parents and children that is gloomy and that is “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Mobility Since 1940” by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang (Chetty et al) They find that if you were born in 1940, you had a 92% chance of surpassing your parents income. But if you were born in 1984, the number is a depressing 50%. Chetty et al control for age — this is for parents and children when they are both 30. This does suggest that the American dream is dead or at least dying — half of the children do better than their parents but half do worse, suggesting no progress over time.

The author then says that we should measure income differently by using a non-standard measure of inflation. But if we had just used that non-standard measure on the wage data of Piketty et al., we would've arrived at the same conclusion anyway?

I'm not sure "richer than their parents" alone, is a fair metric for social mobility. If you're born in the top 20% and stay in the top 20% (not advancing higher), is that really a social concern? I mean, Bill Gates kids are unlikely to do better than their parents, but that's ok.

From what I've read, most social mobility metrics are from low quintiles to higher quintiles.

So if in 1984, 50% of children do better than their parents, and that 50% is mostly the bottom half (I have no idea if it is), then you're doing pretty good in terms of social mobility, no? People making below the median are doing better.

And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.

> And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.

They address that in the paper:

> Higher GDP growth rates do not substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents because a large fraction of GDP goes to a small number of high income earners today. To see why absolute mobility is insensitive to the growth rate when growth is distributed unequally, consider the extreme case in which one child obtains all of the increase in GDP. In this case, higher GDP growth rates would have no effect on absolute mobility. More generally, GDP growth has larger effects on absolute mobility when growth is spread more broadly, allowing more children to achieve higher living standards than their parents. Higher GDP growth and a broader distribution of growth have a multiplicative effect on absolute mobility: Absolute mobility is highest when GDP growth rates are high and growth is spread broadly across the distribution.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/398.full

It's the difference between being 'poor' and merely 'broke'.

The problem with Dr. Sowell is that he believes that "when he adds everything up" that it tells an accurate and whole picture. To him, people are a simple variable to plug into an even simpler economics equation.

He could learn a few things concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty from Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman.

A few points...

+ Sowell never truly questions the data that's the foundation of his work. For Sowell, history and historical data as reported by "conquerors" is never to be questioned. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have famously proved how problematic this approach is.

+ Sowell refuses to address human decision-making, judgment and uncertainty. For him, power and violence do not matter. If the black family structure was better and enough for self-improvement post-slavery then why did millions of blacks flee the South before the enactment of massive liberal civil rights policies?

In Sowell's world, America was great from 1863-1930. A time of great uncertainty and white terrorism that resulted in the Great Migration.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_%28African_Ame...

Hmm, I don't recognise that description. His books "A Conflict of Visions" and "Intellectuals and society" are all about human decision making, judgement and uncertainty.

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