In early December, in Osawatomie, Kan., President Obama delivered the sort of fiery populist speech his base had been demanding since the start of his administration. The speech as a whole strongly overstated the extent of economic insecurity in today’s America, but one particular claim jumped out at me — that upward mobility has declined rather sharply:
We tell people — we tell our kids — that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. . . . And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk. You know, a few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance had fallen to around 40 percent. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a one-in-three chance of making it to the middle class — 33 percent.
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This claim of falling upward mobility — of diminished opportunity — rang false to me. The figures were new and of unknown origin, and they contradicted most of the research that has been conducted to date. Upward mobility is too limited in the U.S. today, and it is lower than it is in other countries (a fact cited by Rick Santorum in a recent Republican presidential debate). But upward mobility does not have to be falling for it to be too limited, and there is only the thinnest evidence that it has fallen over time. I suspected that the administration had sought out new mobility figures that would solidify the populist story of diminished opportunity that formed the basis of the Kansas speech (and perhaps of a 2012 campaign narrative).
Further research revealed that the evidence behind the president’s mobility claim is irreparably flawed. His figures are based on a very sophisticated — but unreliable — back-of-the-envelope analysis that was intended to get around data limitations. And this is far from being simply an academic question. In this case bad evidence discourages people struggling to escape poverty. It unnecessarily increases Americans’ anxiety levels and adds to the general sense of gloom that has sapped consumer confidence, thereby increasing the agonizing slowness of the recovery.
First, consider what we know from previous studies of trends in intergenerational income mobility. The bulk of the existing research shows either that mobility has increased over the long run or that it has changed little in either direction. That includes bothstudies that I know of examining changes in upward mobility from the bottom. Italsoincludessixstudiesusing measures of mobility not confined to movement up from the bottom; these find either no change or rising mobility. In contrast, only twopapers find a fall in mobility, each using non-directional measures. Notably, one of them shows an uptick in the mobility of the most recent two birth cohorts it examined, leaving in doubt the question of whether the longer-term decline it found would have persisted had the authors had more recent data. The other study finds somewhat mixed evidence, depending on the data source and whether children of single parents are included.
The research to date has important limitations. Many of the studies cover a small number of cohorts, and all of the ones finding no increase in mobility use the same data set. However, the conclusion that mobility has been flat or rising over the long run is mirrored in studies of trends in mobility over adults’ lives (within a generation) and of trends in occupational mobility. The educational-mobility evidence, to my knowledge, comes from a single study that found mixed results.
The model the president's office is using sounds like it was devised to create the outcome he was looking for, rather than analyzing the data in a more simplified way, with fewer assumptions. We can compare the data sets simply, rather than in a complex way - so why create the more complex model, built on a host of assumptions, when you have hard data to compare in a straightforward manner?
The answer is that the president knows that few people are going to crunch his model (excepting the rational few at National Review), especially if the speech he's giving tells them something they already believe. Barry's just building another justification for expanding the federal government, and his people gave him one.
Have you considered the potential effect of intergenerational welfare on the development of a set of the population that are either incapable or not interested in "escaping" poverty-poverty as it is now defined with DVDs, flat screen TVs, air conditioning, etc?
The middle class shrinks because they raise the poverty level. Since this increase is built into the economy, the poverty rate will rise along with the number of people the government decides are living in poverty.
Nicely researched article, but all the empirical data in the world is unnecessary when looking at the motivations of Obama. His only interest is in whipping up resentment among his base towards those who his base believes have benefitted unfairly from the capitalist system. These beneficiaries are broadly defined so as to maximize his minion's resentment. From there, his distortion of the facts gets dutifully reported by the mainstream media outlets as undeniable truths, and articles such as this get minimized as right wing propaganda aimed at, somehow, propping up, as usual, the wealthy.
Liberal class warfare politics executed by liberal politicians and promoted by liberal journalists in perfect harmony. It's a well-worn page from the playbook, but like Vince Lombardi's old Packer sweep, it works every time.
The Republicans better come up with a defensive scheme to shut this down.
Upward income mobility is the sort of thing with which liberals are concerned. There is no good conservative reason for conservatives to take an interest in it. From a conservative standpoint the position of each person or family in the distribution of income is, so to speak, completely deserved and is completely the result of the efforts or lack of efforts of people to work successfully enough to rise.
Conservatives should treat income mobility and indeed all such liberal concerns as non-issues.
@Gestell: Obviously, this comment is a canard, since it is an extreme oversimplification of conservatism that is often found on the Left. But I'll answer it straightforwardly.
Conservatives (I might say unlike libertarians) live in the real world, with real human beings. In every real human society there has been nepotism. Conservatives (by which I mean those who support the principles of the American founding) see nepotism as a necessary part of human nature that encourages the present generation to work for the future. But they also see it as having the potential to stifle a society by costing it the talents of those with the misfortune of being born to the wrong parents. There is a reason our Founders wrote rules against aristocracy into the Constitution, after all.
From a practical standpoint, societies with limited mobility tend to be either stagnant or unstable. Neither is very successful for very long. But there is a deeper reason that goes to the heart of conservatism.
Conservatives argue that the free enterprise system is *morally* better, in that it increases the likelihood that a society will produce citizens with the virtues of thrift, industry, and civic duty.
Indeed, while the conservative critique of socialism appears on the surface to be one of practicality, the most trenchant critiques of the socialist and communist systems have been moral ones -- decrying the way in which living in those systems deadens the soul. A significant part of this deadening comes from the lack of hope that such a system brings, because one's efforts or lack of efforts do *not* matter to their income or any other kind of mobility.
Thus, conservatives care about income mobility partly because it is one indication that we are or we are not succeeding in having the kind of society that we are after. (We also care because -- gasp! -- we so-called hardhearted Scrooge types care about people as individuals rather than as oppressed groups to be used as cudgels.)
So even if President Obama is correct that income mobility is reduced, he, as usual, has the cure exactly backwards. He would blame the capitalist system, that 'lets the rich get richer and makes the poor poorer'. But this is contrary to every human society in history, since traditionally, the less free the society, the better job the privileged do in protecting their privilege and passing it down the generations.
To put it into terms with immediate relevance, the people who carried signs reading, "Where's my stimulus?" were stating a key fact of Hoover-Roosevelt economics, as perfected in the Obama stimulus package. In any game where it matters who you know, you'd better pick the right parents.
What causes me to be dubious of these studies is how laws or conditions have changed continually throughout the entire period, such as subsidies for the underprivileged.
I would like to see a study of human behavior or income mobility on the long range effects of handouts from the Gov.
Although interesting nowhere in the article is there a discussion as to the causes of the lack of "acceptable" mobility. What if we changed the discussion to the study of "athletic mobility". I would be curious to see the results. Although my parents were both athletic and were supporting in my childhood pursuit of sports lets just say I don't have the genetic material nor interest required for upward mobility. Yes having parents in support of athletics would undoubtedly help the next generation potentially achieve greater success than they would have without their involvement. The role of parents could also be replaced by a passionate coach and well developed leagues that can identify and foster the talent. The conservative questions are twofold. Is there specific descrimination against anyone (or group) that is specifically preventing the next generation developing their athletic potential and two, whose job is it to help the next generation reach their athletic potential.
In returning to the argument of upward financial mobility I think the answers to the two questions are yes that there should be no descrimination but absence that the role of fostering upward mobility is best left to the prvate sector.
