Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aramadia 3034 days ago
This seems to focus on pre and post tax inequality of outcomes at a specific moment in time.

The more interesting data would measure how fluid are the populations of income deciles between generations or even within a single lifespan.
3 comments
alextheparrot 3034 days ago
Brooks did an interesting study on this, check Page 5 [0]. The answer is that there is a lot of mobility, but your parent’s income status definitely seems to be correlated with their child’s income status.

That isn’t to say it is causative, maybe people who grew up in high cost of living areas just stay in them, where incomes are higher to accommodate.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...

link
frgtpsswrdlame 3034 days ago
>The more interesting data would measure how fluid are the populations of income deciles between generations or even within a single lifespan.

Even that wouldn't be too interesting to me. What if the society we live in just distributes a lot of income on the basis of luck? We would appear to be a highly fluid society but from the perspective of any individual there would still be little you could do to advance. Some really interesting data would be to take a child's income across life and regress it by some of the luckiest things you can have, parental income level / parent hours spent reading to child before 8 years old / attendance of pre-k / quality of child's high school. Then we could see not just fluidity but independent effortful movement in the economy.

link
darpa_escapee 3034 days ago
Maybe this graph[1] is what you're looking for? It's not income deciles, but quintiles.

[1] https://itdoesnotaddup.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/capture5....

link
rosser 3034 days ago
Interesting: nominally more of the bottom quintile both stay in that quintile, and make it to the top quintile, than stay in the top, and drop to the bottom.

  bottom -> bottom: 41%
  top -> top:       40%

  bottom -> top: 9%
  top -> bottom: 8%
I guess that's kind of evidence for mobility? From the shapes of the other bands, coming from money still massively biases for ending up with it, and not coming from it against.
link