{"id":12075,"date":"2011-01-10T20:18:11","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T03:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12075"},"modified":"2011-01-10T20:18:11","modified_gmt":"2011-01-11T03:18:11","slug":"krugman-on-inequality-of-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12075","title":{"rendered":"Krugman on Inequality of Opportunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Krugman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The first thing one should say is that our system does reward hard work, up to a point. Other things equal, those who put more in will earn more.<\/p>\n

But a lot of other things are, in fact, not remotely equal. These days, America is the advanced nation with the least social mobility<\/a> (pdf), except possibly for Britain. Access to good schools, good health care, and job opportunities depends on lot on choosing the right parents.<\/p>\n

So when you hear conservatives talk about how our goal should be equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes, your first response should be that if they really believe in equality of opportunity, they must be in favor of radical changes in American society. For our society does not, in fact, produce anything like equal opportunity (in part because it produces such unequal outcomes). Tell me how you\u2019re going to produce a huge improvement in the quality of public schools, how you\u2019re going to provide universal health care (for parents as well as children, because parents in bad health affect childrens\u2019 prospects), and then come back to me about the equal chances at the starting line thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The report Krugman links to includes this graph:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Note that they’re measuring inter-generational mobility by comparing fathers to sons. They have a legitimate reason for doing that — good data about lifetime earnings is available for fathers and sons, but not for other measures, and without good matching datasets you can’t do international comparisons well — but it’s still annoying.<\/p>\n

So what does that difference mean, in practice? Basically, in the USA and Britain, it generally takes about six generations for the advantages of being born in a wealthy family to fade out; in countries like Canada and Denmark, that advantage fades after just three generations.<\/p>\n

More importantly, the economic floor in the US is just much stickier than it is in other countries:<\/p>\n

Starting at the bottom of the earnings ladder is more of a handicap in the United States than it is in other countries. What is new and striking about these findings, however, is a particularly high amount of stickiness at the bottom for American males.<\/p>\n

Specifically, men born into the poorest fifth of families in the United States in 1958 had a higher likelihood of ending up in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution than did males similarly positioned in five Northern European countries\u201442 percent in the United States, compared to 25 to 30 percent in the other countries (see top half of Table 1).<\/p>\n

Furthermore, in the United States, only 8 percent make the \u201crags to riches\u201d climb from bottom to top rung in one generation, while 11 to 14 percent do so in other countries.<\/p>\n

However , when making this comparison, it is important to note that the Americans who climb from bottom to top in one generation are climbing further in absolute dollars than their counterparts in Europe, given the broad income dispersion in the United States. Still, according to this measure, rising on one\u2019s own bootstraps is harder in the United States than it is in several northern European countries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So in the US, we essentially have accepted more people being stuck in poverty, in exchange for the chance for the few who work their way out of poverty being richer.<\/p>\n

Or have we accepted that? Maybe we haven’t — because accepting that exchange would mean being aware that it exists, and Americans lack awareness. One of the most striking things in the report Krugman links to is that, although Americans have less opportunity than most people who live in wealthy countries, we believe <\/em>we have more opportunity. Americans, more than anyone else, believe that hard work matters and the family you were born into doesn’t. In contrast, countries that actually provide more opportunity, also believe that family wealth matters more to outcomes. It’s all very ironic and annoying, if you ask me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Krugman: The first thing one should say is that our system does reward hard work, up to a point. Other things equal, those who put more in will earn more. But a lot of other things are, in fact, not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,135,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-poverty-labor-related-issues","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-economics-and-the-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}