Surprise: Economic Mobility is Alive and Well in America!

"You can be concerned that there's not enough [economic] mobility or enough opportunity, but you don't have to also believe that things are getting worse."

So says Scott Winship of the centrist Brookings Institution.

Despite having a wealth of empirical evidence on his side, it's a lonely position. Researchers, writers, and politicians on the political right (think Charles Murray in his new book Coming Apart and former GOP Sen. Rick Santorum) and on the left (Timothy Noah in The Great Divergence and President Barack Obama) are convinced that economic mobility is shrinking.

In a series of provocative essays in a wide array of outlets, Winship demonstrates that while income inequality may indeed be growing (especially at the top end of things), mobility is not declining. As he wrote earlier this year in an article at National Review, Using...two National Longitudinal Survey data sets, I can compare children born between 1962 and 1964 to children born between 1980 and 1982, observing their parents' incomes when they were 14 to 16 and their own incomes twelve years later when they were 26 to 28. In contrast to [President Obama's and other's claims] of declining mobility, I found that upward mobility from poverty to the middle class rose from 51 percent to 57 percent between the early-'60s cohorts and the early-'80s ones. Rather than assert that mobility has increased, I want to simply say — at this stage of my research (which is ongoing) — that it has not declined. If I include households that reported negative or no income, the rise in upward mobility I find is only from 51 percent to 53 percent, which is not a statistically meaningful increase. But the data provide absolutely no evidence that economic mobility declined, whereas the president said it had fallen by ten percentage points.

Winship sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about why people mistake growth in income inequality for decreases in economic mobility and how mobility might be increased from where it's been for the past 40 or 50 years.

About 5.28 minutes.

Produced by Anthony L. Fisher; camera by Jim Epstein and Meredith Bragg.

Visit http://reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

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  News & Politics

[Draanor]

Low prices are not causative of unemployment. Government regulations and minimum wage laws cause unemployment. Further, hiring someone in the United States at a higher labor rate with no increase in productivity is illogical. It's a waste of resources and it's a waste that everyone ends up having to pay for (higher prices). So ultimately the question you should ask yourself: Is being wasteful moral?

[Draanor]

Except that's exactly what you are: a socialist. You believe in collectivism. You don't believe an individual should deserve the spoils of their labor. Instead you wish to steal from the productive to give to the least productive. This is a waste of resources and ultimately makes you a very bad person. Ultimately it is probably a statement of your inadequacies because those who can't do (achieve mobility) whine and riot.

[thimization]

That's because of the recession, which is a short term change. And technically, getting fired is "economic mobility", it's just the bad kind.

[FireGuyX]

It was a typo I misplaced the word looking and added working instead. It happens on youtube.

[thimization]

I don't like to be a grammar nazi, but you could be saying two things here. Did you mean "looking for work", implying people are leaving the workforce, or "working for work", implying people are getting paid without doing any work?

[FireGuyX]

I know but this guy is contradicting himself. How can economic mobility be alive, when millions of Americans are no longer working for work.

[thimization]

you know, the unemployment rate is public information. You could just google it...

[Craigs Maxin]

2:07 - 2:30 Well that's not good news at all is it? Inflation is astronomical because of our irresponsible fiscal policies, the cost of living has increased greatly, the cost of goods has increased greatly from the seventies yet wages do not match the increases in the consumer price index. Things aren't better than the seventies, they are different and also economically toxic to the people that live here.

[LockDeltz]

I think the unemployment rate proves this guy wrong.

[cerebus2099]

LOL, cause the magazine that denied there was a financial crisis is now telling us economic mobility isn't that bad. Sounds about right coming from the people who want us to work for less money with abusive employers, that's freedom folks.

[glanemann]

Remember when there use to be 3 people at the end of the car wash drying your car off? Lets say you pay them 4 bucks an hour 12 total at 8 hours, 96 dollars total.  That money is getting into 3 different peoples hands including tips. Moving money around. Now say you did that in San Fran! 30 bucks total an hour for 3 people 240 dollars total. Minimum wage kills jobs. Instead of people getting little bit of cash, they're now getting 0 because businesses will not shell out large sums of cash.

[paleoton]

There are other researches that are contrary to this study. One of them was conducted by the OCDE.