January 23, 2014
The Washington Post gave front page coverage to some serious non-news when it highlighted a “landmark” study showing no substantial changes in mobility for children born in the early 1990s relative to children born in the early 1970s. While this findings is presented as surprising to both people who expected an increase or decrease in mobility, it really would have been surprising if the study had found otherwise.
The big shift in the income distribution against workers at the bottom occurred in the 1980s before the oldest people in this study entered the labor force. The upward redistribution in the period between when the oldest and youngest people in this study entered the labor force would have been primarily to the one percent. It would have been very surprising in a context where they are not big changes in the income distribution among the bottom four quintiles that there would be substantial changes in mobility.
It is probably useful that these researchers confirmed what most observers of the economy already believed, but it doesn’t seem like front page news.
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