If you have only seen the blogosphere coverage and not read the paper, co-authored with Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, then here are some findings you have missed.
the strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure such as the fraction of single parents in the area. As with race, parents’ marital status does not matter purely through its e ects at the individual level. Children of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.
and
high upward mobility areas tend to have higher fractions of religious individuals and greater participation in local civic organizations.
and
no systematic correlation between mobility and local labor market conditions, rates of migration, or access to higher education.
The authors emphasize that these are correlations, not causal relationships. Still, these results seem more promising for social-conservative policy wonks than for progressive ones.
>results seem more promising for social-conservative policy wonks than for progressive ones.
I don’t know. If I was a progressive message maker, i’d roll this into the “two Americas” and “winners of the genetic lottery” meme.
See, you tea party folks with your suburban stable families don’t understand that for the other America, the America that wasn’t lucky enough to be born into your America, the idea of reaching for the American Dream is a joke. Now here’s a tax for this awesome street car line.
That’s what they’ll say, but that argument fails. If you aren’t contributing to the problem (externalities yada yada yada), you are likely moving on up ,perhaps by postponing children.
Let’s go the other way. Would we encourage people to have kids when they are supposed to, 13 or 14? Why isn’t younger better? What do progressives have against evolution?
More on the marriage cargo cult.
Almost half of all children today are born to unwed mothers. If the author’s belief is that these women want to get married but are constrained by the absence of acceptable husbands is correct, we are left with the proposition that nearly half of all the men in the U.S. are unacceptable husbands. That seems a bit unrealistic, doesn’t it? Men still earn more than women on average, as feminists are constantly bemoaning, so the idea that 40-50% of men are unmmaryable for economic reasons really doesn’t add up.
Not good enough to marry, but good enough to make more of?
SRW usually gives good heterodox. Not this time.
What he calls some of the risks of marriage are what I call policy disincentives of marriage.
E.g., one man’s risk of losing your assets is another man’s incentive to divorce- assuming same-sex marriage.
And how exactly does he know that causation doesn’t flow in the intuitive way?
Interfluidity’s “best” argument seems to be related to his assertion that in an era of income/class stratification the problem is that people are marrying within their class and not marrying up/down and thus not causing class mixing.
I’m not sure why we assume this is a bad thing unless you assume that marriage as welfare is the natural state of things.
He then goes on to assert that if people can’t find good spouses that they are perfectly reasonable to go ahead and have offspring. This is of course begging the question. He provides very little evidence, not that I am part of the “show me” crowd. But he thinks he does provide evidence and I suspect it is pretty weak. The fact that single mothers so often do require assistance is de facto evidence that they certainly aren’t perfectly reasonable to have offspring.
It’s weird that the argument basically boils down to the fact that they can’t find good men, so they should let the men hit that anyway so as to produce offspring just because the women want them. The assertion seeming to be that marriage entails some risk over and above that the marriage might not work out, and that men are basically just there for financial support anyway that they aren’t providing. But why isn’t wanting kinds endogenous to being able to provide them support? Do we have a shortage of kids requiring externalized support?
BTW, we still aren’t supposed to believe that marriage is under attack?
The ink is barely dry on the same sex thing (and yes that was mainly about raising the status of the downtrodden gays) but now there is a direct economic argument against marriage- not just agnostic towards marriage. He’s literally saying that many women who want kids should actively avoid marriage (in part because men are bad and in part because government has made marriage a bad risk). And why isn’t he advocating for polygamy? Is that next week?
People are so weird. It’s weird how people keep wanting us to distrust our own eyes.
This seems like an overarching description of society in “The Golden Age” of the 50’s so many on the Left pine for…well, not really, except for the marginal tax rates.
The correlation to access to higher ed carries the inference of higher income levels **in the past** for those with higher ed.
That element may not have the same weight (earning differential) as it did in the past.
Did scan the whole paper (pdf) for the correlations.