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The Great Gatsby Curve - Intergenerational social mobility and equality - graph by Miles Corac
It’s striking just how closely related inequality and mobility are. And it’s political dynamite. Why? If income inequality in one generation can be linked to unequal opportunity in the next, then income inequality can’t just be dismissed as the politics of envy. My bet is that this chart that will launch a thousand papers, as economists try to sort out just what these linkages are. Whatever the answer, it will transform our thinking about inequality.
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Winship has a bunch of complaints about how the data are constructed — and many are valid. He says that it’s difficult to construct internationally comparable measures of income inequality – that the chart should use inequality from an earlier era, and that only some types of inequality would generate immobility. He also points out that mobility is difficult to measure: the data come from different countries with different researchers using different methods. It’s a standard play from the wonk-fight playbook: throw lots of mud at the data, and hope that this leads people to mistrust the conclusions that follow.
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Here’s the thing: his criticisms actually strengthen the original finding.
Think about it. Imagine how strong the “true” relationship must be if it shows up even when using only rough proxies for the “true” levels of inequality and immobility. In light of Winship’s criticisms, the high correlation in this chart is all the more remarkable. If his gripes are correct, then graph understates the correlation between inequality and mobility.
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Below are the Washington Monthly's 2011 national universities rankings. We rate schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country). For an explanation of each category, click here. For more information about the overall goals of the rankings, click here. To learn more about our methodology, click here.
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