I understand it better than you. Generational mobility in the U.S. is very poor, i.e. your future wealth is correlated much more heavily with your parents' wealth in the United States than in European countries (excluding the UK) (ignore the X-axis about income inequality in that graph since I know that isn't what you care about, the important part is the Y-axis). See also here.

Not that you'd ever admit it, but you are wrong.

I keep hearing about winning but all I see is losing

Who bears what means something. When taxpayers bear a cost they have a right to complain about it.

Losing and ineptitude is the new winning in trumpworld.

There is a lot of criticism of then"Great Gatsby Curve" that you posted a link to actually.

The Not So Gatsby Curve

Quote:

The GG Curve purportedly shows that high income inequality inhibits economic mobility while lower levels of income inequality seemingly spur mobility. Those yearning to “spread the wealth around” immediately embraced the curve. After all, if income inequality is the only obstacle to upward mobility, they can simply redistribute wealth all the way to prosperity.

But there is a big dispute about whether the apparent relationship between income inequality and mobility reflects actual “cause and effect.” In a piercing deconstruction of the curve, the Manhattan Institute’s James Manzi recreated almost all of the relationship simply by substituting population size for income inequality. And no one is jumping to blame population size for deficient economic mobility.

Scott Winship, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, casts further doubt on the curve. He notes that the curve’s data reflect income inequality when the sample population reaches adulthood — not conditions that prevailed as they were growing up. As a result, Mr. Winship notes, “extrapolations using the Great Gatsby Curve” to project future mobility are “uninformative.”

Just one example of many. On economic topics like this you should pretty much expect opposing views, people on both sides of the issue.

Like most leftist arguments, I look at it with suspicion. I've learned over time to be very wary of studies that go against common sense. I would, however, agree that the level in income inequality in the United States is, in general, an issue.

I don't have time to argue this right now, I have to get ready for work, but read this newyorker article and give me your thoughts. We can discuss this topic in a few hours when I'm settled in.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-c...nd-doesnt-mean

also

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/23/265356...wo-decades-ago

A new study finds that contrary to widespread belief, it's no harder to climb the economic ladder in the United States today than it was 20 years ago.

But the study did find that moving up that ladder is still a lot more difficult in the U.S. than in other developed countries.

Economists have been looking into the issue of U.S. economic mobility for a long time. But they've often been hampered by the lack of adequate data, says Gary Solon, an economics professor at Michigan State University. He calls the study released this week much more comprehensive than anything that's come before.

"The unusual thing is that this research team has gotten cooperation from the Internal Revenue Service to access tax return data, which of course are not generally available to researchers," Solon says.

If this is how you believe Europe is organised you're an even bigger ****ing idiot than I thought.

My first reaction was "woah, wil reads the New Yorker!", but it quickly became apparent that no, he def didn't read that.

So, the article confirms goofy's claim? He wrote:

I've looked at maybe 3 or 4 articles on intergenerational mobility over the last few months and all of them have agreed on both of these points (that mobility has been fairly stable in the US for a few decades, but that mobility is lower in the US than other countries). Goofy only made the latter claim, but you're saying he's wrong because the former is also true, which is irrelevant.

It is no coincidence you commented on my work ethic in the way you did. We are fundamentally different people. You care about your days off and your world-travel. I care nothing about that.

We view things very differently. I view working and providing for my family as a virtuous thing. You view it as a waste of life and an obstacle in the way to you going on vacation.

That is not a coincidence, it is a result of the mindsets we were both raised in.

can you explain to me what is wrong with working hard so your children gain more resources?

Nothing at all. When we point out that intergenerational mobility in the US is lower than in many other countries, the point we're making is that "working hard so your children gain more resources" is harder in the US than in other countries. That is, your hard work is less likely to result in improving your childrens' relative status. We think this is a problem precisely because we agree with the premise that our society should reward hard work.

Wrong yet again.

We have what's called a work-life balance. To spell it out for you this means that people are encouraged to have more time with their families than in the US because it's understood that happy, well-balanced workers tend to be better, more productive workers, and people are obviously happier to be with their families than you are. One wonders why that is.

Europeans care about travelling because, unlike you, they understand that the world is a richly diverse place and to spend all of one's life cooped up in one place is a sad waste of a life...not that there's any chance of an uncultured ignoramus ever being able to understand this point.

Also, measures of intergenerational mobility measure the other way too. A relative lack of mobility also tells you that lazy rich kids tend to remain rich. They aren't penalized for their lack of industriousness. Our discourse tends to focus on dividing the poor into "the deserving poor" and the "undeserving poor" but it works at both ends of the wealth spectrum. Fundamentally, data on mobility challenge the widespread American belief in meritocracy. The point isn't that meritocracy is bad, it's that we don't have a meritocracy.

wil thinks those things are mutually exclusive? Jesus, what a sad existence.

And yeah, like wn said...

...thanks for demonstrating my case?

You are only looking at the poor side of the data. High mobility in that chart means low correlation between parental wealth and child income means that in countries like Sweden and finland regardless of how much money I personally make something is stopping that money from helping my children. I'm gonna take a gander at its because the government taxing super high in those countries.

if you think hard work improving your children chances are good than super low correlation between parent and child is not necessarily a good thing

I agree that it's not as simple as "low correlation == better, high correlation == worse". The details matter. Mobility is a somewhat blunt instrument in this regard.

I think you are working under the assumption that all humans produce relatively close to each other. Human production in pretty much all fields follow zipfs law, or the pareto distribution. A tiny % of people produce the vast majority of the yield.

someone like bill gates has produced more wealth than millions of regular human beings. his kids being able to be lazy and rich is not because of some flaw in the system.

Similarly, from wil's New Yorker article:

Sounds like we're all on the same page that Europe provides better equality of opportunity!

Time to reconsider your assumptions, based on your own links (I hear Iceland is very nice this time of year).

Complete nonsense. Look up productivity numbers.

Everything you spew is a joke. Total idiocy at every level. Productive Europeans. Give me a ****ing break.

SHOW YOUR WORK

There's a reason you have to work 80 hour weeks to provide for your family and Europeans don't, wil, and it's not because you're an amazingly productive person.

I don't work 80 hour weeks, and I'm productive as ****. That's why I have reached a level I'm happy with and you brag about your trips visiting Donald duck with a French accent.

**** your fake ass Donald duck.

To be clear, I don't believe that social policy should aim for a correlation coefficient of 0. I'm in favor of so-called death taxes but I don't think they should be anywhere close to 100% of the deceased's wealth. I'm simply making the point that we don't have a pure meritocracy, where each individual's social status and wealth is a function only of their own hard work. Goofy's point about intergenerational mobility was a response to wil's line about "equality of opportunity".

I *do* think that many Americans have attitudes about poverty which are excessively punitive. That is, I think they believe, without sufficient justification, that most people are poor simply because they don't work hard enough, and that therefore they don't deserve either government assistance or private sympathy. But mobility data illustrates the point that working hard is often insufficient, and that "equality of opportunity" is something of a myth.

The point, to me, is not therefore that we should create real "equality of opportunity" by using laws to entirely erase the benefit of being born wealthy. It's that we should stop framing debates about economic policy around this false premise that where people end up in life is purely a consequence of how hard they work, or don't.

Unfortunately as always with you we only have your word for this, and judged on past performance that's worth nothing. You do often work 80 hour weeks.

It's wonderfully telling that your imagination for holidays only runs to Disney though.