Transmission of Inequality

Last update: 08 Dec 2024 00:32
First version: 22 December 2021

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Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder

Peeves from teaching this:

1. Single-number summaries (like parent-child correlations or intergenerational elasticities) which assume a single, linear relationship between parents and children, the same for all socio-economic strata. That would be a fantastically interesting, even puzzling, discovery. It shouldn't be pre-judged by the data analysis! (Chetty et al. avoid my ire here by conditioning on origins in particular low strata.)
2. The name "Great Gatsby Curve" for the claim that countries or eras with high inequality across the population also have high inter-generational transmission of inequality. To get this reference, you have to know the plot of a 1925 novel --- it makes the discussion of an important issue more obscure to those who lack a completely irrelevant piece of cultural capital! (Admittedly, the book is widely taught in American high schools, but I guarantee you that plenty of people who went to good American schools were never assigned it, never read it out of class, and don't remember it even if they were assigned it --- let alone non-Americans.)

See also:
• Economics
• Education
• Sociology

Recommended, big picture:
• Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "The Inheritance of Inequality", Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (2002): 3--30 [PDF reprint]
• Magne Mogstad and Gaute Torsvik, "Family Background, Neighborhoods and Intergenerational Mobility", NBER Working Paper 28874 (2021)
• Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis [This is very much a view from 2016, and so it will inevitably become dated over time, but it's both intellectually and morally serious, and someone who wants to learn more about this subject could easily do far worse than to begin here, even if you didn't share Putnam's (transparently presented) ethical and political commitments.]

Recommended, close-ups (very misc.):
• Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976)
• Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren
  • "The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects", Quarterly Journal of Economics 133 (2018): 1107--1162
  • Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, "The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level Estimates", Quarterly Journal of Economics 133 (2018): 1163--1228
• Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter, "Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective", Quarterly Journal of Economics 135 (2020): 711--783 [Preprint version, data files, etc.]
• Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez, "Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States", Quarterly Journal of Economics 129 (2014): 1553--1623 [Preprint version of the paper, data files, etc.]
• Douglas B. Downey, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong [Comments]
• Steven N. Durlauf and Ananth Seshadri, "Understanding the Great Gatsby Curve", NBER Macroeconomics Annual 32 (2017)
• Catherine Guirkinger, Gani Aldashev, Alisher Aldshev and Maté Fodor, "Economic Persistence despite Adverse Policies: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan", Working Paper No. 2020-39 ECARES, Universite Libre de Bruxelles [As a statistician, I am not altogether happy with their reliance on point estimates and significance tests from linear regression models, without also doing goodness-of-fit checks for those models. (I would be somewhat happier if they had fit generalized additive models and reported the partial response functions.) But this is me complaining about the general run of applied economics papers; if you believe those, you should certainly find this persuasive]
• Allison Morgan, Aaron Clauset, Daniel Larremore, Nicholas LaBerge and Mirta Galesic, "Socioeconomic Roots of Academic Faculty", socArxiv/6wjxc
• Richard V. Reeves
  • "The Dream Hoarders: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality", Boston Review 30 May 2017
  • Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
• Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality
• Nicolas Tackett, The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy

Modesty forbids me to recommend:
• 36-313, Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination [For the 2021 version, this begins in lecture 13; that may change in other years]

To read:
• Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jacome, Santiago Perez, "Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the United States over Two Centuries", American Economic Review 111 (2021): 580--608
• Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, "Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery" [PDF preprint]
• Jens Beckert, "Durable Wealth: Institutions, Mechanisms, and Practices of Wealth Perpetuation", Annual Review of Sociology 48 (2022): 233--255
• Corina Boar and Danial Lashkari, "Occupational Choice and the Intergenerational Mobility of Welfare", NBER Working Paper 29381, 2021
• Raymond Boudon [These are now very old, but I'm a great admirer of Boudon's later works on ideology, so...]
  • Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality
  • Mathematical Structures of Social Mobility
• Samuel Bowles, Steven Durlauf and Karla Hoff (eds.), Poverty Traps
• David Brady, Ryan Finnigan, Ulrich Kohler, Joscha Legewie, "The Inheritance of Race Revisited: Childhood Wealth and Income and Black-White Disadvantages in Adult Life Chances", Sociological Science 7 (2020): 25
• Richard Breen, "Some Methodological Problems in the Study of Multigenerational Mobility", European Sociological Review 34 (2018): 603--611
• Richard Breen and Walter Müller (eds.), Education and Intergenerational Social Mobility in Europe and the United States
• Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R Jones, Sonya R Porter, "Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: an Intergenerational Perspective", The Quarterly Journal of Economics 135 (2020): 711--783
• Gregory Clark, with Neil Cummins, Yu Hao and Daniel Diaz Vidal, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility
• M. Corak, "Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility", Journal of Economic Perspetives 27 (2013): 79--102 [Durlauf and Seshahdri say this was the first source for the Great Gatsby Curve, though they attribute the name to Krueger]
• Thomas A. DiPrete, "The Impact of Inequality on Intergenerational Mobility", Annual Review of Sociology 46 (2020): 379--398
• Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction and Quantification in Education
• Steven N. Durlauf
  • "Associational Redistribution: A Defense", Politics and Society 24 (1996): 391--410
  • "Groups, Social Influences, and Inequality: A Memberships Theory Perspective on Poverty Traps", in Bowles, Durlauf and Hoff (eds.) above
  • "A Theory of Persistent Income Inequality", Journal of Economic Growth 1 (1996): 75--93
• Steven N. Durlauf, Andros Kourtellos and Chih Ming Tan, "The Great Gatsby Curve", socArxiv/mrw9y (2021)
• Per Engzell and Carina Mood, "How Robust are Estimates of Intergenerational Income Mobility?", socArxiv/gd2t6
• Patricia Funjika, "Historical African ethnic class stratification systems and intergenerational transmission of education", Economic History of Developing Regions 38 (2023): 89--116
• Elisa Jácome, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu, "Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the 20th Century", Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the 20th Century (Working Paper 29289, NBER, 2021)
• Alan Krueger, "The Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States" [Cited, as "Speech given at Center for American Progress, Washington, DC, January 12", 2012, by Durlauf and Seshadri as the source for the phrase "Great Gatsby Curve"]
• Carles Lalueza-Fox, Inequality: A Genetic History
• Daniel Laurison, Dawn Dow, and Carolyn Chernoff, "Class Mobility and Reproduction for Black and White Adults in the United States: A Visualization", Socius 6 (2020)
• Bhashkar Mazumder, "Fortunate Sons: New Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States Using Social Security Earnings Data", The Review of Economics and Statistics 87 (2005): 235--255
• Magne Mogstad, Joseph P. Romano, Azeem Shaikh and Daniel Wilhelm, "Inference for Ranks with Applications to Mobility across Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement across Countries", ssrn/355728 (2020)
• Zachary Parolin, Rafael Pintro Schmitt, Gosta Esping-Andersen, Peter Fallesen, "The Intergenerational Persistence of Poverty in High-Income Countries", osf/io/tb3gz (2023)
• Lauren A. Rivera, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
• Jennifer E. Smith, B. Natterson-Horowitz, and Michael E. Alfaro, "The nature of privilege: intergenerational wealth in animal societies", Behavioral Ecology 33 (2022): 1--6
• Matthew Staiger, "The Intergenerational Transmission of Employers and the Earnings of Young Workers" [PDF preprint]
• Jessi Streib, Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall
• Lauren Valentino and Stephen Vaisey, "Culture and Durable Inequality", Annual Review of Sociology 48 (2022): 109--129
• Roy van der Weide, Christoph Lakner, Daniel Gerszon Mahler, Ambar Narayan, and Rakesh Ramasubbaiah, "Intergenerational Mobility around the World", Journal of Development Economics 166 (2024): 103167, World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper No. 9707 (201)