The New York Times has some interactive graphics showing various types of data about social class and class mobility. You can see where you fall in terms of four characteristics often used to measure class status, see the overall class breakdown for various occupations, and so on. This graph shows social class mobility by depicting which social class (divided into quintiles) the U.S. population fell into in 1998 based on the social class they started out in from 1988:
You can hover over a particular group, such as “lower middle,” to see the outcome just for them.
Another graph of social mobility:
This next graph counters the idea that poor families remain poor forever (often explained by some version of the “culture of poverty” thesis) by showing that if you track a poor family over multiple generations, there is a general trend toward upward mobility:
That isn’t to ignore the fact that being poor leads to circumstances (poor schools, etc.) that make upward mobility difficult. But the idea that poor families stay poor for generation after generation, passing on poverty almost like a genetic characteristic, simplifies a more complex story about how families become poor, how long they remain poor, and the importance of looking at structural factors as opposed to a “cycle of poverty” explanation.
Since Lisa shared an embarrassing story today, I’ll share one too: for some reason, I think because he had the album Purple Rain and was famous for wearing purple a lot, for the longest time I thought the book The Color Purple must be a biography about Prince.
Comments 12
charles — July 15, 2009
the color palate for the first graph is intriguing--at first, i just assumed it was a chart about race, (of course, it has caucasian for the lowest income bracket and dark brown for the top, which is opposite of the trend...)
Duran — July 15, 2009
What would be interesting is a comparison of the quality of life for poor today vs. poor in 1988.
I would submit that, primarily due to the information revolution, poor people today are much more likely to have access to the means to better their position: free educational materials such as those published by MIT, vast online marketplaces in eBay and craigslist, and a wide array of job searching facilities.
I also pose a question: let's say that the richest quintile were to get 100x richer, and the poorest quintile were to get 10% richer. Do you consider this a better or worse situation than if the richest quintile were to become 10% poorer and the poorest quintile were to remain the same?
Joshua — July 15, 2009
This American Life, episode 293, "A Little Bit of Knowledge", contains a segment in which adults share embarrassing facts about misconceptions they held far longer than they should have. It can be listened to in its entirety at:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1090
Thought it might help you guys feel more normal about your embarrassing revelations. ;-)
Ellen — July 15, 2009
The second graph that shows mobility is decreasing is interesting. I also think the conversation is incomplete without race. I imagine if you stratified by race, those graphics would look quite different. Racism, and especially segregation, make social mobility quite different for different groups. But it also shows that it is just as hard to go down, if not harder, than going up. I imagine that has to do with both safeguards, resources, and social networks.
Duran's question about absolute vs. relative poverty really isn't relevant in a discussion about social mobility, unless he was trying to say it doesn't matter if people are poor because the quality of life for everyone has risen. First, that's just not true. The quality of life has not changed drastically in the past twenty years. In fact, it is more important to have certain material resources (like the internet) to merely survive. But to answer his question, it is relative poverty that is important for most measures of health and well being. If he feels like reading any social science research (and economics is also a social science) he can confirm that. But I have a feeling his head is too far up his ass to do that.
I am going to go listen to This American Life now.
Raksha — July 16, 2009
The story about Prince reminds me of what a surprising number of my students did when I was teaching Women's Studies in grad school. They misunderstood the term "prima donna" and wrote papers about how a girl in our culture is often a "pre-Madonna" and if she doesn't come to Jesus/stop having sex/dress more conservatively/whatever then they would end up an EVOL HOOR!!1! like the singer Madonna. I think I was even more amused than I was horrified by these kinds of papers.
syd — July 16, 2009
I think I am going to fabricate my own brackets for interactive white boards. Anyone know a good fabricator?
Shinobi — July 16, 2009
The third graphic I think is difficult to read. From what I can tell we're seeing the increase of a family's income as a % of the Average US Income. Which means by the fifth generation the family is still below the average Income in the US?
Also, does this represent an individual family? An aggregate of families? I'm just not really sure what this data represents just from the graph and that makes it difficult to draw conclusions from.
Also, one of the problems with seeing a "trend" like this is that one cannot simply assume the "trend" continues forward in time. So while it looks like in the next generation they may actually reach the US average income, that may not be true at all.
While I think the image appears compelling, on closer examination I am not sure that it is actually showing any particularly strong evidence that there is no cycle of poverty.
Shinobi — July 16, 2009
I also think for the graph in the NYtimes it is important to consider that the second data point is looking at data for 1998, before the big tech crash. Three years later the data may have looked very very different.
abbie — July 20, 2009
Top quintile in 1998 was income over ~75K/year. In other words, this data can't tell the difference between a junior college professor, a stock broker, and John D Rockefeller III. One crucial feature of mobility in a society is the ability of ordinary people to become rich -- and for the rich to fall to ordinary income and status. This data can't tell us anything on that point. Yet this story and data like it have been used by conservatives to argue that class mobility is a solved problem and we don't need social services. The Times did a great job presenting the data, but it did more harm than good.
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