Economist's View: "More Inequality, Less Social Mobility"
Mark Thoma fait le point sur quelques développements récents du débat, avec une référence aux dernierds travaux de Saez (Saez et Piketty avaient lancé le débat sur l'accroissement des inégalités) et des travaux connexes sur la relation entre inégalité et mobilité.
Fascinant débat.
Citation
There may be a connection between mobility and inequality. Dan Andrews and Andrew Leigh find that countries that are more unequal are also countries where social mobility is lower:
More Inequality, Less Social Mobility by Andrew Leigh: Dan Andrews and I have a short paper out on the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility (aka social mobility). By contrast with the view that inequality is offset by more income mobility across generations, it turns out that in more unequal countries it is actually harder to move from rags to riches (or vice-versa). ...
We’re pretty sure that we’re the first to test for a statistically significant relationship between the two variables, but our results do accord with other studies that have shown that there is less intergenerational mobility in the US than in the Scandinavian countries.
Here's the abstract, introduction, and conclusion to the paper:
More Inequality, Less Social Mobility, by Dan Andrews and Andrew Leigh: Abstract We investigate the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. Proxying fathers' earnings with using detailed occupational data, we find that sons who grew up in countries that were more unequal in the 1970s were less likely to have experienced social mobility by the late-1990s.
