Whose idea were the standards of 25/75% but quintiles of income? Does he ever rank income for a birth cohort separately, or is it always against all incomes of all adults (I assume that's what he's doing)?
The cost of living varies so widely across the country that someone should be measuring how it has changed, too. I suspect that high incomes increasingly congregate where high (and rising) costs are, so who is actually just treading water, not floating famously?
Isn't all this data and theorizing from Chetty a pretty damning indication that America's social welfare system is a massive failure? The scope of available programs and average amount of subsidy as increased over the last 50 years and yet the economic cohort that utilizes them is not doing any better and Chetty's entire thesis basically makes no attempt to argue cash and like cash programs improve social outcomes.
According to Chetty, outcomes for black children in the bottom household income quintile did improved during this period. More generally, however, it seems odd to consider that the welfare state’s goal is to solve the problems of the underclass, rather than simply to improve their material living standards in absolute terms, which is something that is achievable through policy. For example, the US saw a huge reduction in child poverty thanks to child benefits created during the pandemic, and then the country saw an increase in child poverty after the benefits expired. It seems simple enough to explain this, given that poor people become less poor if they have more money.
If it doesn't really alter outcomes I am not sure what the point is. Just adding benefits to goose household income over an arbitrary income line seems like a waste of resources, particularly if it has a dysgenic effect as well.
Steve has explained that several times before. The important thing is the link between the parents' and child's data. I can't remember what year child dependents first had to have an SSN for the IRS, but presumably that's the method--fake but accurate SSNs.
We go through this every time Steve writers about Chetty. Chetty does not have everyone's tax information sitting on a server farm at Harvard. What Chetty and his researches have the ability to do is run scripts on the IRS and Census Bureau databases that created aggregated data. Steve has actually linked to media stories in the past where Dr Chetty's operations are explain. But Steve seems to think it improves his point to misrepresent what Chetty is doing.
As noted in other threads Steve focuses too much on his base with too much inside jokes and phrases. His remarks about Chetty are one of them.
I heard a talk from the FBI about how they believe that donated tissue samples that are anonymized could be de-anonymized since the accompanying demographic data will have a lot of information, the data sequencing will have a lot of information. So someone with that information just needs to shift through social medical data until they find someone who matches everything.
I've written about Chetty's work dozens of times since 2013. I don't explain the methodology, which I've described countless times before, every new time I refer to it.
Chetty's breakthrough was simply in having the hubris to think that something that federal agencies would surely say was not allowed could be done.
Once again, Chetty does not have anonymized data sitting on a server farm at Harvard. Chetty and his staff get to run scripts on the actual IRS and Census bureau databases and the aggregated data is record. There is a world of difference between the two. Look it up.
I think you misread the graph on the social mobility of low-income white children. The graph says that in the 1978 birth cohort 13.7% of white children who grew up in the bottom household income quintile moved up to the top household income quintile in adulthood while in the 1992 birth cohort the percentage was 11.9%, not 3%.
Overall, it's a very interesting paper, but it's hard to know what to make of these findings because Raj Chetty doesn't try to test his hypotheses by doing things like studying people within the same family. The first thought that comes to mind is that if you're talking about percentiles of the income distribution, that's just a measure of how people are doing compared to other people, so it seems relevant that in this time period the US had a huge increase in its Hispanic and Asian populations. For example, as Steve points out, if the growth of the Hispanic population causes the medium white household to move up the percentiles in the distribution then the old 25th percentile of white households will shift upward and the new 25th percentile will be occupied by more downscale whites. One can also imagine how the growth of the Asian population will eventually make it harder for many whites to access the top household income quintile.
The other thing that comes to mind as a possible explanation for any increase in the class gap among whites is the increase in homogeneous marriage, that is, during this period it is possible that people with high IQs and perhaps other socially valued characteristics increasingly married people of similar IQs and characteristics, and the same goes for people at the bottom and middle of the distribution of characteristics.
It is also possible that something went wrong culturally for some sections of the white population, the widening mortality gap seems to indicate that this is part of the explanation, but it is difficult to understand what exactly happened based on this paper. States like North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Minnesota, Iowa, and most of Wisconsin seem to be doing well for low-income whites according to Chetty. I am not sure what these states have in common other than being high percentage white, they do not share the same religion and level of religiosity for example.
When I looked at Chetty's 2015 paper focusing on incomes in 2010-2011, the parts of the country that provided agriculture, energy, minerals, etc to the China Boom (e.g., Sioux County, Iowa), were doing much better than parts of the country whose factories were getting hammered by China. It's a little like how the rise of China did the Australian working class a lot of good because Australia never did much manufacturing, but it had enormous resources (e.g., iron ore) to sell to China.
Australia used to manufacture her own cars (over 400k/yr in the 70s), but they are all imported now. Ford, Toyota, and GM quit in the mid 2010s. I've never read exactly why.
When I lived in the Bay Area I was in a band with three guys who grew up together, working class, in San Jose. These were GenX guys, a little older than the 1978 cohort. From listening to them chat I got the impression that they were about the only people from their peer group whose lives weren't messed up. Everyone else they grew up with succumbed to methamphetamine. In fact, now that I think about it, the bass player was only recently clean, and I think the drummer kind of bullied him into playing with us to help him with that. One day the drummer had to miss practice because he was going to the funeral of an old friend of his who had clearly committed "suicide by cop".
The guitar player was approximately the last white union carpenter in the region. He told me the bosses would have posters up in their offices that said 'it takes three white men to do the work of one Mexican' (I don't remember if it was three, but you get the point). He was married to a Mexican woman and had one child.
Guitar player's father was also a union carpenter and owned his house in San Jose.
oh, not necessarily relevant to the Chetty findings, but the drummer was black, made more money than the others and owned a house. I got the impression that he was a little sharper than the other two, and that maybe his family was a little more educated. He was the only member of the group who had been to prison (not jail, prison) and he straightened out after and got a good job and made a start on a family (though I got recent hints that the family thing might be going south). Life is complicated
Steve would help himself if he did more reading of others. What the bottom quintile of the economic ladder have is a lot of chaos in their lives. It is hard to achieve long term economic success while experiencing chaos in one's life or if one's parents/caregivers live a life of chaos.
That 13% of bottom-born whites got to the top quintile is amazing. Some are like Vance or Clinton, who both escaped chaos. Some marry well. Others might be children of grad students or otherwise temporarily impoverished.
Vance was not in the bottom 20% Remember, Vance attend a suburban middle class high school outside of Cincinnati. And Clinton was debates ago. Take 20% of whites, the calculate 13% of that number. That is a little over 2% of all non-Hispanic whites.
No one ever looks clever by intentionally misunderstand someone. If Steve read others, he would discuss chaos in people's lives more. The closest Steve likes to get is saying that living around poor people is a bad way to live. What is left unsaid is the amount of chaos in the lives of poor people.
Poor people do lots of stupid, chaos-generating things like commit crimes or take drugs, or get pregnant with men who make terrible husbands and fathers. It is perfectly possible to be poor and have a dignified, quiet life.
Even poor parents used to tell their kids, "Lie down with dogs get up with fleas." The poor should be encouraged to adopt bourgeois values and discouraged from white trash or thug values.
One of the great moral failings of our elites is they refuse to preach what they practice.
Whose idea were the standards of 25/75% but quintiles of income? Does he ever rank income for a birth cohort separately, or is it always against all incomes of all adults (I assume that's what he's doing)?
The cost of living varies so widely across the country that someone should be measuring how it has changed, too. I suspect that high incomes increasingly congregate where high (and rising) costs are, so who is actually just treading water, not floating famously?
Isn't all this data and theorizing from Chetty a pretty damning indication that America's social welfare system is a massive failure? The scope of available programs and average amount of subsidy as increased over the last 50 years and yet the economic cohort that utilizes them is not doing any better and Chetty's entire thesis basically makes no attempt to argue cash and like cash programs improve social outcomes.
According to Chetty, outcomes for black children in the bottom household income quintile did improved during this period. More generally, however, it seems odd to consider that the welfare state’s goal is to solve the problems of the underclass, rather than simply to improve their material living standards in absolute terms, which is something that is achievable through policy. For example, the US saw a huge reduction in child poverty thanks to child benefits created during the pandemic, and then the country saw an increase in child poverty after the benefits expired. It seems simple enough to explain this, given that poor people become less poor if they have more money.
If it doesn't really alter outcomes I am not sure what the point is. Just adding benefits to goose household income over an arbitrary income line seems like a waste of resources, particularly if it has a dysgenic effect as well.
“Chetty has managed to get his claws upon their parents 1040 tax forms from 1978-2019 and their own 1040s up through 2019.”
Steve, this framing is incorrect and if I may be so bold a little tedious at this point.
Chetty and co just have an extremely large spreadsheet with everything like precise names and addresses removed.
Steve has explained that several times before. The important thing is the link between the parents' and child's data. I can't remember what year child dependents first had to have an SSN for the IRS, but presumably that's the method--fake but accurate SSNs.
We go through this every time Steve writers about Chetty. Chetty does not have everyone's tax information sitting on a server farm at Harvard. What Chetty and his researches have the ability to do is run scripts on the IRS and Census Bureau databases that created aggregated data. Steve has actually linked to media stories in the past where Dr Chetty's operations are explain. But Steve seems to think it improves his point to misrepresent what Chetty is doing.
As noted in other threads Steve focuses too much on his base with too much inside jokes and phrases. His remarks about Chetty are one of them.
De-anonymization is a thing.
I heard a talk from the FBI about how they believe that donated tissue samples that are anonymized could be de-anonymized since the accompanying demographic data will have a lot of information, the data sequencing will have a lot of information. So someone with that information just needs to shift through social medical data until they find someone who matches everything.
I've written about Chetty's work dozens of times since 2013. I don't explain the methodology, which I've described countless times before, every new time I refer to it.
Chetty's breakthrough was simply in having the hubris to think that something that federal agencies would surely say was not allowed could be done.
I have seen you use the passage above or a slight derivation of it of a dozen or so times.
Government agencies sharing anonymised administrative data with researchers is not vaguely novel.
The framing makes the practice sound suspicious when it very much isn’t.
Once again, Chetty does not have anonymized data sitting on a server farm at Harvard. Chetty and his staff get to run scripts on the actual IRS and Census bureau databases and the aggregated data is record. There is a world of difference between the two. Look it up.
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-two-economists-got-direct-access-irs-tax-records
I think you misread the graph on the social mobility of low-income white children. The graph says that in the 1978 birth cohort 13.7% of white children who grew up in the bottom household income quintile moved up to the top household income quintile in adulthood while in the 1992 birth cohort the percentage was 11.9%, not 3%.
Overall, it's a very interesting paper, but it's hard to know what to make of these findings because Raj Chetty doesn't try to test his hypotheses by doing things like studying people within the same family. The first thought that comes to mind is that if you're talking about percentiles of the income distribution, that's just a measure of how people are doing compared to other people, so it seems relevant that in this time period the US had a huge increase in its Hispanic and Asian populations. For example, as Steve points out, if the growth of the Hispanic population causes the medium white household to move up the percentiles in the distribution then the old 25th percentile of white households will shift upward and the new 25th percentile will be occupied by more downscale whites. One can also imagine how the growth of the Asian population will eventually make it harder for many whites to access the top household income quintile.
The other thing that comes to mind as a possible explanation for any increase in the class gap among whites is the increase in homogeneous marriage, that is, during this period it is possible that people with high IQs and perhaps other socially valued characteristics increasingly married people of similar IQs and characteristics, and the same goes for people at the bottom and middle of the distribution of characteristics.
It is also possible that something went wrong culturally for some sections of the white population, the widening mortality gap seems to indicate that this is part of the explanation, but it is difficult to understand what exactly happened based on this paper. States like North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Minnesota, Iowa, and most of Wisconsin seem to be doing well for low-income whites according to Chetty. I am not sure what these states have in common other than being high percentage white, they do not share the same religion and level of religiosity for example.
When I looked at Chetty's 2015 paper focusing on incomes in 2010-2011, the parts of the country that provided agriculture, energy, minerals, etc to the China Boom (e.g., Sioux County, Iowa), were doing much better than parts of the country whose factories were getting hammered by China. It's a little like how the rise of China did the Australian working class a lot of good because Australia never did much manufacturing, but it had enormous resources (e.g., iron ore) to sell to China.
Australia used to manufacture her own cars (over 400k/yr in the 70s), but they are all imported now. Ford, Toyota, and GM quit in the mid 2010s. I've never read exactly why.
When I lived in the Bay Area I was in a band with three guys who grew up together, working class, in San Jose. These were GenX guys, a little older than the 1978 cohort. From listening to them chat I got the impression that they were about the only people from their peer group whose lives weren't messed up. Everyone else they grew up with succumbed to methamphetamine. In fact, now that I think about it, the bass player was only recently clean, and I think the drummer kind of bullied him into playing with us to help him with that. One day the drummer had to miss practice because he was going to the funeral of an old friend of his who had clearly committed "suicide by cop".
The guitar player was approximately the last white union carpenter in the region. He told me the bosses would have posters up in their offices that said 'it takes three white men to do the work of one Mexican' (I don't remember if it was three, but you get the point). He was married to a Mexican woman and had one child.
Guitar player's father was also a union carpenter and owned his house in San Jose.
oh, not necessarily relevant to the Chetty findings, but the drummer was black, made more money than the others and owned a house. I got the impression that he was a little sharper than the other two, and that maybe his family was a little more educated. He was the only member of the group who had been to prison (not jail, prison) and he straightened out after and got a good job and made a start on a family (though I got recent hints that the family thing might be going south). Life is complicated
Steve would help himself if he did more reading of others. What the bottom quintile of the economic ladder have is a lot of chaos in their lives. It is hard to achieve long term economic success while experiencing chaos in one's life or if one's parents/caregivers live a life of chaos.
That 13% of bottom-born whites got to the top quintile is amazing. Some are like Vance or Clinton, who both escaped chaos. Some marry well. Others might be children of grad students or otherwise temporarily impoverished.
Vance was not in the bottom 20% Remember, Vance attend a suburban middle class high school outside of Cincinnati. And Clinton was debates ago. Take 20% of whites, the calculate 13% of that number. That is a little over 2% of all non-Hispanic whites.
2% of all whites is at least 10% of whites in the top quintile, depending on how people with no income are counted.
Who is this Chaos and what's he doing, just showing up in people's lives? There oughta be a law against this Chaos fellow.
No one ever looks clever by intentionally misunderstand someone. If Steve read others, he would discuss chaos in people's lives more. The closest Steve likes to get is saying that living around poor people is a bad way to live. What is left unsaid is the amount of chaos in the lives of poor people.
Poor people do lots of stupid, chaos-generating things like commit crimes or take drugs, or get pregnant with men who make terrible husbands and fathers. It is perfectly possible to be poor and have a dignified, quiet life.
But it is much harder as Steve likes to point out since when one is poor, one is living around other poor people.
Even poor parents used to tell their kids, "Lie down with dogs get up with fleas." The poor should be encouraged to adopt bourgeois values and discouraged from white trash or thug values.
One of the great moral failings of our elites is they refuse to preach what they practice.
1954 was the first year when more than 50% of 19 y/o were high school graduates. Exactly when was that time that poor parents were doing a good job?