John Quiggin Watches the Political Equivalent of a Tightrope-Walking Apatosaurus...
John Quiggin watches Tyler Cowen abandon equality of opportunity as a goal and endorse stasis of relative incomes instead:
How (not) to defend entrenched inequality: Once the Overton window shifted enough to allow inequality and social immobility to be mentioned, the weight of evidence has been overwhelming. This post by Tyler Cowen is an indication…. Cowen feels the need, not merely to dispute some aspects of the data on inequality and social mobility in the US, but to make the case that a unequal society with a static social structure isn’t so bad after all. Cowen makes seven arguments, ranging from weak to risible….
(3) For a given level of income, if some are moving up others are moving down. Do you take theories of wage rigidity seriously? If so, you might favor less relative mobility, other things remaining equal. More upward — and thus downward — relative mobility probably means less aggregate happiness, due to habit formation and frame of reference effects.
This is an ancient argument against income redistribution… but it’s surprising to see it extended to the case of intergenerational mobility. Apparently, expensive tastes, once acquired in childhood, can’t be dispensed with without great suffering.
(5) How much of immobility is due to “inherited talent plus diminishing role for random circumstance”? Is not this cause of immobility very different — both practically and morally — from such factors as discrimination, bad schools, occupational licensing, etc.? What are you supposed to get when you combine genetics with meritocracy? I do not know how much of current American (or other) immobility is due to this factor, but I find it discomforting that complaints about mobility are so infrequently accompanied by an analysis of this topic.
A lot of handwaving here. The supposed genetic role is assumed, not supported by any evidence to produce a suggestion that declining mobility arises because the US has now become more meritocratic, and therefore more efficient at promoting people of high ability. There’s plenty of evidence going the other way, notably including the fact that class matters much more than it used to in getting admission to high-status colleges..
(4) Why do many European nations have higher mobility? Putting ethnic and demographic issues aside, here is one mechanism. Lots of smart Europeans decide to be not so ambitious, to enjoy their public goods, to work for the government, to avoid high marginal tax rates, to travel a lot, and so on. That approach makes more sense in a lot of Europe than here. Some of the children of those families have comparable smarts but higher ambition and so they rise quite a bit in income relative to their peers. (The opposite may occur as well, with the children choosing more leisure.) That is a less likely scenario for the United States, where smart people realize this is a country geared toward higher earners and so fewer smart parents play the “tend the garden” strategy. Maybe the U.S. doesn’t have a “first best” set-up in this regard, but the comparison between U.S. and Europe is less sinister than it seems at first. “High intergenerational mobility” is sometimes a synonym for “lots of parental underachievers.”
Another version of the same argument. The only notable point is the observation that “smart people realize this is a country geared toward higher earners”.
(6) I am more than willing to hear arguments than a less mobile society is a less stable society, or otherwise a society which makes worse political decisions. But I haven’t seen serious arguments here. By “serious arguments” I mean those which take endogeneity into account and go beyond noting that Denmark is a better polity than Brazil, and so on.
Granted, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of hard statistical evidence here (commenters, please prove me wrong on this). But there is a ton of US political rhetoric from the past (right up to the last six months or so) that would suggest great social and political benefits from living in a ‘land of opportunity’...
The rest of it is no better.
John Quiggin sums up:
To sum up, Cowen’s post is an exercise in defending the indefensible, and its weaknesses reflect that. As Mitt Romney’s tax returns show, wealthy Americans have the rules rigged in their favor from day one. And that’s assuming they obey the rules. Unlike the poor, they can mostly cheat with impunity. In these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that US inequality is so deeply entrenched. The only surprise is the suddenness with which the facts have become common knowledge…
And then John gets triumphalist:
The fact that the Repubs are extreme reactionaries, uninterested in any kind of bipartisan compromise, has finally sunk in to all but the most obtuse centrists…. [T]he point that the rich play by different rules from the rest of us has been made glaringly obvious…
I'm more skeptical. But at least I have seen an apatosaurus try to walk a tightrope. That's worth the price of admission all by itself.
