American Exceptionalism in a New Light (thoughts/studies not my own)

[Bill 84 318i]

I suppose there are many angles - maybe this study isn't even what most of y'all talk about when it comes to capitalism/socialism (without anything in between, of course) - some of you may not be interested at all in earnings mobility, and I'd hope that would be a different thread. I'm actually not all the way through it yet, and I may be a bit too far removed from a statistics course, but I think it's interesting.

We develop methods and employ similar sample restrictions to analyse differences in intergenerational earnings mobility across the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We examine earnings mobility among pairs of fathers and sons as well as fathers and daughters using both mobility matrices and regression and correlation coefficients. Our results suggest that all countries exhibit substantial earnings persistence across generations, but with statistically significant differences across countries. Mobility is lower in the U.S. than in the U.K., where it is lower again compared to the Nordic countries. Persistence is greatest in the tails of the distributions and tends to be particularly high in the upper tails: though in the U.S. this is reversed with a particularly high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers will remain in the lowest earnings quintile. This is a challenge to the popular notion of ’American exceptionalism’. The U.S. also differs from the Nordic countries in its very low likelihood that sons of the highest earners will show downward ’longdistance’ mobility into the lowest earnings quintile. In this, the U.K. is more similar to the U.S..

If you can't make it through a WP or WSJ link, then don't bother either reading or replying - it's 30+ pages.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp1938.html

[joshh]

I read the first eight pages before feeling the need to not read any further. And scanned over the rest.

They haven't a clue what American exceptionalism really is. It's not just a paycheck. That may just be a formality as this is just one part of American exceptionalism but then their title is in error. Which makes me think this study was done with a purpose to show there is not such thing as American exceptionalism the way we see it.
The data they are using is not on a one for one basis. They are leaving out economic differences and changes in political climate. And having to calculate from 2000 currency values from different years of different countries (specially the UK). If it can't be taken from an apples to apples comparison, it's pretty pointless in my opinion.

It would also be very easy to explain most of this with the Socialism vs Capitalism argument. Earnings Equality.....

But nowhere can a poor individual turn his life around as fast as he can in America....and keep climbing.

[e30e]

That paragraph hurt my eyes reading that; cliffs?

If I understood it right, its saying in Americas poor breeds poor where as other countries are doing it a lot less?

[e30e]

That paragraph hurt my eyes reading that; cliffs?

If I understood it right, its saying in Americas poor breeds poor where as other countries are doing it a lot less?