{"id":20307,"date":"2015-04-11T09:57:35","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T13:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=20307"},"modified":"2015-04-11T10:17:29","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T14:17:29","slug":"clinton-taps-harvard-professors-ideas-on-social-mobility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2015\/04\/11\/clinton-taps-harvard-professors-ideas-on-social-mobility\/","title":{"rendered":"Clinton taps Harvard professor\u2019s ideas on social mobility"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Boston Globe<\/em> has the article Clinton taps Harvard professor\u2019s ideas on social mobility<\/a>.\u00a0 I am not a subscriber anymore, but I just had to follow the link to see who this Harvard Professor could be. Much to my chagrin, he wasn’t among the wacky ones I know about (Martin Feldstein<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Chetty\u2019s emphasis on upward mobility offers a less divisive way to address middle class economic issues than the rhetoric of income inequality that progressives in the Democratic Party like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her followers are pushing. It\u2019s also more palatable to large corporations and wealthy donors who have funded her previous campaigns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hillary wouldn’t want to offend anyone in her social circle, or should I say criminal enterprise.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s taken series shots at Senate Republicans for stalling the nomination of Loretta Lynch for attorney general via her Twitter feed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can’t figure out what the interest in Loretta Lynch is.\u00a0 She is no less a product of Wall Street than the current Attorney General, Eric Holder.\u00a0 Lynch might even be more culpable than Holder in the failure of the Department of Justice to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street.\u00a0 After all, the crimes were\/are committed in Lynch’s U.S. Attorney district<\/p>\n

The research Chetty and his team have done shows that children who grow up in parts of the country with less segregation, less income inequality, stronger schools, more social capital, and stable families are more likely to improve their social standing as adults. He and his colleagues are preparing to release policy prescriptions in coming months.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quelle suprise!<\/a>\u00a0 Of course, it is always good to have the data to show that what seems to be obvious is actually true. i don’t know what kind of policy presecriptions these people will come up with, but I can imagine.\u00a0 My response to Hillary’s promotion of these prescriptions will probably be along the lines, “My God, woman.\u00a0 You want to fix what’s wrong with the poor, while your rich pals are robbing us blind?\u00a0 What kind of fools do you take us for?”<\/p>\n

He also spoke at last year\u2019s Clinton Global Initiative meeting, where he mentioned his signature eye-popping statistic: \u201cChances of achieving the \u2018American Dream\u2019 are almost two times higher in Canada than the United States,\u201d he said, showing slide with data to back up the claim.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Darn those Canadians.\u00a0 They live on the same continent that we do, and they are better than we are at Democracy and Capitalism.\u00a0 It must be something about living north of us.\u00a0 I am pretty sure they look down upon us as we do to people from Mexico.\u00a0 Or northerners in this country look upon southerners in this country.\u00a0 Maybe the cold is good for the brain.<\/p>\n

Other researchers on his project said that people from different political backgrounds tend to seize on different parts of the work. \u201cWhen you look at the data it is a political Rorschach test,\u201d said Nathaniel Hendren, an assistant professor at Harvard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How am I doing on that Rorschach test?<\/p>\n

One of the commenters on the Globe article gave the URL to Raj Chetty’s work, www.rajchetty.com<\/a>.\u00a0 With just a few moments of poking around, I came across the working paper, IS THE UNITED STATES STILL A LAND OF OPPORTUNITY? RECENT TRENDS IN INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY<\/a>.\u00a0 The excerpt below comes from the abstract.<\/p>\n

Based on all of these measures, we find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s. However, because inequality has risen, the consequences of the \u201cbirth lottery\u201d \u2013 the parents to whom a child is born \u2013 are larger today than in the past.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s see if I have this right – two plus two equals five.\u00a0 Social mobility has not changed in over 40 years yet inequality has risen.\u00a0 How did the inequality grow without any change in social mobility?\u00a0 It must be the birthrate of the lower classes.\u00a0 The rich are too busy grabbing all the money to have children.<\/p>\n

By the way, some of the comments on the Globe article are really classic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Boston Globe has the article Clinton taps Harvard professor\u2019s ideas on social mobility.\u00a0 I am not a subscriber anymore, but I just had to follow the link to see who this Harvard Professor could be. Much to my chagrin, he wasn’t among the wacky ones I know about (Martin Feldstein). Chetty\u2019s emphasis on upward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-stevegsposts","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20307"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20319,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20307\/revisions\/20319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}