Only in America – the flip side of N_Fiddledodog's Rant
Public_Domain @ Mon May 13, 2013 12:46 am
Khar @ Mon May 13, 2013 4:50 am
Well, since the fun in the thread is over, I might as well respond. 
For everyone else, feel free to ignore and go back to discussing mass produced German metal. So mainstream. </hipster>
Psudo Psudo:
My last try: how is intergenerational income elasticity actually calculated? Can you prove that the USA is anything lower than 15th in the world by its measure? Do you think that 15th out of 200+ (top 8% in the world) is a ranking to be ashamed of?
Or, failing that, why do you deem these questions to be irrelevant?
Or, failing that, why do you deem these questions to be irrelevant?
Usually, when measuring elasticity, the easiest way is just to remember that you are looking at the change in one variable with a certain change in another to find the impact between the two. Most of the time, it's easiest to see when pared down to the following:
elasticity (x, y) = (Δ(%y))/(Δ(%x))
However, for the sake of a more specific and relevant value, they typically use a simple linear regression and then mold it into doing what they want to do. In this case, this is typically used in papers performing studies on intergenerational income elasticity as a base for their model, as an example:
lny(c) = α + βlny(p) + ε
Just imagine anything in brackets is subscript, this board really needs some proper BBcode. Here is a basic overview of how a regression works for other readers not familiar with the concept. This is still fairly simplified, but relevant. y(c) is the child's income, and the y(p) is the income of the parent (or, more directly, the father). The coefficient β provides the measure you are looking for. To answer your initial question, it looks at people moving between all groups, both down and up the economic scale, via directly comparing the two levels of income; are people able to move away from the comparative income of their parents, for example? Hence, the farther away the next generation of children are from their father's income lowers that coefficient, because they correlate less. A lower correlation implies greater elasticity, and hence economic mobility, since people can end up far away from their parent's income. How well off the top is, and how bad off the bottom is, should be generally irrelevant to the discussion, since their incomes still must be able to change. This isn't the best measure, a link I will direct you to later provides a few papers that use other methods to discuss this issue in detail, if you want to review that instead.
Kind of obviously carries with it an attenuation bias and errors derived from using a few years rather than lifetime income, and so forth. However, most modern papers use much more complex, and far better derived models in their papers -- indeed, the forward of just about every paper you can find these days is "the old way of measuring this is stupid," replete with a new, much more expanded method of measuring it. Most papers, for example, use various methods to account for age and educational attainment, among other variables. There is generally a trend between the nations, however, and the USA does tend to rank lowly when ranked against viably comparable other nations; that is, well developed, western liberal democracies. In most measures, the USA is going to rank ahead of the rest of the world, but that is hardly a test of the mechanisms relative to such a group, nor is it a very viable measure of development for the USA. Given that many support the ideal that America is a beacon of economic liberty, a lack of economic elasticity implies a significant lack of ability to move from the poor to a higher class, or for a person who is rich to move to a lower one.
The question of greater relevance should be "how does America rank in the free world," rather than using a broader measure, in my own opinion, since the latter gains us very little insight in saying how the States should be. I get what you are trying to say, though, Psudo; measuring nations against each other matters most when nations have not attained a sufficient level of development, and for sure a degree of sufficiency has been gained that is above most other nations. However, in this case, I'd say (in my own opinion) that we are still seeking improvement, and it does clash somewhat with the image of America as the economic forefront of the world in most forms. Hence why these studies mostly look at OECD nations; not just because there is socioeconomic relevance between the different state actors, but also because it provides us a measure relevant to societal development at the level our states are at. Well, that, and the data simply isn't available for a lot of countries; I don't think there is a comprehensive listing of all nations due to varying methods of measurement. In the beginning of the final paragraph, there is a link where I discuss the current state of affairs in the USA, and how that may not be sufficient, regardless of comparative rankings, since I think you are searching for that instead. In the context of this thread, I can see andy as having made some of his point.
So, in conclusion as to this topic; you are both right. Psudo, you are correct in that the United States is a land of opportunity. America will retain its status as a top nation for that. However, Andy may be correct in saying it is not the land of opportunity among those nations capable of being a land of opportunity, since it is difficult for the rich to fail and the poor to succeed, according to the measure he used, compared to other nations of comparative development. And since we often hear of America as the land of opportunity, that is where the relevance of Andy's stance comes from. The question of sufficiency, if being a land of opportunity is enough, was largely untouched by Andy, and that is because, again, you are both right. Andy was largely focusing on the idea of "opportunity" and whether or not America is the best, and limited his scope, perhaps wrongly, to that, since it is a question of whether it was worthy of criticism. Psudo, perhaps irrelevantly, wanted to take this beyond the original post of Andy's, where it the word "the" was king, but where the implications of what was being said actually mattered in reality. Both of you are right, you just ended up defining yourself into being right and arguing different things, both things of which are relevant but were not actually relevant to each other, one on if America was on the top, and the other on if being at the very top even mattered. Frankly, I think both of you have a point as well; Andy has pointed out the obvious ability for America to improve, and hence there should be impetus for that development, whereas Psudo pointed out that America still retains a status well above the norm and being overly critical may be hasty (even though I disagree for the sake of devil's advocate in a link below). The difference between "a" and "the" is massive indeed. As for me having to provide the math...
Andy, I get that this was seen by you as being outside the scope of the argument, but you were given the chance to engage with someone willing to discuss a topic close to your heart, and I kind of expected more. Especially since this would have actually been a discussion of some relevance, and since your none-too-subtle entrance in this thread to make a favoured point of yours only retains it's poignancy in its defense. This is neither difficult math, nor would it have been hard for you to find if you spent time looking for it among your very own sources. If you care to make this argument, along with those others like me who have written argumentation for why a lack of socioeconomic mobility and equality can be bad, then you really need to know the math, and have the dedication to the subject to learn the background information of what you are espousing -- especially if you plan to bring it up in a lot of threads. Indeed, your recent response to others calling them math morons runs somewhat contrary to your lack of response. If you really care for the topics you post on here at all, you would take your own implied advice and come to understand it to the best of your ability. Defend your sources, defend your understanding, and through that defend your arguments; nothing posted here is sacrosanct, and all is open to scrutiny, as is good debate. If you do that well, than maybe your postings on your topics will carry more weight not just among the regulars of this forum, but of the Canadian people in general.
bootlegga @ Mon May 13, 2013 5:16 am
N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:
bootlegga bootlegga:
Psudo's thread?
I can't let him take the rap for something he actually critiqued.
No. That thread was mine. It was one of those little smiley, ironic, half-truth, winks from one side of the partisan divide to the other. One sees them from both sides.
What amazed me about it was how angry it made some. I still hear bitches about it from commentors on current posts 'Remember that time months ago, you posted that humor thing that wasn't 100% fact. Proves you're a liar.'
Also, I see now there are now parodies on the original. I'm surprised. Apparently it was much more powerful than I thought when I first posted it. Hell, I just thought it was a bit of a smile.
My mistake NF... fixed!
commanderkai @ Mon May 13, 2013 7:32 am
Psudo Psudo:
Public_Domain: If you meant violence in general, the tragic side of the modern human experience, why does your comment explicitly contain the word "American"? Not Louisianian, not North American, not human, but American? I'm not looking for you to defend your country. I'm looking for you not to criticize mine specifically for the faults of humanity generally.
It's rather interesting how American tragedies get more comments and a more active discussion than Canadian ones on "Canadian forums".
Public_Domain @ Mon May 13, 2013 8:07 am
Zipperfish @ Mon May 13, 2013 8:48 am
I would argue that opportunity doesn't eqaul "intergenerational elasticity." It's always dangerous to tie your horse to a single variable, especially given that the data used to calculate that variable is subject to large uncertainty and bias.
andyt @ Mon May 13, 2013 9:13 am
$1:
The Missing Rungs: Has the 'land of opportunity' left the majority behind?
HENDERSON, North Carolina — Garland Sanders came of age working the textile mills that once dotted this rural county along the border with Virginia. That is, until 10 years ago when he was laid off along with several hundred others as Harriet & Henderson downsized, part of a drastic shrinking of an industry that could not compete with lower Asian wages.
“It wasn’t a lot of money, and I thought life was hard then, but it got a whole lot harder since,” said Sanders, 41, sitting at the Smithfield’s Chicken ‘N Bar-B-Q restaurant here on a recent visit. He said he and his wife eventually had to move on from their hometown in search of work, migrating to Florida where Sanders now has a job as a security guard.
“My daddy never made any more than me, really, but when we were kids, there always seemed to be money for stuff — a little fishing trip, we went to Disneyland one year,” he said.
“We just can’t seem to get ahead now, even with my wife working flat out too. We’d love to move back, but it would be a move down, and at my age, I can’t afford to risk that,” he added.
It may be no consolation, but Sanders has a lot of company in this fate. After two centuries in which the United States was virtually a synonym for “land of opportunity,” social mobility in America has stalled.
This has left a majority of the country’s workforce — those in the bottom three fifths of the American earning pyramid — facing a far steeper upward climb, and indeed a significant challenge just to hold on to what they have.
Measuring social mobility is not easy. Economists generally believe the best method is to compare the inflation adjusted incomes of parents with those of their children and, if possible, grandchildren. For generations, the “American Dream” included the assumption that anyone willing to put in the hours and keep his or her nose to the grindstone could make their way up the rungs of the income ladder to a better — or at least more economically secure life.
Yet today, in study after study, the hard fact is that a child born in the past two decades in France — or in Germany, Sweden or Japan — stands a better chance of earning significantly more than their parents than a child born in America.
“Only 4 percent of those raised in the bottom quintile make it all the way to the top as adults, confirming that the ‘rags-to-riches’ story is more often found in Hollywood than in reality,” one report by the Pew Center for the States revealed last year.
A 2010 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development looked at social mobility in the largest European and North American economies and found that children born in the US, UK and Italy have the worst prospects for advancement.
Canada, long thought of as something of a nanny state by its southern cousins, is also more mobile. Miles Corak, an economics professor at the University of Ottawa, led an intensive study of generational mobility in both the US and Canada. His 2006 study, the gold standard on the matter to date, found Canada to be as much as three times as mobile as the ‘land of opportunity,’ and concluded most of the reason is the “stickiness” of those at the very top and very bottom.
Specifically, he found that those born into the bottom of the economic heap in both countries (in the US, that is the bottom 10 percent, or those earning about $12,000 a year) had very different odds of rising. In the US, the likelihood of a child being stuck there too is about 22 percent. In Canada, it’s 16 percent.
On the other end of the ladder (in the US, that means the top 10 percent, or those earning over $126,000 a year) have a much better chance of remaining there. Those born in the United States have a 26 percent chance of staying at the top rung compared with 18 percent in Canada. In other words, Canada’s pool of upper income households makes more room for newcomers.
How has this happened? Economists believe it is caused in part by the same tax policy changes that have over the last two decades created the surging income inequality that is at the center of this series.
GlobalPost’s Special Report, “The Great Divide,” found in instance after instance that the huge spike in inequality in America beginning about the time “trickle down” economics became an article of faith in some quarters of industry and government has seen wealth trickle up instead.
Indeed, the share of all US income captured by the top 10 percent of earners was as bad in 2007 as it was just before the Great Depression in 1929. The 2008 crisis pushed it down, but it has already begun climbing again.
But there’s more to the equation than taxes.
The failure of those fiscal policies that assumed wealth would “trickle down” has greased the rungs of the American ladder to success. That has meant important changes in social policy, in access to education and health care. And the changes have coincided with enormous global historical shifts. And, economists point out, this multitude of factors has conspired to remove many of the rungs on the ladder altogether.
Global trends have exacerbated the stagnation in the middle and lower rungs of society. The waning of trade union power, particularly in the US, removed some of the leverage working class people once had to keep wages growing. The collapse of Soviet communism freed millions but also added millions of low-wage workers to the global economy, placing downward pressure on middle and lower tier incomes, and giving American corporates the option of simply moving jobs abroad.
Information technology and the addition of women to the workforce combined to cause a spike in US worker productivity. Yet it has not translated into wage growth, at least not for the majority of Americans. In some industries, it has fed joblessness. In effect, modern supply chain management, cheaper and better communications, other advances have made it possible for 100 workers in 2013 to do the work 1,000 or more did in 1983.
Not all the news is bad. The American economy and its workforce have traditionally been first adopters, and adapters, and there are signs this characteristic has survived The Great Divide. The cost of manufacturing in some Asian countries, even China, is rising as their own citizens demand rights and protections and as energy costs make trans-Pacific shipments more costly. That has led to some significant “re-shoring” of jobs that had left for Asia coming back to the US.
Even when jobs do appear, they appear in lesser numbers than before, thanks to technology. And indeed, the sense of optimism that news of a new factory can bring often evaporates as the details emerge.
Garland Sanders, for instance, flew hundreds of miles on his day off to look into reports that a solar panel company Semprius planned to site a new plant in Vance County that will employ 250 people. But the jobs on offer required experience Sanders lacks, and anyway he and his wife Laura are underwater in their Jupiter, Florida condominium.
“If I’d have known where this was all going, I suppose I would have stayed in school longer,” Sanders said. “But it really wasn’t too long ago when a working man could make a living with his hands.”
Capture.PNG [ 214.57 KiB | Viewed 536 times ]
HENDERSON, North Carolina — Garland Sanders came of age working the textile mills that once dotted this rural county along the border with Virginia. That is, until 10 years ago when he was laid off along with several hundred others as Harriet & Henderson downsized, part of a drastic shrinking of an industry that could not compete with lower Asian wages.
“It wasn’t a lot of money, and I thought life was hard then, but it got a whole lot harder since,” said Sanders, 41, sitting at the Smithfield’s Chicken ‘N Bar-B-Q restaurant here on a recent visit. He said he and his wife eventually had to move on from their hometown in search of work, migrating to Florida where Sanders now has a job as a security guard.
“My daddy never made any more than me, really, but when we were kids, there always seemed to be money for stuff — a little fishing trip, we went to Disneyland one year,” he said.
“We just can’t seem to get ahead now, even with my wife working flat out too. We’d love to move back, but it would be a move down, and at my age, I can’t afford to risk that,” he added.
It may be no consolation, but Sanders has a lot of company in this fate. After two centuries in which the United States was virtually a synonym for “land of opportunity,” social mobility in America has stalled.
This has left a majority of the country’s workforce — those in the bottom three fifths of the American earning pyramid — facing a far steeper upward climb, and indeed a significant challenge just to hold on to what they have.
Measuring social mobility is not easy. Economists generally believe the best method is to compare the inflation adjusted incomes of parents with those of their children and, if possible, grandchildren. For generations, the “American Dream” included the assumption that anyone willing to put in the hours and keep his or her nose to the grindstone could make their way up the rungs of the income ladder to a better — or at least more economically secure life.
Yet today, in study after study, the hard fact is that a child born in the past two decades in France — or in Germany, Sweden or Japan — stands a better chance of earning significantly more than their parents than a child born in America.
“Only 4 percent of those raised in the bottom quintile make it all the way to the top as adults, confirming that the ‘rags-to-riches’ story is more often found in Hollywood than in reality,” one report by the Pew Center for the States revealed last year.
A 2010 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development looked at social mobility in the largest European and North American economies and found that children born in the US, UK and Italy have the worst prospects for advancement.
Canada, long thought of as something of a nanny state by its southern cousins, is also more mobile. Miles Corak, an economics professor at the University of Ottawa, led an intensive study of generational mobility in both the US and Canada. His 2006 study, the gold standard on the matter to date, found Canada to be as much as three times as mobile as the ‘land of opportunity,’ and concluded most of the reason is the “stickiness” of those at the very top and very bottom.
Specifically, he found that those born into the bottom of the economic heap in both countries (in the US, that is the bottom 10 percent, or those earning about $12,000 a year) had very different odds of rising. In the US, the likelihood of a child being stuck there too is about 22 percent. In Canada, it’s 16 percent.
On the other end of the ladder (in the US, that means the top 10 percent, or those earning over $126,000 a year) have a much better chance of remaining there. Those born in the United States have a 26 percent chance of staying at the top rung compared with 18 percent in Canada. In other words, Canada’s pool of upper income households makes more room for newcomers.
How has this happened? Economists believe it is caused in part by the same tax policy changes that have over the last two decades created the surging income inequality that is at the center of this series.
GlobalPost’s Special Report, “The Great Divide,” found in instance after instance that the huge spike in inequality in America beginning about the time “trickle down” economics became an article of faith in some quarters of industry and government has seen wealth trickle up instead.
Indeed, the share of all US income captured by the top 10 percent of earners was as bad in 2007 as it was just before the Great Depression in 1929. The 2008 crisis pushed it down, but it has already begun climbing again.
But there’s more to the equation than taxes.
The failure of those fiscal policies that assumed wealth would “trickle down” has greased the rungs of the American ladder to success. That has meant important changes in social policy, in access to education and health care. And the changes have coincided with enormous global historical shifts. And, economists point out, this multitude of factors has conspired to remove many of the rungs on the ladder altogether.
Global trends have exacerbated the stagnation in the middle and lower rungs of society. The waning of trade union power, particularly in the US, removed some of the leverage working class people once had to keep wages growing. The collapse of Soviet communism freed millions but also added millions of low-wage workers to the global economy, placing downward pressure on middle and lower tier incomes, and giving American corporates the option of simply moving jobs abroad.
Information technology and the addition of women to the workforce combined to cause a spike in US worker productivity. Yet it has not translated into wage growth, at least not for the majority of Americans. In some industries, it has fed joblessness. In effect, modern supply chain management, cheaper and better communications, other advances have made it possible for 100 workers in 2013 to do the work 1,000 or more did in 1983.
Not all the news is bad. The American economy and its workforce have traditionally been first adopters, and adapters, and there are signs this characteristic has survived The Great Divide. The cost of manufacturing in some Asian countries, even China, is rising as their own citizens demand rights and protections and as energy costs make trans-Pacific shipments more costly. That has led to some significant “re-shoring” of jobs that had left for Asia coming back to the US.
Even when jobs do appear, they appear in lesser numbers than before, thanks to technology. And indeed, the sense of optimism that news of a new factory can bring often evaporates as the details emerge.
Garland Sanders, for instance, flew hundreds of miles on his day off to look into reports that a solar panel company Semprius planned to site a new plant in Vance County that will employ 250 people. But the jobs on offer required experience Sanders lacks, and anyway he and his wife Laura are underwater in their Jupiter, Florida condominium.
“If I’d have known where this was all going, I suppose I would have stayed in school longer,” Sanders said. “But it really wasn’t too long ago when a working man could make a living with his hands.”
Capture.PNG [ 214.57 KiB | Viewed 536 times ]
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news ... ity-income
Psudo @ Mon May 13, 2013 9:30 am
Thank you, Khar, for a uniquely fair and balanced analysis. I accept your very valid criticisms of me in the spirit they are offered.
I never thought of you, Public_Domain, as one who followed popular trends uncritically. Why reflect the media rather than expressing your unique self?
Zipperfish Zipperfish:
opportunity doesn't eqaul "intergenerational elasticity." It's always dangerous to tie your horse to a single variable
Thank you for explicitly making that distinction; until this morning, I felt very lonely in doing so.
Zipperfish @ Mon May 13, 2013 10:41 am
Khar Khar:
Well, since the fun in the thread is over, I might as well respond.
For everyone else, feel free to ignore and go back to discussing mass produced German metal. So mainstream. </hipster>
Usually, when measuring elasticity, the easiest way is just to remember that you are looking at the change in one variable with a certain change in another to find the impact between the two. Most of the time, it's easiest to see when pared down to the following:
elasticity (x, y) = (Δ(%y))/(Δ(%x))
blah blah blah blah blah blah.
For everyone else, feel free to ignore and go back to discussing mass produced German metal. So mainstream. </hipster>
Psudo Psudo:
My last try: how is intergenerational income elasticity actually calculated? Can you prove that the USA is anything lower than 15th in the world by its measure? Do you think that 15th out of 200+ (top 8% in the world) is a ranking to be ashamed of?
Or, failing that, why do you deem these questions to be irrelevant?
Or, failing that, why do you deem these questions to be irrelevant?
Usually, when measuring elasticity, the easiest way is just to remember that you are looking at the change in one variable with a certain change in another to find the impact between the two. Most of the time, it's easiest to see when pared down to the following:
elasticity (x, y) = (Δ(%y))/(Δ(%x))
blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And you wonder why you always end up standing by yourself at parties. ha ha ha. Just joking--great post.
Public_Domain @ Mon May 13, 2013 10:58 am
BartSimpson @ Mon May 13, 2013 12:53 pm
Public_Domain Public_Domain:
If I posted anarchist and communist threads from my "other" sources, I'd be more non-credible and marginalized on this forum than I already am.
[tangent]
And why do you think that is the case? If your proposals make sense and can be demonstrated to show some sort of advantageous outcome then why would posting them negatively impact your credibility?
Furthermore, if you accept that your credibility would be adversely affected by posting these anarchist and communist ideas then how is it that you're still dedicated to them?
[/tangent]
Unsound @ Mon May 13, 2013 1:08 pm
Canadian_Mind Canadian_Mind:
Sounds a lot like Rammstein. TBH, the only artist from Sweden I'm actively aware of is Basshunter, and that is Techno/trance, not Metal. I suppose Finland has Loki, but they never really took off. Norway Just has hot bitches and oil. Denmark has... Nothing I'm aware of? 
Denmark has Volbeat. And Lars Ulrich. And Hatesphere. And, of course, Aqua!
Public_Domain @ Mon May 13, 2013 1:13 pm
ShepherdsDog @ Mon May 13, 2013 1:14 pm
I like the symphonic/goth metal bands from Scandinhoovia
BartSimpson @ Mon May 13, 2013 1:47 pm
Public_Domain Public_Domain:
I consider it impossible for liberals or conservatives to find communist or anarchist discussion credible. I've never seen liberals or conservatives take such notions seriously, and I am roughly rebuffed whenever I start to hint at them.
They are not accepted beliefs around here and will never be considered valid in a forum with all the socioeconomic diversity of lassaiz-faire and Keynesian capitalists.
Basically, I'm not going to bother being flamed and neg replied for whatever non-mainstream piece I find. Like I said, I'll save my breath for people who give a shit.
I'm dedicated to them because I'm well aware that ideas don't need to be credible amungst liberals and conservatives to be good ideas. A liberal or conservative can't understand a concept such as a credible non-mainstream political strategy. It's just not there. I am to either vote for a party or fuck off; I already push the patience barrier around here on that front.
I'd like to believe that people can accept others ideas but years of debate have led me to believe that for the most part it's easier to assume that the harbringers of strange ideas are incompetent or otherwise fucking around.
They are not accepted beliefs around here and will never be considered valid in a forum with all the socioeconomic diversity of lassaiz-faire and Keynesian capitalists.
Basically, I'm not going to bother being flamed and neg replied for whatever non-mainstream piece I find. Like I said, I'll save my breath for people who give a shit.
I'm dedicated to them because I'm well aware that ideas don't need to be credible amungst liberals and conservatives to be good ideas. A liberal or conservative can't understand a concept such as a credible non-mainstream political strategy. It's just not there. I am to either vote for a party or fuck off; I already push the patience barrier around here on that front.
I'd like to believe that people can accept others ideas but years of debate have led me to believe that for the most part it's easier to assume that the harbringers of strange ideas are incompetent or otherwise fucking around.
Myself, I'm fine with communism and anarchism so long as no one tries to force me to participate.
If you want to form a communist community on your own dime then I say have a great time!
As to the anarchists, I see them all the time. They reject societal rules, they spurn the notions of work, they forage for their food, and they form very loosely governed communities that operate absent any body of law.
