A Very Uneven Playing Field: Economic Mobility in the United States
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present results from a new data set, the Statistics of Income Mobility Panel, that has been assembled from tax and other administrative sources to provide evidence on economic mobility and persistence in the United States. This data set allows us to take on the methodological problems that have complicated previous efforts to estimate intergenerational earnings and income elasticities. We find that the elasticities for women’s income, men’s income, and men’s earnings are as high as all but the highest of the previously reported survey-based estimates. Because the intergenerational curves are especially steep within the parental-income region defined by the 50th to 90th percentiles, approximately two-thirds of the inequality between poor and well-off families is passed on to the next generation. This extreme persistence cannot be attributed to any single factor. Instead, the U.S. is exceptional with respect to virtually all factors governing intergenerational persistence, including the returns to human capital, the amount of public investment in the human capital of low-income children, the amount of socioeconomic segregation, and the progressiveness of the tax-and-transfer system. For each of these four factors, the U.S. has opted for policies that are mobility-reducing, with the implication that any substantial increase in mobility will likely require a wide-ranging package of reforms that cut across many institutions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it