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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"NYT: Income inequality not increasing"

21 Comments -

1 – 21 of 21
Anonymous peterike said...

What I want to see is a study showing the amount of income and wealth lost by foreigners taking extremely valuable seats in premier US universities and then heading back to their own nations with their new sheep skins.

A sensible nation would not allow more than 10% of its key university seats to be taken by outsiders. But then, we are not a sensible nation. The amount of wealth and knowledge lost by the slavish sucking up to foreign students is a generational crime that goes entirely unspoken.

1/23/14, 3:00 PM

Anonymous Henry Canaday said...

It seems to me that Income Inequality and Income Mobility are, even if related, technically two different things.

1/23/14, 3:02 PM

Anonymous Anononymous said...

A major problem is that Chetty looks at income but doesn't adjust for cost of living. The cost of housing is much higher in New York City ... than in Atlanta

Why only compare within the country? What is cost of housing New York City vs. Mobutu?

1/23/14, 3:09 PM

Anonymous Anononymous said...

that about 8 percent of children born in the early 1980s who grew up in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution managed to reach the top fifth

If 100% of the bottom 1/5 were to get to the top 1/5, then wouldn't the top 1/5 have to be displaced down? Would we complain about them being worse off? And if the top 1/5 spaces are now being hogged by the bottom 1/5, then there is no room for the next to top 1/5 to advance. How long can do they get to stay at the top 1/5 before they need to be displaced by the bottom 4/5 needing to advance? Maybe we could have a rotation system. Bottom 1/5 to top 1/5, top 1/5 to 4/5, 4/5 to 3/5, 3/5 to 2/5.

1/23/14, 3:27 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

OT from the issue of mobility and inequality, it is interesting that West Virginia is about 95% white, yet is one of the poorest places on the map.

HBD?

1/23/14, 3:29 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

West Virginia has been on a downward path in state rankings for decades. It's a little like Scotland: everybody with something on the ball leaves.

1/23/14, 3:31 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve, I haven't looked carefully at their measures, but it seems to me "social (income) mobility" is clearly measuring churn in a zero-sum gain. If income mobility is high, many in the bottom 20% move up... implying that many in the top 80% move into the bottom 20%. This type of research clearly rests on the assumption that Income Mobility Is A Good Thing. Implication: it's a good thing if lots of people in the bottom 20% move up while lots of people in the top 80% move down. Perverse. Obviously anti-white.

1/23/14, 3:54 PM

Anonymous nice cake said...

"Obviously anti-white."

In 2003 a Bay Area junior high scholer quoted one of his black teachers to me: "white people are gonna have to come down a few notches."

1/23/14, 4:19 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's interesting how the best recent-ish movie set in West Virginia is October Sky, which is about smart kids from humble backgrounds harnessing their talents by getting the hell out of West Virginia.

1/23/14, 4:36 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve, interesting that you should compare West Virginia to Scotland. Most West Virginians descend from the Scots and English border lands. And it looks like you get the same results, regardless where you put these folks. And my great-grandma came from Scotland. Oi.

1/23/14, 5:23 PM

Anonymous Five Daarstens said...

There was a Forbes map from 2011 showing where people are migrating to/from. Check out the Long Island, NY area (where I am from).

http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/migration.html

1/23/14, 6:56 PM

Blogger Burke said...

The military attempts cost of living adjustments for its loclity-dependent Basis Allowance for Housing (BAH). The link is tothe PDF, but they also have text files and historical data

1/23/14, 7:13 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

West Virginia isn't all bad. It's very beautiful, especially in the Eastern part of the state, but the winters are brutal in the valleys. It's only really started to free fall as a state in the last 40 year-- about when my family left. The liberal attack on the noble idea of the self sufficent, tacitur, and morally upright 'Proud Mountaineer' has been unrelenting since Johnson's administration. According to Tom Wolfe in I think it was 'Last Great American Hero' West Virginia leads the nation by Medal of Honor recipients per capita. I wonder if that will be true the next time we wonder into a bloodletting.

1/23/14, 7:48 PM

Blogger Eric Rasmusen said...

1. There is a good, though not completely compelling, argument for not adjusting for standard of living. It is that if people choose to pay higher rents in New York City or Santa Barbara, it must be because they'd rather live there. Otherwise, why wouldn't they move somewhere cheaper? In some cases, that is quite convincing. The cost of livign is high in California, taxes are high, and services are bad, so it seems like the "real income" of people is low. But high-tech companies still choose to locate there, because their employees prefer living there to Oklahoma, even tho their salaries would stretch to buy more stuff in Oklahoma.

2. IT would be interesting to check out the correlation between the Saez Chetty measure of immobility and (a) population growth and (b) population inflow minus outflow and (c) children per capita. This woudl no doubt confirm your idea that these places with supposed immobility are ones people like to stay living in and find desirable places to bear and raise children.

1/23/14, 7:51 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Silicon Valley style inequality

1/23/14, 8:03 PM

Blogger A.C. said...

Does WV's overwhelmingly white population compare favorably in terms of educational attainment or income with say, West Indian blacks from Brooklyn and Queens? I'd guess not.

1/23/14, 8:46 PM

Blogger Eric Rasmusen said...

Teh great things about states with population outflows is that the price of nice century-old houses drops, and ugly new houses aren't being built. So if you do still have a job, economic decline can be good, not bad.

Of course, the decline can't be because of social breakdown--- Detroit's amazingly cheap houses still aren't a bargain...

1/24/14, 6:33 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Newark's "commuting zone" would include a wide swath of Manhattan's. So isn't your example bogus?

1/24/14, 7:51 AM

Blogger pat said...

The New York Times and media outlets of that stripe are always on the prowl for some plausible sounding study that shows that some bad outcome like poverty, crime or poor school performance that is closely associated with people of the black race is actually the result of another independent variable not race at all. If you are able to produce such a study you will be published. Simple.

The most obvious example is the long history of 'experts' who are willing to testify that crime and poverty among blacks has nothing to do with race but is rather a consequence of class. This NYT article is a little more sophisticated, but it is also an agenda driven piece of research. The powers that be nowadays favor the view that the IQ and poverty gap between the races is closing. So we get 'happy talk' research which shows that we are on the right track and that if we just keep quiet and be patient everything will work out. Black people will - despite the evidence of our 'lying eyes'- become more and more like whites and Asians.

I wonder how many of your readers fully appreciate your 'regression to the mean' argument. It is a nice way of saying that blacks are inferior. It's a mathematical euphemism.

The reason we have regression to the mean is that on retest the error term tends to balance out and disappear. So when you say blacks regress to a lower mean you are saying the real variable - income or employability or whatever - is really truly lower and that higher results are just errors, temporary errors that will wash away when measured again. Regression to the mean means that the group average can be more meaningful than a single data point. That literally means that a group characteristic like race will show up on retest and swamp ephemeral individual characteristics.

It's hard to think of a more odious idea to an antiracist liberal.

Albertosaurus

1/24/14, 10:28 AM

Anonymous David said...

Mr. Canaday is right that income inequality and upward income mobility are different things.

Upward income mobility has always been flat except for a few Horatio Algers, whose stories are the exceptions that prove the rule. For example, a recent study showed that US intergenerational income inelasticity is high among OECD countries. (NB: The studies apparently aren't broken out by race.)

But US wages have sharply declined relative to productivity for 34 years: chart.

The bottom line picture is one of a vast herd of people working harder but going nowhere, while a few individuals climb their backs to ever-higher heights; i.e., the rise of neofeudalism. Steve is correct about cost of living calculations insofar as millions' shuffling their deck chairs to the Sunbelt in pursuit of lower costs of living can somewhat obscure the picture.

1/24/14, 1:24 PM

Anonymous jody said...

"West Virginia has been on a downward path in state rankings for decades. It's a little like Scotland: everybody with something on the ball leaves."

only west virginia and maine lost population in 2013. every other state had a net gain above 0, even michigan and rhode island. maine avoids national ridicule for being the redneck moron backwater that it is, by voting for the democrat most of the time. voting D seems to absolve anybody of ridicule.

maine has, i believe, the lowest average SAT score.

1/24/14, 3:49 PM

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