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Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

This story reminded me of something I've often wanted to know when people start talking about economic inequality metrics, namely, how many of those in poverty when entering the workforce will remain in poverty their whole life? To me the longitudinal information here is the most significant metric i.e. what does wealth movement look like for individuals over their lifetime. Virtually everyone in their teens and early twenties is in or near poverty, but what does that same individual look like at 30, 40, and 60?

Can any economists / sociologists in here point me to studies / research in this area?

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I've heard from smarter people than me that your parents' level of economic attainment is the best predictor of your economic attainment. Everyone may be broke in their twenties, but some of those 20 somethings presumably got a leg up from being in a good (pre, elementary, secondary, post-secondary) school and can ask mom and pop for help on the down payment for a home, etc.

Suspect that's still the case, though the other trend of increasing inequality means that more and more at the bottom are slipping out of middle class, while a very select few at the top are headed toward cryoretirement in their ice palaces overlooking a scenic valley on some private jovian moon.

Score on IQ tests is a far better predictor of SES than parental SES. Someone in the 95th percentile for IQ will, on average, earn more than someone with parents in the 95th percentile of earnings.

See: http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intellige...

IQ might be a better predictor, but the linked paper says it's not a far better one:

"The results demonstrate that intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on the whole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES or grades."

That might just mean that intelligence is useful not only for gaining personal success, but also for raising offspring who will be successful. Is that a problem that society should try to correct?

> your parents' level of economic attainment is the best predictor of your economic attainment

I've read that marital status of you biological parents and the marital statuses of the parents in your neighborhood are also great predictors.

They keyword you're looking for is intragenerational mobility, it'll pull up plenty of research, here's one link I found: http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/income-mobility-over-a...

But actually, I would go the opposite way and say we need to look at multigenerational inequality. Which is to say that our current inequality metrics might look really good even if you were bound to being only 1 quintile higher or lower than your grandparents, every individual would oscillate in a small range through their life but once accumulated it would show up in the data as lots of mobility. What I'd be really interested in seeing is how likely a family is to climb out of poverty over a few generations and then to stick there or how likely a rich family is to sink into poverty and stick there.

A few weeks ago the NYTimes had a graph showing the same trend applying to all workers that this current story illustrates with two examples:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh...

TL;DR In 1980 low income workers saw their incomes rise faster than high income workers, now the vast majority of income gains go to extremely high paid workers.

You're looking for research on what's called "socioeconomic mobility". The Atlantic has summed up some of this research [1]. Basically it's become harder for American workers to work their way up the income ladder over time.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-...

Economic mobility is fairy well measured, and has been decreasing for decades. The US tends to not rank terribly well, putting a bit of a damper on the whole "land of opportunity" thing

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