Social Mobility

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But on the topic of Sowell, I saw a story that reminded me of something he wrote in Basic Economics (IIRC), that looking at income stratification is only a snapshot in time, and people generally don't stay in the same bracket their whole lives. A recent Brookings Institution study looks like it corroborates that. Most individuals increase their income throughout their lives, they usually don't go the other way.

He does look at household income in his study, which doesn't make sense to me because women started working more throughout the time period of his study, but then he looks at individual income which is what Sowell was talking about.

Cato Institute is who linked to the story, they included this graph from the WaPo:

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Via gwern:

We investigated intergenerational educational and occupational mobility in a sample of 2,594 adult offspring and 2,530
of their parents. Participants completed assessments of general cognitive ability and five noncognitive factors related
to social achievement; 88% were also genotyped, allowing computation of educational-attainment polygenic scores.
Most offspring were socially mobile. Offspring who scored at least 1 standard deviation higher than their parents on
both cognitive and noncognitive measures rarely moved down and frequently moved up. Polygenic scores were also
associated with social mobility. Inheritance of a favorable subset of parent alleles was associated with moving up,
and inheritance of an unfavorable subset was associated with moving down. Parents’ education did not moderate the
association of offspring’s skill with mobility, suggesting that low-skilled offspring from advantaged homes were not
protected from downward mobility. These data suggest that cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as genetic factors
contribute to the reordering of social standing that takes place across generations.
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