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A comment on Why it's expensive to be poor. Parent comment

Re:Why it's expensive to be poor by pixcavator on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @08:21PM (#619607)
>"France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark all have more relative mobility than the US, while only the United Kingdom is shown to have less mobility [1]"

That report again! All I see is: some professor came up with his own definition of economic mobility (some unitless score, what the hell is it?) and now we are supposed to take these conclusions as a gospel.

UPDATE: Apparently I can't reply to the comment below, so I have to do it here. The comment only confirms what I wrote and does not answer the question: what is that score? How is it computed?

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Re:Why it's expensive to be poor by perneto on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @09:17PM (#619668)
The report uses two metrics of economic mobility: absolute mobility, and relative mobility. Relative mobility is unitless because it's an elasticity: it measures how much parent income influences children income.

This is from note 13 in the report. Also, the authors didn't come up with this themselves. The data comes from here: http://www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbs...

This explains nicely where the use of elasticity comes from.

Do you have other data that contradicts these conclusions?

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