Matt Zeitlin

It’s safe to say that the conservative movement has confused normative ideas about what policies should be implemented or not implemented. But of course I would say that; I’m a liberal. But it’s also noteworthy how the conservative movement has seriously confused positive ideas about pretty basic policy issues. There is, of course, the widespread belief among movement conservative types (and politicians) that reductions in marginal income tax rates will increase revenue. This, obviously, is not true and doesn’t have a scintilla of empirical evidence to support and not even any good argument for why this could be true when income tax rates are the lowest they have ever been.

But another argument that conservatives seem to take for granted is that, despite our abnormal-for-the-industrialized-world inequality, we have more intergenerational mobility, that the economic and social status for a given person is less influenced by their parents economic and social status than it is in other countries. Marco Rubio, profiled in today’s New York Times Magazine, believes this wholeheartedly:

He jackhammers his message about America’s exceptional status in the world. “This is the only society in history where your future is not determined by where you were born,” he said. “I believe that the United States of America is the greatest society in the history of humanity.”

This, intuitively, seems unlikely; if the income distribution is more spread out, it would seem harder to advance along it. But even when you just measure gross income gains, Marco Rubio, “The First Senator From the Tea Party?” is pretty wrong. Here are just a smorgaboard of papers and reports that all conclude that the US has less intergenerational income mobility than comparable countries. And, most damningly for hardcore economic conservatives, Scandinavian social democracies have higher levels of intergenerational income mobility.

Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has a paper which says that “Using administrative data containing the earnings histories of parents and children,the IGE is estimated to be around 0.6. This suggests that the United States is substantially less mobile than previous research indicated.” And, “estimates of intergenerational mobility are significantly lower for families with little or no wealth.”

Or, from Markus Jantti of Abo Akademi University:

The United States, Italy, and France all have high persistence, at 0.45, 0.44, and 0.42, respectively, which with a 12-fold income advantage in the parental generation would translate to roughly three times higher incomes among the children of the richest fifth compared to those of the poorest. Denmark has the lowest persistence at 0.12, and most other countries are quite close to 0.25. These numbers translate to 1.35 and 1.86 times higher incomes among the richest fifth offspring, holding constant the parental income advantage

In summary, “Intergenerational income persistence in the United States is quite high compared to other countries, and that persistence.”

Now, conservatives could argue that all this talk of mobility doesn’t matter and that it’s aggregate growth that’s important. But when there is so much inequality, this type of argument isn’t likely to find much purchase in the electorate. And, even more damningly, there is a ton of research that suggests the best way to increase intergenerational mobility, especially among the very poor, is intensive, expensive investments in early childhood education and health care. Of course, the only conservative education policy is to make it easier to fire teachers, privatize as much as possible and just hope shit works out. Which I guess explains why they hold such contrary-to-reality views about intergenerational mobility.