Link: The Becker-Posner Blog.
The NYTimes article that referred to my 1987 Presidential address to the American Economic Association badly misstated what I said. I did not claim that children’s income was not much related to the income of their parents. In fact I assumed for the sake of discussion that about 40% of the parents’ income advantage was passed on to children. Note that grandchildren would then only have about 16% of the advantages of their grandparents. It is true that some recent work claims the fraction passed on might be as high as 50% rather than 40%, but that is controversial, as Dean Lillard of Cornell and others have argued. I also stand by my claim that there is no credible evidence that the degree of intergenerational mobility has fallen during the past few decades.
Comments