Tyler Cowen wrote:
Why economic mobility measures are overrated: For a given level of income, if some are moving up others are moving down. Do you take theories of wage rigidity seriously? If so, you might favor less relative mobility, other things remaining equal. More upward — and thus downward — relative mobility probably means less aggregate happiness, due to habit formation and frame of reference effects...
And then doubled down:
What does the inequality-immobility link mean?: [H]aving somewhat more [intergenerational] churn should not be viewed as a major social goal per se…. If you are looking for Turing test fail, mood affiliation, unwillingness to recognize comparisons on the margin (as if I am defending hereditary aristocracy), and us vs. them thinking, here are John Quiggin, Brad DeLong, and Paul Krugman, as if I had staged a satirical interchange to illustrate and make fun of their occasional proclivities…
The argument that America has too much intergenerational social mobility is not, to my mind, greatly strengthened by the plea that one is not "defending hereditary aristocracy"--that the optimal amount of intergenerational social mobility is not much less but just somewhat less than we have today.
