Social and Educational Mobility: Denmark vs USA (James Heckman)

Despite generous social programs such as free pre-K education, free college, and massive transfer payments, Denmark is similar to the US in key measures of inequality, such as educational outcomes and cognitive test scores. 

While transfer payments can equalize, to some degree, disposable income, they do not seem to be able to compensate for large family effects on individual differences in development. 

These observations raise the following questions: 

1. What is the best case scenario for the US if all progressive government programs are implemented with respect to child development, free high quality K12 education, free college, etc.?

2. What is the causal mechanism for stubborn inequality of outcomes, transmitted from parent to child (i.e., within families)? 

Re #2: Heckman and collaborators focus on environmental factors, but do not (as far as I can tell) discuss genetic transmission. We already know that polygenic scores are correlated to the education and income levels of parents, and (from adoption studies) that children tend to resemble their biological parents much more strongly than their adoptive parents. These results suggest that genetic transmission of inequality may dominate environmental transmission.

  

See 

Genetic correlation of social outcomes between relatives (Fisher 1918) tested using lineage of 400k English individuals 

Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility

The Contribution of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills to Intergenerational Social Mobility (McGue et al. 2020)

Note: Denmark is very homogenous in ancestry, and the data presented in these studies (e.g., polygenic scores and social mobility) are also drawn from European-ancestry cohorts. The focus here is not on ethnicity or group differences between ancestry groups. The focus is on social and educational mobility within European-ancestry populations, with or without generous government programs supporting free college education, daycare, pre-K, etc.

Lessons for Americans from Denmark about inequality and social mobility 

James Heckman and Rasmus Landersø 

Abstract Many progressive American policy analysts point to Denmark as a model welfare state with low levels of income inequality and high levels of income mobility across generations. It has in place many social policies now advocated for adoption in the U.S. Despite generous Danish social policies, family influence on important child outcomes in Denmark is about as strong as it is in the United States. More advantaged families are better able to access, utilize, and influence universally available programs. Purposive sorting by levels of family advantage create neighborhood effects. Powerful forces not easily mitigated by Danish-style welfare state programs operate in both countries.

Also discussed in this episode of EconTalk podcast. Russ does not ask the obvious question about disentangling family environment from genetic transmission of inequality.

 

The figure below appears in Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility. It shows SNP-based polygenic score and life outcome (socioeconomic index, on vertical axis) in four longitudinal cohorts, one from New Zealand (Dunedin) and three from the US. Each cohort (varying somewhat in size) has thousands of individuals, ~20k in total (all of European ancestry). The points displayed are averages over bins containing 10-50 individuals. For each cohort, the individuals have been grouped by childhood (family) social economic status. Social mobility can be predicted from polygenic score. Note that higher SES families tend to have higher polygenic scores on average -- which is what one might expect from a society that is at least somewhat meritocratic. The cohorts have not been used in training -- this is true out-of-sample validation. Furthermore, the four cohorts represent different geographic regions (even, different continents) and individuals born in different decades.

The figure below appears in More on SES and IQ.

Where is the evidence for environmental effects described above in Heckman's abstract: "More advantaged families are better able to access, utilize, and influence universally available programs. Purposive sorting by levels of family advantage create neighborhood effects"? Do parents not seek these advantages for their adopted children as well as for their biological children? Or is there an entirely different causal mechanism based on shared DNA?

 

The figure below appears in Low SES does not decrease heritability of cognitive ability (N=300k).

 

The Contribution of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills to Intergenerational Social Mobility (McGue et al. 2020)

If you have the slightest pretension to expertise concerning social mobility, meritocracy, inequality, genetics, psychology, economics, education, history, or any related subjects, I urge you to carefully study this paper.

The Contribution of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills to Intergenerational Social Mobility  

(Psychological Science https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620924677)

Matt McGue, Emily A. Willoughby, Aldo Rustichini, Wendy Johnson, William G. Iacono, James J. Lee 

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.

From the paper:

We believe that a reasonable explanation of our findings is that the degree to which individuals are more or less skilled than their parents contributes to their upward or downward mobility. Behavioral genetic and genomic research has established the heritability of social achievements (Conley, 2016) as well as the skills thought to underlie them (Bouchard & McGue, 2003). Nonetheless, these associations may be due to passive gene–environment correlation, whereby high-achieving parents both transmit genes and provide a rearing environment that promotes their children’s social success (Scarr & McCartney, 1983). Our within-family design controlled for passive gene–environment correlation effects. Although offspring inherit all of their genes from their parents, they inherit a random subset of parental alleles because of meiotic segregation. Consequently, some offspring inherit a favorable subset of their parents’ alleles, whereas others inherit a less favorable subset. We found, as did previous researchers (Belsky et al., 2018), that the inheritance of a favorable subset of alleles was associated with an increased likelihood of upward mobility... 

...In summary, our analysis of intergenerational social mobility in a sample of 2,594 offspring from 1,321 families found that (a) most individuals were educationally and occupationally mobile, (b) mobility was predicted by offspring–parent differences in skills and genetic endowment, and (c) the relationship of offspring skills with social mobility did not vary significantly by parent social background. In an era in which there is legitimate concern over social stagnation, our findings are noteworthy in identifying the circumstances when parents’ educational and occupational success is not reproduced across generations.

See also Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility (PNAS July 9, 2018: 201801238). Both papers provide out of sample validation of polygenic predictors for cognitive ability, specifically of the relationship to intergenerational social mobility.

Genetic correlation of social outcomes between relatives (Fisher 1918) tested using lineage of 400k English individuals

Greg Clark (UC Davis and London School of Economics) deserves enormous credit for producing a large multi-generational dataset which is relevant to some of the most fundamental issues in social science: inequality, economic development, social policy, wealth formation, meritocracy, and recent human evolution. If you have even a casual interest in the dynamics of human society you should study these results carefully...

See previous discussion on this blog. 

Clark recently posted this preprint on his web page. A book covering similar topics is forthcoming.

For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 English Individuals 1750-2020 shows Genetics Determines most Social Outcomes 

Gregory Clark, University of California, Davis and LSE (March 1, 2021) 

Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization. Using a lineage of 402,000 English people 1750-2020 we test whether such mechanisms better predict outcomes than a simple additive genetics model. The genetics model predicts better in all cases except for the transmission of wealth. The high persistence of status over multiple generations, however, would require in a genetic mechanism strong genetic assortative in mating. This has been until recently believed impossible. There is however, also strong evidence consistent with just such sorting, all the way from 1837 to 2020. Thus the outcomes here are actually the product of an interesting genetics-culture combination.

The correlational results in the table below were originally deduced by Fisher under the assumption of additive genetic inheritance: h2 is heritability, m is assortativity by genotype, r assortativity by phenotype. (Assortative mating describes the tendency of husband and wife to resemble each other more than randomly chosen M-F pairs in the general population.)

Fisher, R. A. 1918. “The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 52: 399-433

Thanks to Clark the predictions of Fisher's models, applied to social outcomes, can now be compared directly to data through many generations and across many branches of English family trees. (Figures below from the paper.)

The additive model fits the data well, but requires high heritabilities h2 and a high level m of assortative mating. Most analysts, including myself, thought that the required values of m were implausibly large. However, using modern genomic datasets one can estimate the level of assortative mating by simply looking at the genotypes of married couples. 

From the paper:

(p.26) a recent study from the UK Biobank, which has a collection of genotypes of individuals together with measures of their social characteristics, supports the idea that there is strong genetic assortment in mating. Robinson et al. (2017) look at the phenotype and genotype correlations for a variety of traits – height, BMI, blood pressure, years of education - using data from the biobank. For most traits they find as expected that the genotype correlation between the parties is less than the phenotype correlation. But there is one notable exception. For years of education, the phenotype correlation across spouses is 0.41 (0.011 SE). However, the correlation across the same couples for the genetic predictor of educational attainment is significantly higher at 0.654 (0.014 SE) (Robinson et al., 2017, 4). Thus couples in marriage in recent years in England were sorting on the genotype as opposed to the phenotype when it comes to educational status. 

It is not mysterious how this happens. The phenotype measure here is just the number of years of education. But when couples interact they will have a much more refined sense of what the intellectual abilities of their partner are: what is their general knowledge, ability to reason about the world, and general intellectual ability. Somehow in the process of matching modern couples in England are combining based on the weighted sum of a set of variations at several hundred locations on the genome, to the point where their correlation on this measure is 0.65.

Correction: Height, Educational Attainment (EA), and cognitive ability predictors are controlled by many thousands of genetic loci, not hundreds! 

This is a 2018 talk by Clark which covers most of what is in the paper.

For out of sample validation of the Educational Attainment (EA) polygenic score, see Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility.

 

There is a tide

This novel reminds of recent dystopian movies and books such as Elysium, The Road, Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas. Our zeitgeist recognizes the ever accelerating gap between haves and have-nots, and these novels and films reflect that collective consciousness. The gap always existed between the rich and poor worlds, but now it exists within developed countries like the US, threatening broad swathes of the former middle class.

Leonard Lopate Show: Chang-Rae Lee talks about his new novel, On Such a Full Sea, set in a future, when a long-declining America is strictly stratified by class. Abandoned urban neighborhoods have become high-walled, self-contained labor colonies. The members of the labor class work to provide quality produce and fish to elite villages. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears.

Interestingly, the wealthy dwellers of the Charters allow the top 1 percent of children from the labor colonies to ascend in class. The main character Fan's brother was adopted by a Charter family, and she seeks him out for help. The genomic angle manifests in the disappearance of Fan's love, who is dispatched (for study?) because of a rare mutation that makes him resistant to the still-deadly "C-diseases" (cancer?).

An excerpt from the book.

... When our ancestors were first brought here—the archival vids and pix show them rolling in on fleets of shiny silver company buses—the air was to them fresh and clear, just like in the image of the roofless row house, and when they stepped out, they must have been entranced by the scant briny notes of the harbor waters, breathing them in deep. And think of how startled they might have been by the strange brand of tidiness in this place (once known as Baltimore) and other abandoned cities that settlers were sent to in other eastern and midwestern states, this preservation by dint of absence, such that after they gathered their luggage from the curb and were shuttled by carts to the houses assigned to them, our and your and Fan's forebears among them, their gasps were not of trepidation or disappointment but of gratitude and relief.

Indeed, it's difficult for us to understand how genuinely grateful they were; we glance around B-Mor now and it's impossible to imagine how our people could have felt that way (how time and safety and a filled belly rapidly evolve us!), to be presented with so depleted a cityscape and still have a heart-surge of excitement. The legendary Wen Shurbao, who would be our first and only mayor, reportedly exhorted his brethren by invoking the classic proverb: "Our generation will plant the trees. The next will enjoy the shade."

Surely there were the discontented among those originals, but which of them could deny the promise of this place? Here was an entire community, ready for revitalization. Yes, the houses were basically shells, but in fact many still had roofs and walls and sturdy stairs; yes, few had any boilers, but the majority had salvageable wiring and plumbing; yes, the floors had to be scraped and sanded and refinished, every cabinet and counter scrubbed and disinfected of the leavings of birds and vermin and insects, and yet what activity offers more immediate, honest gratification than shining up a seemingly ruined surface back to the distinctive grain of its essence?

... We should concede that unlike the experience of most immigrants, there was very little to encounter by way of an indigenous population. There were smatterings of them, to be sure, pockets of residents on the outskirts of what is now the heart of B-Mor, these descendants of nineteenth-century African slaves and twentieth-century laborers from Central America and even bands of twenty-first-century urban-nostalgics, all of whom settled the intimate grid of these blocks and thrived for a time and, for reasons that history can confidently trace and identify but never quite seem to solve, inexorably declined and finally disappeared. Our predecessors had the unique advantage of being husbanded by one of the federated companies, rather than the revolving cast of governmental bodies that overreached in their efforts or were disastrously neglectful, all of them downright clueless. The originals were brought in en masse for a strict purpose but with their work- and family-centric culture intact, such that they would not only endure and eventually profit the seed investors but also prosper in a manner that would be perpetually regenerative.

... Perhaps it was the same with our originals, though in a different circumstance. They went about their first labors, renovating the row houses in the same way, it turns out, that certain antique American communities used to do, the foreman or forewoman of each block marshaling all its residents to converge on one address and revamp, say, the bathrooms or kitchen, the museum clips just like a science class vid of hundreds of ants tugging a sourball-sized rock. You can picture it now. They'd go from one house to the next, right on down the block, this mobile, instantly adaptive assembly line, each person assigned a function, with the children passing beach pails of dust and rubble in a brigade, the elderly offering sips of cool chrysanthemum tea from canteens, even the unwell propped up in chairs close by or even inside the site, so that they might lend moral support or learn by watching. ...

Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3,

BRUTUS
Under your pardon. You must note beside,
That we have tried the utmost of our friends,
Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe.
The enemy increaseth every day.
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.

Ron Unz and wealth inequality

Last night I had dinner with Ron Unz, a former theoretical physicist who has also been a software entrepreneur and a maverick political activist. We covered a wide range of issues, from science to technology to public policy. It was a real pleasure to talk to someone with such depth and breadth of understanding. Ron is yet another counterexample to those who claim that theoretical physicists can't do practical things. In fact, most former physicists I know end up doing very interesting and sometimes important things after leaving the field.

Both Ron and I are very concerned (perhaps even gloomy) about the future of America. He mentioned a disturbing statistic: the top 1 percent of Americans control as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent! Indeed, as discussed in this paper by NYU economist Edward Wolff, the rough breakdown is that the top 1 percent, the next 9 percent, and the remaining 90 percent each have about the same combined wealth! In the table below the most recent figures are for 2004. In the wake of the housing bubble I'd expect that the relative share of the rich has gone up a bit, since for average Americans a big chunk of their net worth is in their homes. US levels of inequality exceed those of other developed countries, but are comparable to China and still below (thank goodness) Mexico and Brazil. (See here for Gini Coefficients.)



See also net worth by age group:

US Human Development Indices

I was struck by this table of Human Development Index values for different groups in the US. It looks like three different countries when broken out this way! There is one group clustered at 7.5 (Asians), another around 5.5 (Whites) and another around 3.5 to 4 (Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans).

The indices are computed by this project, using US government data. See here for more, including a nice visualization with results by state, district, etc. Can the life expectancy of Native American and Latino women really be higher than for White women? Latino males also seem to have longer life expectancy than White males.



More on life expectancies of different regional and ethnic groups in the US here. (The researchers define 8 different Americas by race and geography or class.)

The gap between the life expectancy of the 3.4 million black males in high-risk urban areas in America 8 and the life expectancy for the 5.5 million Asian females in America 1 in 2001 was 20.7 y. Within the sexes, the gap between the best-off and the worst-off groups was 15.4 y for males (Asians versus blacks in high-risk urban areas) and 12.8 y for females (Asians versus low-income southern rural blacks). These gaps are 2.4 and 2.8 times those between white and black life expectancies for the nation as a whole for males and females, respectively. ...

The 12.8-y gap in life expectancy between females in Americas 1 and 7 is approximately the same as the gap between Japan, with the highest national life expectancy for females in 2001 (84.7 y), and Fiji, Nicaragua, and Lebanon [34]. Asian females in the US have a life expectancy that is 3 y higher than that of females in Japan [34]. For males, the 15.4-y gap in life expectancy between Asians (America 1) and high-risk urban blacks (America 8) is the same as between Iceland, with the highest national male life expectancy in 2001 (78.2 y), and Sao Tome, Belarus, and Uzbekistan [34]. In other words, millions of Americans, distinctly identified by their sociodemographic characteristics and place of residence, have life expectancies that are similar to some low-income developing countries (see also Figure 4B).

To have, and have not

This NYTimes article starkly illustrates the gap between rich and poor in India. It depicts a gated high-rise community with its own water, power, security and health systems, surrounded by slums from which are drawn the 2.2 servants per affluent occupant family. The high-rise is visible in the background of the picture above (slideshow).

Many of the relatively few Indians who enjoy first-world living standards, including the family in the article, do so as a consequence of globalization.

...“Things have gotten better for the lucky class,” Mrs. Chand, 36, said one day, as she fixed lunch in full view of Chakkarpur, the shantytown where one of her two maids, Shefali Das, lives. “Otherwise, it is still a fight.”

When the power goes out, the lights of Hamilton Court bathe Chakkarpur in a dusky glow. Under the open sky, across the street from the tower, Mrs. Das’s sons take cold bucket baths each day. The slum is as much a product of the new India as Hamilton Court, the opportunities of this new city drawing hundreds of thousands from the hungry hinterlands.

...For those with the right skills, the good times have been very good. Mr. Chand, 34, a business school graduate who runs the regional operations for an American manufacturing firm, has seen his salary grow eightfold in the last five years, which is not unusual for upper class Indians like him.

The Chands are typical of Hamilton Court residents: Well-traveled young professionals, some returnees to India after years abroad, grateful for the conveniences. Some of them are also the first in their families to live so comfortably.

...Mrs. Chand, a doctor who decided to stay home to raise her children, trained in a government hospital. Her other maid told her recently that her own daughter had given birth at home, down there in the slum.

Sometimes, Mrs. Chand said, she thinks of opening a clinic there. But she also said she understood that there was little that she, or anyone, could do. “Two worlds,” she observed, “just across the street.”

The following Bloomberg article describes a recent World Bank study. The results are amazingly consistent with an estimate I mentioned in a previous post, that the "effective" first-world population of India in human capital terms might be around 100 million (4 high performers for every 10 in the US).

The study links the results of a test given to 6,000 teenagers in two states -- Rajasthan in western India and Orissa in the east -- to students' performance on the same exam in 51 other countries.

The researchers conclude that mathematical abilities of India's 14-year-olds vary widely between the worst and the best students.

If other states are similar to the ones studied then it would mean that 17 million Indian students don't meet the lowest international benchmark of ``some basic mathematical knowledge.'' That's 22 times the corresponding figure for the U.S.

At the same time, the depth of India's math talent -- those whose test scores are considered to be of an advanced level -- is also significant. ``For every 10 top performers in the U.S., there are four in India,'' the World Bank economists say. That's 100,000 students, or more than any European country.

This latter group is supplying the bulk of India's scientific, technical, managerial and entrepreneurial talent and is responsible for the country's growing clout in the global knowledge economy.