There is a lot that I wanted say about the mobility debate but my views are so far out of the mainstream I wasn’t sure where to start. This post by Matt Yglesias lets me at least say something.
Washingtonian, like other regional magazines I’m familiar with, does an annual “best restaurants” issue which is different from their “cheap eats” issue. They also have a “best doctors” issue, but there’s no equivalent of the “cheap eats” concept for health care. My best guess is that this reflects the authentic structure of consumer demand. People sometimes want a great big fancy dinner and sometimes want a great deal on a bowl of pho, but on health care what they want to know is who’s the best.
I was in a doctor’s office with a relation and we noticed a sign on the wall that requested patients not wear perfume or scented lotions of any kind. Then there was another sign that requested that you not make loud noises. The doctor was also fidgety, awkward and significantly “goofy looking.”
We had a conversation that I’ll paraphrase like this:
Relation: Maybe he has Fragile X
Me: Doubt it, Fragile X usually implies mental retardation
Relation: He doesn’t seem very intelligent
Me: An IQ of 80 would make it unlikely that he would finish medical school
Relation: I guess that’s right
Which is to say several things.
First, “best” was not a relevant consideration. Can order blood work was his defining characteristic. This is especially true with a primary care physician. Besides being loose with the prescription pad its not always clear what a “good” primary care physician is.
Second, people grossly underestimate the extent to which society is sorted. This leads to people being thought of as stupid who are in fact well into the right of the distribution. In turn, this leads to people underestimating the extent of the meritocracy. What seem like gross violations are on a larger scale minor discrepancies.
That having been said my baseline is that a well sorted meritocracy increases the case for redistribution. The biggest problem with redistribution is that you may upset the sorting.
If the sorting is really tight then you can redistribute a lot and not worry about messing it up.
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Thursday ~ January 26th, 2012 at 9:54 am
Curt Doolittle
1) You would need to back that statement with some sort of data. It certainly appears that there is lot of noise in the data, but you are stating that it’s signal. And I don’t see any evidence of that. In fact, almost all the data shows the opposite.
2) If you changed the topic of discourse from Redistribution to Exchange, then you’d have an easy sell. Transfers are politically charged. Exchanges are politically beneficial to both parties.
What can the poor exchange? Status, norms, avoidance of class warfare, and improvement of the physical commons. The first is both the most valuable and the cheapest.
Thursday ~ January 26th, 2012 at 2:38 pm
Ken S
1) My apologies if I’m unaware of the context of this post/comment, but redistribution doesn’t necessarily involve poor people unless you consider the middle/lower-upper class as poor folks now. I wonder how much of the political climate can be blamed on a moderate mis-sorting of the right end of the merit distribution (this is where the squeaky wheels are most likely to be). If this is the case then the best solution would be to actually improve the sorting.
2) Status/norm exchanges w.r.t the middle and upper classes seem out of the question. For many in the middle class extra money is just useful for displaying status anyways. Also, who really knows where the advantage lies for class warfare/promotion of the commons between these two groups. Most probably don’t want to find out because of the risk of destabilising the wider patterns of meritocracy. The options remaining are crossing your fingers and ignoring the problem, improving the meritocracy at the right end, or some sort of redistribution.
Thursday ~ January 26th, 2012 at 10:59 am
Lord
We already have redistribution, but it is usually upwards, licensing, patents, etc. The 15% carried interest tax rate isn’t due to merit.
Thursday ~ January 26th, 2012 at 2:50 pm
Jeff
I strongly doubt that most Americans underestimate “the extent of the meritocracy”. Polls routinely show that people believe that America has plentiful and equal opportunity, and that talent and hard work inevitably leads to success. While there is no question that these are related, for your thesis of strong meritocratic sorting to be correct, there should be continual re-sorting with each new generation. For example, taking IQ as a proxy for intrinsic ability (as has often been done), considerable research has shown that its heritability is between 40% and 70%. This necessarily requires a good deal of regression to the mean from one generation to the next. However, cross-national research examining economic mobility regularly finds the US at the bottom of first-world countries. Moreover, inter-generational studies in the US show that there is less mobility than people usually believe. For example, taking the acquisition of a college degree as an indicator of ability and effort, people who are born into the bottom quintile are less likely to end up in the top quintile than those who are born into the top 20%, even if the former earn a degree and the latter do not.
This contains considerable pertinent information:
http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/02_economic_mobility_sawhill.aspx
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 9:55 am
Sally N
One should note that an individual may have fragile X syndrome and may not fit the IQ definition of intellectual disability (mental retardation). Fragile X like many conditions is a spectrum disorder, individuals may be mildly or severely affected. Fragile X is genetic and not just a condition that affects the child with fragile X, family members may be at risk for FXTAS or FXPOI. Only the FMR1 DNA (aka as the Fragile X DNA test or Southern Blot with PCR analysis) can determine if Fragile X is or is not present, in the case of Fragile X a diagnosis cannot be made by observation and having core symptoms. To learn more about fragile X visit fragilex.org and fraxa.org.