Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Alana Semuels examines new research showing a decline in U.S. social mobility within an individual's working life:

Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”

Carr and Wiemers used data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which tracks individual workers’ earnings, to examine how earnings mobility changed between 1981 and 2008. They ranked people into deciles, meaning that one group fell below the 10th percentile of earnings, another between the 10th and 20th, and so on; then they measured someone’s chances of moving from one decile to another. But the researchers wanted to see not just the probability of moving to a different income bracket over the course of a career, but also how that probability has changed over time. So they measured a given worker’s chances of moving between deciles ​during two periods​, one from 1981 to 1996 and another from 1993 to 2008.​

They found quite a disparity. “The probability of ending where you start has gone up, and the probability of moving up from where you start has gone down,” Carr said. For instance, the chance that someone starting in the bottom 10 percent would move above the 40th percentile decreased by 16 percent. The chance that someone starting in the middle of the earnings distribution would reach one of the top two earnings deciles decreased by 20 percent. Yet people who started in the seventh decile are 12 percent more likely to end up in the fifth or sixth decile—a drop in earnings—than they used to be.

Overall, the probability of someone starting and ending their career in the same decile has gone up for every income rank. “For whatever reason, there was a path upward in the earnings distribution that has been blocked for some people, or is not as steep as it used to be,” Carr said.

- Meanwhile, Alissa Quart notes that precarity and economic insecurity reach a long way up the income spectrum. Trish Kelly discusses the growth of working poverty in Vancouver. And Rachelle Younglai reports that an increasing number of Canadians with advanced degrees are mired in poverty despite the work they've put into their education.

- Laurel Gregory reports on the lack of accessible child care for lower- and middle-income families.

- Tom Parkin examines the record amount of lobbying happening at the federal level - and it's particularly worth noting the anti-social causes which are being pushed repeatedly. And the CP reports on the ongoing effects of the Cons' moves to undermine regulations.

- Finally, Aldo Caliari comments on the importance of establishing and enforcing international standards for fair taxes, rather than allowing the wealthy few to exploit tax havens.