No— having every individual work in the marketplace is neither necessary nor desirable. We should not treat isolated individual career achievement as the end-all of mobility.
Also, for a lot of people, “I make more income but whereas my parents basically achieved their family goals, but I didn’t” doesn’t feel like upward mobility. Key to recognize marriage isn’t just a PATH TO upward mobility, marriage IS upward mobility for many people!
Pretty much any welfare function will treat total welfare as some function of leisure time and other variables so we should not prima facie assume differences in labor force participation we know are culturally related are necessarily “lack of mobility.”
Maybe (read: absolutely definitely beyond a shadow of a doubt) Mormons in Utah have a utility function which is non-trivially different from people in other places!
even for the identical utility functions, using “individual income” penalizes people whose chosen path to mobility is through household specialization. Who is more upwardly mobile: a bottom quintile girl who later earns $45k, or one who earns $0, but whose spouse earns $250k?
You can take issue with one path or another for social or cultural reasons but in purely economic terms the women with $0 in individual earnings probably achieved *more* upward mobility.
The actual measure we want is not about income at all of course but consumption: what goods and services did a person consume? What experiences did they have? We’re these more abundant than their parents had?
That is very complicated to measure! But it’s what we actually want to measure: how did a person’s actual consumption and leisure, ie major components of a welfare function, change vs their parents?
Household income is a noisy indicator. But individual income is even worse.
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At the release for UNFPA's big global annual report in the Philippines, the media highlight was about how COVID-19 will cause a huge rise (25%!) in unintended pregnancies in the Philippines.
I haven't been able to figure out what that is based on in terms of data.
At about 26 minutes here the explanation starts. It's based papers published by Guttmacher and JHU, and back-of-the-envelope estimates of changes in contraception.
I keep Lutheran in my bio mostly because it’s true but also a little bit because it helps ID people who are paid trolls who just grab random words out of your bio to use as pejoratives.
Lutherans do not have any meaningful political or ideological brand, globally or domestically. Indeed being milquetoast is practically the Lutheran political creed. And yet these trolls come out of the woodwork being like “WELL OF COURSE HE’S LUTHERAN”
If in your first interaction with a person on this hellsite you reference any part of their listed bio 99% of the time it means you’re the bad guy.
I think it's possible to say both "the US response has been very bad" and also "Progressives have been leaping at any comparison to make the US look bad because they basically feel embarrassed about America anyways and confirmation bias is strong."
It is in fact possible that the US response has been worse than it should have been and also that the European response has been worse than it should have been, and that pretty much "the response" was determined by..... let's say March 1.
Once the disease was widespread in many countries, as it clearly was by early March, it's not clear how much influence governments could really wield in terms of preventing a major death spike.