Thread by @lymanstoneky

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.

Just adjust for household size.

https://twitter.com/swinshi/status/1315410373282091013

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.