{"title":"Comment: Summarizing income mobility with multiple smooth quantiles instead of parameterized means.","authors":"Ian Lundberg, Brandon M Stewart","doi":"10.1177/0081175020931126","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Studies of economic mobility summarize the distribution of offspring incomes for each level of parent income. Mitnik and Grusky (2020) highlight that the conventional intergenerational elasticity (IGE) targets the geometric mean and propose a parametric strategy for estimating the arithmetic mean. We decompose the IGE and their proposal into two choices: (1) the summary statistic for the conditional distribution and (2) the functional form. These choices lead us to a different strategy-visualizing several quantiles of the offspring income distribution as smooth functions of parent income. Our proposal solves the problems Mitnik and Grusky highlight with geometric means, avoids the sensitivity of arithmetic means to top incomes, and provides more information than is possible with any single number. Our proposal has broader implications: the default summary (the mean) used in many regressions is sensitive to the tail of the distribution in ways that may be substantively undesirable.</p>","PeriodicalId":48140,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Methodology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4000,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7544240/pdf/nihms-1626340.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Sociological Methodology","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0081175020931126","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2020/7/21 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Studies of economic mobility summarize the distribution of offspring incomes for each level of parent income. Mitnik and Grusky (2020) highlight that the conventional intergenerational elasticity (IGE) targets the geometric mean and propose a parametric strategy for estimating the arithmetic mean. We decompose the IGE and their proposal into two choices: (1) the summary statistic for the conditional distribution and (2) the functional form. These choices lead us to a different strategy-visualizing several quantiles of the offspring income distribution as smooth functions of parent income. Our proposal solves the problems Mitnik and Grusky highlight with geometric means, avoids the sensitivity of arithmetic means to top incomes, and provides more information than is possible with any single number. Our proposal has broader implications: the default summary (the mean) used in many regressions is sensitive to the tail of the distribution in ways that may be substantively undesirable.
期刊介绍:
Sociological Methodology is a compendium of new and sometimes controversial advances in social science methodology. Contributions come from diverse areas and have something useful -- and often surprising -- to say about a wide range of topics ranging from legal and ethical issues surrounding data collection to the methodology of theory construction. In short, Sociological Methodology holds something of value -- and an interesting mix of lively controversy, too -- for nearly everyone who participates in the enterprise of sociological research.