posted by leo
on Thu, 01/12/2012 - 20:15
Economist Alan Krueger gave a talk at the Center for American Progress. Here's my favorite line (as distilled by Ezra Klein):
"The correlation between parents' and their children's income is around 0.50. This is remarkably similar to the correlation that Sir Francis Galton found between parents' height and their children’s height over 100 years ago. This fact helps to put in context what a correlation of 0.50 implies. The chance of a person who was born to a family in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution rising to the top 10 percent as an adult is about the same as the chance that a dad who is 5'6" tall having a son who grows up to be over 6'1" tall. It happens, but not often."
