Your Parents Matter When it Comes to Your Occupational Status

America has always been viewed as a land of opportunity, but some people have more opportunities than others to succeed occupationally. This is a point driven home in a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by social demographer Michael Hout of New York University. 

I present a time series of intergenerational occupational mobility between 1994 and 2016, using data from the GSS (9). (The GSS began in 1972 but did not ask about mother’s occupation until 1994.) The GSS recently recoded all occupational data to the latest standards established by the US Census Bureau, allowing comparisons of all years.

Occupational status persists across generations in the United States to a degree incompatible with the popular theme of “land of opportunity.” Data from 1994–2016 show that median occupational status rose 0.5 point for every one-point increase in parents’ status (somewhat less if the father was absent). Intergenerational persistence did not change during these years, but mobility declined from two-thirds of people born in the 1940s to half of those born in the 1980s. This substantial decline in absolute mobility reflects the changing distribution of occupational opportunities in the American labor market, not intergenerational persistence.

We parents want our children to do well in life, and Professor Hout's research suggests that successful couples are more likely than others to have successful children. This kind of perpetuation of inequality was not such a big deal, suggests Hout, when occupational mobility was high and everyone had a good shot at being socioeconomically better off than their parents. Today's economy has fewer opportunities for upward mobility, so the persistence of parental benefits emerges as a bigger deal than it might have seemed in the past.

South Korea's Fertility May Drop Below 1 Child Per Woman

Thanks to both Todd Gardner and Stuart Gietel-Basten for almost simultaneously pointing me to a story in yesterday's Guardian suggesting that the fertility rate in South Korea may soon drop to less than one child per woman. This is low-low fertility of nearly unheard of proportions even in what has become a very low fertility region of the world (and check out the brand new 2018 PRB World Population Data Sheet to make those comparisons for yourself!):

The average number of babies born per woman of reproductive age is due to be as low as 0.96 this year, falling below one for the first time in history, according to a study commissioned by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper [that article is in Korean, btw].

Such a low fertility rate is normally only seen during wartime, said Lee Chul-hee, an economics professor at Seoul National University and one of the authors of the study.

“There’s definitely going to be a psychological shock among the Korean people,” he said. “It will likely influence what is considered to be an ideal number of children, and could lead to the rate dropping even further.”

At the end of the Korean War, UN demographers estimate that the TFR in South Korea was above 6 children per woman, but a rapid drop in fertility after that (not unlike the one in Taiwan) brought fertility down to below replacement in the mid-1980s and it has stayed below replacement since then. This has, of course, generated the almost ideal demographic dividend that has helped the country leap into prosperity in a relatively short period of time. 

As is also true in Southern Europe, the birth rate is so low in South Korea at least in part because of the strings that are still tied around the lives of women:

The status of women in South Korea, a deeply patriarchal society, is a major driver of the trend, along with worsening job prospects for young people and rising property prices. Women are getting married and having children later in life, if at all, for fear of being denied promotions and facing discrimination at work.

The average age for South Korean women marrying for the first time is 30.2, according to figures from the ministry of gender equality and family, up from 24.8 in 1990. On average, women have their first child at 31.6.

There are going to have to be some decisive cultural changes--not just simple government policies--if the birth rate is going to get back up closer to replacement level. It can happen, of course, but it won't be easy.

Max Roser and Our World in Data

Over time I have regularly given shout-outs to the great work that Max Roser and his team at Oxford University do in assembling and presenting data for the world around us--focusing heavily on demographically-related themes (remember, indeed, that nearly everything is connected to demography!). There is no time like the start of the Fall term to go online and access these resources. You could start with the graphs of world population growth, such as:

Or, you may want to start with a YouTube video sponsored by Bill Gates, focusing on the important demographic work that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does around the world:

And there's lots more. Browsing these resources is a great way to start the term.

North Carolina Ordered by the Court to Redraw its Gerrymandered Districts -- UPDATED

You may recall that two months ago the U.S. Supreme Court sent back to the U.S. Court of Appeals a ruling that North Carolina's Congressional District boundaries had been gerrymandered in order to favor Republican candidates. The obvious evidence of this is that 10 of North Carolina's 13 Congressional Districts are held by Republicans, despite the fact that Republican candidates had won only 53% of the overall popular vote. The Supreme Court suggested that perhaps the parties bringing the lawsuit forward didn't have the standing to do so. This week the lower court rejected that idea, as the NYTimes reported:

In a lengthy ruling on Monday, the panel reached largely the same conclusion that it had in January. And the judges agreed that the plaintiffs in the case — voting-rights advocacy groups and residents of each of North Carolina’s 13 districts — had standing to bring the suit.

The judges left open the possibility that they could order new maps to be drawn before the 2018 election, either by the North Carolina General Assembly or by a special master appointed by the court.

The ruling sets up a delicate tactical question for the Supreme Court, which has never ruled a partisan gerrymander to be unconstitutional, passing up three separate opportunities to do so in its last term. With the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the end of July, the court is now divided between four conservatives who have expressed skepticism about the court’s ability to tinker with political maps, and four more liberal justices who have argued that it has that ability.

As you might imagine, this turn of events so close to the midterm elections in November has "plunged North Carolina politics into disarray" since no one knows what the district boundaries will be and thus who the viable candidates might be. Now, keep in mind that the U.S. Constitution does not require a person to live in the District they represent, but most voters are going to expect that they will. And, of course, redrawn boundaries will only be good until the 2020 census numbers are finalized late in 2020, at which time the new census figures will likely lead to new boundaries...and probably new lawsuits.

UPDATE:
Politico has just reported that the Federal Court will not require North Carolina to adjust its Congressional District boundaries prior to this year's midterm election coming up in November.

"Having carefully reviewed the parties’ briefing and supporting materials, we conclude that there is insufficient time for this Court to approve a new districting plan and for the State to conduct an election using that plan prior to the seating of the new Congress in January 2019. And we further find that imposing a new schedule for North Carolina’s congressional elections would, at this late juncture, unduly interfere with the State’s electoral machinery and likely confuse voters and depress turnout," Judges James Wynn Jr., William Osteen Jr. and W. Earl Britt wrote in a joint order.

A Reminder of Why Congress Can't Pass Immigration Reform

Thanks to Professor Rubén Rumbaut for pointing me to a story from NPR a few days ago about the quick rise and fall in the summer of 1965 of the A-TEAM--"Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower." 

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program. Started in World War II, the program was an agreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions.

The end of the Bracero Program came about as part of the 1965 Immigration Act which also ended the decades-old National Origins Quota System that had been designed to limit legal migration to the U.S. to Northern and Western Europeans. Ending the guest worker program meant that farmers had no one to pick the crops, so strong (athletic) young male high school students were supposed to fill in the gap. 

Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

So farmers went back to using Mexican immigrants, except that now they were undocumented immigrants or, more diplomatically, people who had entered without inspection (EWIs). And that is still where we are today. We don't want to legalize these workers because then they would have be paid good wages and have adequate housing and health care provided to them. That would raise the prices the farmers would have to charge for their produce, and consumers would complain or start buying food imported from elsewhere. This is the impasse that for decades since has prevented agreement on a reasonable immigration policy in this country.