This probably deserves its own thread. I was under the impression, though, that school funding levels are relatively close, at least within each given state.
Do you seriously think there aren’t thousand and thousands of almost identical anecdotes to be mined here in the US?
I’m not sure if that’s theoretically supposed to be true, but it certainly isn’t in practice. And you can be sure it varies from state to state, too.
That part’s certainly true; for example, New York spends three times as much per student as Utah.
Presumably that’s the case in Canadia too, if resources are allocated there on the provincial level.
I can’t find per-pupil spending numbers for individual school districts in my state (Florida), let alone for individual schools.
You’d think so, but not really. See the numbers from Stats Canada http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-595-m/2010083/c-g/c-g008-eng.htm. Numbers are pretty similar in all the provinces; the territories are much higher but considering the population density and cost of living in the territories that’s not too surprising.
The various provinces can afford to provide roughly equal services due to inter-provincial transfer payments. Richer provinces send, via the federal government, money to poorer provinces based on a somewhat complicated formula.
Yes, you’re certainly correct that we cannot use anecdotal evidence.
What we can say though, is that the data show us that xnylder’s story is more likely to occur in Canada, compared to the United States.
It is more likely in the US that a son of a low income father will have a low income himself.
I think it’s a bit more complex than “Canada has better schools and health care”. I mean there are plenty of poor people who never have had a debilitating illness and they never rise to the middle class.
My WAG is that a large factor is the high cost of a college education in the US. There are a lot fewer manufacturing jobs that pay a decent living for high school educated people, so the primary method of joining the middle class is to get a college degree and work for a large company. In-state tuition at Rutgers is like $40,000 over 4 years, plus room and board. Twice that if you are out of state. And Rutgers isn’t exactly Princeton. That’s a lot of money for people making less than $35k a year.
And sure, if you are in the upper percentiles of your class, you can get scholarships and whatnot. But it’s not really equal opportunity when only the brightest of the poor can go to the same colleges as mediocre students from affluent families.
I don’t think that signifies. Mediocre State U generally offers more or less the same education as Pointy Headed Private College. Obviously, a degree from PHPC is much more likely to get you hired in many places, but that’s because people who hire people are lazy, not because college is expensive.
A good education is a ladder to economic mobility but there are all sorts of pitfalls along the way for the poor.
If someone gets sick it can destroy your family’s financial stability.
If there is insufficient day care and sick leave, a single mother might have a difficult time maintaining a job if her child is frequently ill.
If access to medical care and education are largely determined by ability to pay, and you don’t have the ability to you may end up sacrificing the benefits of education for the necessity of health care.
We can’t ensure equality of outcome or even equality of opportunity but leaving the distribution of things like education and health care to market forces seems suboptimal.
But there is also education spending on the State and Federal level. I’d be curious to see how that factors in.
My cousin went to Mediocre A&M. 
It’s not laziness. College has become a professional certification and status symbol. And because of the entire education and hiring process becomes a bit of a self fullfilling prophecy. The top companies - Fortune 500, Wall Street investment banking, Big-4 accounting, white shoe management consulting, Silcon Valley startups - all want to hire the best and the brightest. Well, if you are the best and the brightest, you would have graduated from the top schools. Therefore the best and brightest all look to get into those top schools so they can get hired by the top companies.
THere are exceptions of course. I know a number of people who never graduated college and managed to work their way up from the mailroom, so to speak. But that is a difficult road and they didn’t exactly start out dirt poor either.
Federal education spending is pretty miniscule - less than 10% of the overall total. In some states, like the Dakotas, it’s closer to 20%, but that’s because $20 million dollars is enough to educate everyone in South Dakota and buy them a pickup truck and senators aren’t apportioned by population.
Go Average Badgers!
It is laziness. Efficient, but still lazy.
Is there a link to the paper itself, not the abstract? Without that, it’s impossible to assess it.
But as you showed with the excerpt from the paper, just a bit more likely (22% vs 16%). Not even close to “three times” more likely. And the numbers are pretty astounding - in case of US four out of five sons of a low income father will NOT have low income themselves. In case of Canada it is apparently five out of six. That’s great social mobility, whether it is four out of five or five out of six.
That link contains a one-click download which will give you a pdf of the entire paper.
There’s a lot of data in the paper. I’m not entirely sure myself where the “3 times” figure comes from. As I said earlier here, I think it comes from more complex calculation of “Intergenerational elasticity of earnings between fathers and sons”
Yes, it comes from juggling numbers. Look at Figure 4. The probability of sons of lower-half income fathers to move into the top-half income is about the same between United States and Canada. The differences are not huge, and in some deciles the “mobility” in United States is better than in Canada.
There is also this: “While these dieerences in generational economic mobility are signicant, both
in a substantive and a statistical sense, they do not necessarily imply differences
in equality of opportunity. Jencks and Tach (2006) and Roemer (2004) address
this issue, pointing out in particular that complete equality of opportunity is
not indicated by an intergenerational elasticity of zero, or entries in a transition
matrix that are all the same. In this sense it is not as if Canada is further along
in some optimal sense than the United States. The existing differences could
very well be optimal for each country, reflecting underlying values and the social
choices that respect them.”
The paper also presents differences between countries that may contribute to the slightly lesser “upward mobility”. For example, “In Canada 2.1 percent of children 13 years or younger were born to teen-aged mothers, but in the United States this figure - at 8.3 percent - is almost four times as high. … As a result there are proportionally many more very young mothers in the United States”.
Married mothers: US - 77%, Canada - 84%. Single, divorced or separated mothers - US - 13%, Canada - 9%. Single, never married mothers: US - 9%, Canada - 6%.
“In Canada, 78 percent of children 13 years and younger live with both biological parents, substantially greater than in the United States where only 65 percent of children do so.”
Do you see a trend? Maybe all those “conservatives” pushing “family values” have a point?
Certainly there is a point to “family values”. I think though, that some groups push this as merely a phrase, and a way to denigrate others who they deem lack these “values”. They pay lip service to the phrase, while supporting policies that actually damage lower income families.
In the case of Canada, family values are encouraged by government policies that help lower income folks who have children, EI benefits that encourage parental leave, and other so-called “socialist” policies that actually help people. A relative lack of moralistic/religious judgement concerning sex education in Canada may also lead to fewer teen pregnancies
Yes, I believe the authors point to this specifically. In the mid-range of incomes, there is not much difference in mobility between the US and Canada.
The differences may be found in the “tails” of the distribution. The sons of lowest income people are less likely to move up in rank in the US. The sons of the highest income people are less likely to fall back in rank in the US. The poor remain poor, and the rich remain rich.
If you’ve ever had to hire someone, you would know that you simply can’t interview every single person who applies.
Of course not. That doesn’t mean you should toss out all the resumes from people who didn’t attend Ivy League schools.
Not all jobs are to be had through the traditional recruitment/resume/interview process. There is still a significant proportion that are gained through Daddy or Uncle introducing the candidate to the right people. This is particularly true with large firms.