pld:I’d be happy to search for it unless you know of a source offhand.
No clue, alas. I did notice a reference in the second UI study you cited to a comparative study of mobility in the US and Germany, which remarked “Note that, in both countries, the vast majority of individuals who move between quintiles move only one quintile, and that the percentage of individuals who move 3 or 4 quintiles is quite small (e.g., in Germany, 3.8 percent of those who could move up 3 quintiles did so after 5 years; in the United States, the comparable percentage was 2.6).” But that still tells us nothing about what percentage of Americans move 2 quintiles, or how far the one-quintile movers are actually moving. (Another issue that I hadn’t thought of is how you separate out significant economic mobility from the typical income changes of the life cycle: e.g., almost everybody makes more money at 35 than at 21, almost everybody makes less money at 70 than at 45, etc.) So I still have no idea what the real percentage of Americans experiencing significant mobility ought to be estimated at.
My fruitless search did, however, turn up the previously unfamiliar word “heteroskedasticity” (meaning unequal variance in regression errors), which IMHO makes it all worthwhile. Heteroskedasticity-expialidocious!
As well it should – fraud is a crime, and its perpetrators ought to be punished by jail, and the right to jail people rightly lies solely with the State. But the downfall of the companies was and is independent of the government – cheesed off investors will be chasing the carcasses of those companies to the end of the earth to get their money back (full disclosure: I and my affiliates are in fact creditors of some of these companies – I am a chaser here).
That wasn’t my point. My point was simply that this allegation, on its own, even if true, is insufficient to judge a company as large as Wal-Mart to be broadly unethical. It’s a relatively modest dispute about overtime wages. In the larger context, WalMart made insurance possible for thousands who would not otherwise have qualified. They also offered some other combination of wages and benefits (I dunno what they are – flexible hours? Help with day care? I honestly don’t know what would motivate someone to go work for that beheamoth, only that people do so) which enticed people to go to work for them. And to judge them “unethical” because of this dispute is, uh, premature.
