The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2011, Friday

The Wall Street Journal

November 11, 2011, Friday

The Wall Street Journal (full article)

Economic Mobility Stats Are Moving Target

My print column today examines the fluidity of economic status in the U.S. Occupy protesters say they are the 99% and protest the 1%. But there is some movement between those groups over time. Just how much is a subject of considerable political and academic debate.

“It is a fuzzy concept and once you start formalizing it, you end up talking about something precise but missing a lot of things,” said Columbia University economist Wojciech Kopczuk of economic mobility.

Gary S. Fields, a labor economist at Cornell University, identified six different ways to measure mobility in a 2005 report. “There are these six groups of ideas that people have in mind,” Fields said. “We shouldn’t conflate them. They are really different things.”