Mobility, Aspirations and Social Conflict

该项目继续进行关于经济发展、流动性和社会冲突的广泛研究议程。它提出了向上流动的概念，并研究了它与经济发展的几个方面的联系。具体地说，它提出的问题是：不平等和两极分化如何影响向上流动？不平等和流动性(或缺乏流动性)如何影响社会冲突？该项目包括两个主要部分。第一部分引入了向上流动的概念，并提出了向上流动的一类度量。这些措施被证明具有广泛的范围，并且很容易适用于世界上大多数国家的公共领域的数据。第二部分通过利用主要研究者在早期工作中发展的经济行为理论来研究流动性和社会动荡之间的联系。在这一理论中，一个人的周围环境通过影响她的理想阈值来影响她所表达的偏好，而理想阈值是成就和失败的分界线。从这一角度可以理解各种现象，一方面包括经济不平等与向上流动(或缺乏)之间的联系，另一方面是不容忍的抬头和社会冲突加剧。研究项目的两个部分都致力于这样的理解。社会流动性是研究人员和政策制定者的优先研究领域。但由于流动性指标对数据的要求，这些文献受到了限制。这种衡量向上流动的新方法开启了一个影响深远的计划，允许使用现成的数据来衡量大多数国家的流动性。这项工作的核心是增长累进性公理，该公理指出，将瞬时增长率从相对富裕的人转移到贫穷的人身上，会增加向上的流动性。这一公理，加上温和的辅助限制，确定了一类向上流动的衡量标准，这些衡量标准与个人增长率呈线性关系，对基线收入的权重呈几何级数下降。由于基本衡量标准不依赖于面板数据，因此它可以应用于数据匮乏的设置。这一应用使人们得以详细探讨一些新兴国家最近向上流动的趋势，也为更深入地理解大盖茨比曲线打开了大门，该曲线将基线不平等与社会内部随后的流动联系起来。这些衡量流动性的指标也与社会动荡等现象有关。一个主要目标是了解对高度和日益加剧的经济不平等的“正交反应”，这些反应并不总是针对这种不平等的原始原因。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project continues a broad research agenda on economic development, mobility and social conflict. It conceptualizes upward mobility, and studies its connections with several aspects of economic development. Specifically, it asks: How do inequality and polarization affect upward mobility? How do inequality and mobility (or the lack thereof) affect social conflict? The project has two main parts. The first part introduces a notion of upward mobility, and develops a class of measures for it. These measures are shown to have wide scope, and are easily applicable to data in the public domain for a majority of the world’s countries. The second part studies the link between mobility and social unrest by exploiting a theory of economic behavior developed in earlier work by the principal investigator. In this theory, an individual’s ambient environment affects her expressed preferences through its influence on her aspirational thresholds, which serve as dividing lines between achievement and failure. A variety of phenomena can be understood from this perspective, including the connections between economic inequality and upward mobility (or its absence) on the one hand, and the rise of intolerance and heightened social conflict on the other. Both parts of the research project work towards such an understanding.Social mobility is a priority area of research among researchers and policy makers. But the literature is hamstrung by the demands that mobility measures place on the data. This new approach to measuring upward mobility opens up a far-reaching program, which permits the measurement of mobility in a majority of countries using readily available data. At the heart of the exercise is the Growth Progressivity Axiom, which states that transfers of instantaneous growth rates from relatively rich to poor individuals increases upward mobility. This axiom, along with mild auxiliary restrictions, identifies a class of upward mobility measures that are linear in individual growth rates, with geometrically declining weights on baseline incomes. Because the underlying measure does not rely on panel data, it can be applied to data-poor settings. That application permits a detailed exploration of recent trends in upward mobility in some emerging countries, and it also opens the door to a deeper understanding of the Great Gatsby curve, which links baseline inequalities to subsequent mobility within societies. These measures of mobility are also connected to phenomena such as social unrest. A major objective is to understand “orthogonal reactions” to high and rising economic inequality, those that are not always directed at the original causes of that inequality.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.