Big Data, Big Biases, Big Mistakes: On the Spanish Atlas of Opportunities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/ris.2020.78.3.20.003Keywords:
Atlas de Oportunidades, Big Data, Income Mobility, Methodological Biases, Social Mobility, SpainAbstract
The Atlas de Oportunidades, recently launched by the Felipe Gonzalez and the Cotec foundations, has been defined by its authors as a unique tool to study social mobility in Spain. In this paper I contend that the Atlas is actually a bad tool for studying social mobility for both conceptual and methodological reasons. Conceptually, the Atlas offers a limited tool because it reduces social mobility to income mobility and this obscures our understanding of the factors and mechanisms involved in the processes of socio-economic attainment and the transmission of social (dis)advantage. The Atlas is also, and most importantly, a bad tool for the study of intergenerational income mobility because its immense database introduces severe methodological biases, which inevitably lead to a gross overestimation of the actual levels of income mobility in Spain.
Downloads
References
Acemoglu, D., G. Egorov y K. Sonin. 2018 "Social Mobility and Stability of Democracy: Reevaluating De Tocqueville". The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(2):1041-1105. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx038
Berman, Y. 2017. "Understanding the Mechanical Relationship between Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility". Disponible en SSRN: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2796563
Black, S. E. y P. J. Devereux. 2011."Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility." Pp. 1487-1541 en Handbook of Labor Economics, Vol. 4b. Amsterdam: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-7218(11)02414-2
Blanden, J. 2019. "Intergenerational Income Persistence". IZA World of Labor 2019: 176. https://doi.org/10.15185/izawol.176.v2
Breen, R. 2004. Social Mobility in Europe. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199258457.001.0001
Breen, R., C. Mood y J. Jonsson. 2016. "How Much Scope for a Mobility Paradox? The Relationship between Social and Income Mobility in Sweden". Sociological Science 3:39-60. https://doi.org/10.15195/v3.a3
Chetty, R., N. Hendren, P. Kline, y E. Saez. 2014a. "Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States." Quarterly Journal of Economics 129:1553-623. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju022
Chetty, R., N. Hendren, P. Kline, E. Saez y N. Turner. 2014b. "Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility." American Economic Review 104:141-147. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.5.141
Chetty, R., J. Friedman, N. Hendren, M. R. Jones y S. R. Porter. 2018. "The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility". NBER Working Paper no. 25147 https://doi.org/10.3386/w25147
Corak, M. 2013. "Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility." Journal of Economic Perspectives 27:79-102. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.27.3.79
Durlauf S. N. y A. Seshadri. 2018. "Understanding the Great Gatsby Curve". NBER Macroeconomics Annual, 32: 333-393. https://doi.org/10.1086/696058
Erikson, R. y J. Goldthorpe. 1992. The Constant Flux: A study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Felgueroso, F. 2018. "Población Especialmente Vulnerable ante el Empleo en España en el año 2018". Estudios sobre la Economía Española, eee2018-11 | Fedea. http://documentos.fedea.net/pubs/eee/eee2018-11.pdf
Gil-Hernández, C. J., I. Marqués-Perales y S. Fachelli. 2017. "Intergenerational Social Mobility in Spain between 1956 and 2011: The Role of Educational Expansion and Economic Modernisation in a Late Industrialised Country" Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, 51:14-27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2017.06.002
Goldthorpe, J. 2000. On Sociology. Oxford University Press.
Gregg, P., L. Macmillan y C. Vittori. 2014. "Moving towards Estimating Lifetime Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the UK". Working Paper No. 14-12. Department of Quantitative Social Science, Institute of Education, University of London.
INE. 2020a. "INEbase, Resultados Nacionales y por Comunidades Autónomas: Ganancia Media Anual por Trabajador". Recuperado de: https://www.ine.es/jaxiT3/Datos.htm?t=28201#!tabs-tabla
INE. 2020b. "INEbase, Resultados Nacionales. Renta Anual Neta Media (año anterior a la entrevista)". Recuperado de: https://www.ine.es/jaxiT3/Datos.htm?t=9942
Lipset, S.1992. "Political Consequences of Social Mobility" en Social Mobility and Political Attitudes, editado por F. C. Turner. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Llaneras, K., O. Medina y E. Costa. 2020a. Atlas de Oportunidades. Fundación Felipe Gonzalez- Fundación Cotec. https://www.cotec.es/fundacionfelipegonzalez/oportunidades
Llaneras, K., B. Andrino, D. Grasso y O. Medina. 2020b. "El mapa de la renta de padres e hijos: cómo la riqueza de su familia influye en su futuro" El País, 14 Julio 2020 https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-07-14/el-mapa-de-la-renta-de-padres-e-hijos-como-la-riqueza-de-tu-familia-influye-en-tu-futuro.html
Mare, R. 1981. "Change and Stability in Educational Stratification." American Sociological Review, 46:72-87. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095027
Mazumder, B. 2005 "Fortunate Sons: New Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States using Social Security Earnings Data." The Review of Economics and Statistics 87:235-55. https://doi.org/10.1162/0034653053970249
Mincer, J. 1974. Schooling, Earnings and Experience. New York: Columbia University Press.
Narayan, A., R. Van der Weide, A. Cojocaru, C. Lakner, S. Redaelli, D. G. Mahler, R. G. N. Ramasubbaiah y S. Thewissen. 2018. Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World. Washington, DC: World Bank. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 IGO. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1210-1
OCDE. 2010. "A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility across OECD Countries". Pp. 181-198 en Economic Policy Reforms 2010: Going for Growth. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/growth-2010-38-en
Opportunity Insights. 2020. "The Opportunity Atlas". https:// www.opportunityatlas.org/
Palomino, J.C., G. A. Marrero y J. G. Rodríguez. 2018. "One Size Doesn't Fit All: A Quantile Analysis of Intergenerational Income Mobility in the U.S. (1980-2010)." Journal of Economic Inequality 16:347-367. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-017-9372-8
Polavieja, J. G. 2003. Estables y Precarios: Desregulación Laboral y Estratificación Social en España. Madrid: Siglo XXI/Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas.
Stiglitz, J. E. 2012. The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. New York: WW Norton.
Torche, F. 2015. "Analyses of Intergenerational Mobility: An Interdisciplinary Review". The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 657(1): 37-62. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716214547476
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2020 Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
© CSIC. Manuscripts published in both the printed and online versions of this Journal are the property of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and quoting this source is a requirement for any partial or full reproduction.All contents of this electronic edition, except where otherwise noted, are distributed under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International” (CC BY 4.0) License. You may read here the basic information and the legal text of the license. The indication of the CC BY 4.0 License must be expressly stated in this way when necessary.
Self-archiving in repositories, personal webpages or similar, of any version other than the published by the Editor, is not allowed.
