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.
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