Social Mobility

This is consistent with the results in a paper I co-authored, using a sample of OECD countries (though not Luxembourg as far as I recall):
`Intergenerational Mobility and Education Equality’ (with Arnaud Chevalier, Dorren McMahon) in Education and Inequality across Europe (editors Peter Dolton, Rita Asplund and Erling Barth) (2009) London: Edward Elgar.

JohnTheOptimist

Business flair? Let us see how well they do in the depression then!
In a bubble, any fool who can borrow and all can when credit is given so freely, will prosper. The trick is to invest the proceeds into property which will always go up in value!!!!!!! HAhaha! How is their acumen now?

Uni is a yardstick that is countable. The ability to think is more valuable. But not documented. I propose a university, free of state interference. Dedicated not to knowledge, which changes as the IPCC or the SM dictate, but to the ability to assess, acquire and understand knowledge only. Participants promise a tithe, lasting for thirty years. All graduates will have performed well in certain unpublished indeed secret tests. They will conspire in untraceable ways, to steal from the stupid and evil and condemn their offspring to poverty while endowing their own in sinecures. Yes, the idea is not original!

@Colin Scott

Great question! Assumes the mothers harmoniously and perfectly correlate in social class terms with the fathers. Come on ye radical feminists – rally to the cause (-;

@Colin Scott: there are two distinct issues here the sex of the child and the sex of the parent. Why that article in the Economist looked at sons I don’t know, but looking at the education of the father rather than the mother makes sense. Basically the two are highly correlated (fathers & mothers education) so if you put both in you find it very difficult to separate out the effects but it is generally clear that if you had to pick one you would pick the father’s. That’s because father’s education determines a household’s SES more than mothers. Using the mother’s education is unlikely to change the picture much. The paper I mentioned above looks at both boys & girls but also uses father’s education.

@Rory O Farrell: by “return to education” economists normally mean the effect of additional years of education on one’s earnings. By that criterion, various cross-country comparisons have shown that the returns in Ireland are actually higher than all or most Western developed countries although typically less than in developing countries.

@kevin denny

… and how high is the father/mother correlation in Ireland?

David:
I am not sure I understand the first question. I don’t recall huge sex differences. That link which was conveniently put up has a WP version of the paper, which is close to the published paper.
I’d had to dig up the raw data to check what the correlation is & with parental education being in levels you really need a categorical measure of association. With women’s education levels rising probably more than men’s (i.e. catching up), I suspect you get more assortative mating so the correlation increases but I might be wrong.

The most interesting aspect of this chart is the diversity of results among these States which are all in the EU.

Not only are there huge variations among these States in the relationships between a father’s education has on a son’s education and earnings, there appears to be no correlation whatever between the impact on the son’s education and impact on the son’s earnings.

Even in the most egalitarian society, I would expect that sons would tend to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, including in their education. But if third-level education was nearly universal (for males in this study!), this tendency would not produce an appreciable difference for those whose fathers had third-level degrees (i.e. practically the whole population). Is that the explanation for Austria in this table?