Opinion – Samuel Pessôa: The truth of the left

In an article published in 2014, a group of economists, including Raj Chatty, a professor at Harvard University, showed that the possibilities for social mobility vary greatly between different geographic regions in the United States. That is, there are places where the children of poor parents rise socially, while in others this does not happen.

In another paper, published two years later, Chatty and his collaborators showed that families who move to regions where there is greater social mobility — and who do so when their children are still under 13 — see their children benefit from the new environment.

These children, as adults, will have an average income higher than that of other adults born in areas of low social mobility whose parents, however, never left there.

In the original work, from 2014, the authors also showed that there is a group of characteristics typically associated with regions where the probability of social ascension of children of poor parents is greater.

These areas of greater opportunity and greater mobility have a “face”. These are less segregated communities, with less inequality, where schools are better. There are fewer single-parent families, lower rates of maternity among teenagers and higher rates of social capital — something that can be measured, for example, through participation in social work or in churches.

In principle, it is not possible to determine a specific causal relationship between these characteristics and greater mobility. It appeared to be a package where all the variables correlated.

It so happens that the search for this kind of “success formula” in regions with greater opportunities for poor children has just gained a new chapter. In the August issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, Chetty and a large number of collaborators (over 20) published a new article on the topic entitled “Social Capital 1: Measurement and Association with Economic Mobility”. And this time they found a variable strongly correlated with the differences in the probability of social ascension of the children of poor families in the different regions. When they took this variable into account, all the others described in the previous paragraph were no longer relevant.

What is the secret? The regions in the US where the children of the poor rise socially are those where poor children live with poor children, but also with rich children. In the authors’ language, there is a connection between income classes.

It is not possible to know exactly by what mechanism the coexistence between social classes increases the chance of mobility of the children of the poorest families. There must be numerous mechanisms. According to the authors, this is a topic for future work.

A possible mechanism may lie in the opportunities that good connections can generate. In a paper published in 2021 in the American Economic Review, it was documented that wealthy families in the South of the United States who had lost a lot of wealth during the Civil War and soon after, with the end of slavery, that is, between 1860 and 1870, in 1940 they had already fully recovered their social position. And the mechanism of this process was probably in social connections, whether through marriage or access to better opportunities.

As the Health Minister Adib Jatene intuitively defined in this Sheetin December 2007, “the big problem of the poor is not that he is poor, it’s that his friend is also poor! to negotiate financing”.

The recent findings of the academy indicate that the minister’s intuition was correct. There is a supra-individual dimension in determining poverty. This is the truth of the left.

Note: This column is paired with the one on June 19 of last year titled “Langoni, the truth from the right”.