![Vince Young in happier times. His rapid rise and sudden fall constitute a cautionary tale. But behind it all there is good news about economic opportunity and upward mobility. [Credit: Dallas Morning News]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Credit-Dallas-Morning-News.jpg)
Vince Young in happier times. His rapid rise and sudden fall tell a cautionary tale. But a new study provides welcome news about economic opportunity and upward mobility. [Credit: Dallas Morning News]
Reports of Young’s bankruptcy filing coincided with the release this week of a new study by a group of Harvard and Berkeley economists that reached an unexpected conclusion: upward economic mobility is not the exclusive province of entrepreneurs, entertainers and star athletes like Young. The National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER] report concluded that “children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s.”
Economic mobility in the US is not in decline, despite what you may hear in Tuesday’s State of the Union Address or what you may have read on this website. America is still, as the report’s title suggests, “a land of opportunity.”
Opportunities, of course, can be squandered. Vince Young’s rise to national prominence reached warp speed during the 2006 Rose Bowl, when his touchdown run with just 19 seconds to play won a national championship for the University of Texas. That spring, he was the third player chosen in the NFL draft, signing a five-year contract with the Tennessee Titans that guaranteed him $26 million and included incentives that could earn him millions more.
He was a 2006 Pro Bowl selection and was honored as Offensive Rookie of the Year. He helped lead his team to the playoffs in 2007 and seemed destined for still better things until he sprained his knee during the first game of the 2008 season. Kerry Collins replaced him as quarterback and never relinquished the starting role that season, leading the Titans to an NFL-best 13–3 record. Young, though fully recovered from his knee injury, looked on from the sidelines for the remainder of that season.
The Titans released Young after the 2010 season and he signed with Philadelphia as a backup. Eagles coach Andy Reid inserted Young into the lineup in the fourth quarter of a game in December 2011. The Eagles were up 45–13 at the time. Young was playing only to give the starters a rest and protect them from injury in a game that already was won. He was sacked on his final play, a portent of things to come. He never took another snap in professional football. A career that began with great promise was over at age 28.
Judges and lawyers are at work trying to learn where the estimated $45 million in salaries and endorsements that he earned between 2006 and 2011 has gone. In seeking the refuge of bankruptcy court, he told the judge that he has no more than $1 million in assets, as much as $10 million in debt and no way to keep his creditors at bay.
Born in a poor Houston neighborhood in 1983, Young had roughly a 9 percent chance of rising from the bottom quintile in which he was born to the top quintile by age 26, according to the authors of the NBER study [Table 4]. That’s not much different from the prospects for someone born in similar circumstances during the previous generation.
The study is based on a review of tax information from tens of millions of people born between 1971 and 1993, people who now range in age from 20 to their early 40s. The data show a surprising persistence of economic mobility. The jump from the bottom to the top quintile — particularly at age 26 — is a huge one. In 2011, the average income in the bottom quintile was $11,239, compared with $178,020 in the top quintile. It’s a shorter, though still considerable, step up for someone born in the middle quintile. Such a person born in 1971 had an 18.5 percent chance of reaching the top quintile by age 26; for someone born in 1986, the chance was slightly greater at 19.8 percent.
The authors compared their study to an earlier one showing that intergenerational economic mobility did not change significantly between the 1950 and 1970 cohorts [p. 10], leading them to conclude that such mobility “remained remarkably stable over the second half of the twentieth century” [p. 10].
They note, paradoxically, that this rate of economic mobility has persisted amid rising income inequality [p. 11]. Parents in the top 1 percent accounted for a larger share of income in 1992 (20.1 percent) than in 1971 (10.1 percent) [Table 6].
The authors postulate that this inequality hasn’t affected overall mobility because it is largely confined to the very highest earners. “The correlation between inequality and mobility is driven primarily by ‘middle class’ inequality,” they write. Inequality among the 99 percent hasn’t varied all that much between the 1971 and 1993 birth cohorts, the authors note. “From this perspective, it is less surprising that mobility has not changed significantly despite the rise in inequality” [p. 11].
To illustrate this paradox, they write:
A useful visual analogy is to envision the income distribution as a ladder, with each percentile representing a different rung. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children’s chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed (rank-based mobility has remained stable) [p. 1].
People are still scaling the ladder at rates comparable to those of previous generations despite negative trends like declining test scores, diminished “parental inputs,” and declining “social connectedness,” the authors note. They speculate in a footnote that this may be due to “countervailing social trends” like improved civil rights for minorities and broader access to higher education, but leave more complete explanations for future researchers to ponder.
They are content to present encouraging data at a somewhat discouraging time: one of our core social values remains intact. America is as economically mobile today as it has been for last several generations.
The President can be expected to tell a different story on Tuesday night. He will reportedly reprise the theme of a speech last December when he said that Americans today “experience in a very personal way the relentless, decades-long trend [of] … a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain — that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.”
That basic bargain may be more robust than the President imagines, if the NBER study’s findings are correct. It may explain why he has struggled to make inequality and a presumed decline in mobility winning political issues. Only 1 percent of respondents in a recent Quinnipiac poll listed income inequality as a top priority for the President and Congress this year. The President and his party would like that number to grow. His hope is to persuade voters that the problem is urgent and that his party is best equipped to address it.
He seems unlikely to succeed, in part because his message is so discordant. On one hand, he argues that the economy is on the mend and that he should be credited with creating millions of jobs; on the other hand, he portrays a stagnant America, one in which the poor and middle class are bereft of hope, save in government intervention.
That’s not to say that income inequality is a matter of little concern or that government should neglect it. I’ve suggested elsewhere that social welfare programs bear close re-examination in light of changing social trends and that Federal Reserve policies should be revamped, since they have tended to benefit the wealthiest while doing little to spur broader economic growth or job creation. I’ve argued that things like wealth taxes, caps on CEO salaries and minimum wage increases don’t effectively address the problem. And I’ve cited the need to seek out new approaches that may not comport with the preferred orthodoxies of either party.
Inequality is a significant problem that remains poorly understood. That it evidently coexists with upward mobility is heartening.
All of which provides a hopeful message for Vince Young. He is still just 30 years old, with many potentially productive years ahead. Once he puts his legal and financial problems behind him, opportunity awaits.