Opportunity

Thus far we have focused on inequality: the distribution of resources in society. A related question is one of opportunity: do all people have equal chances of landing at various places in that distribution?

The question of opportunity calls for studies of how the luck of birth, such as one’s family of birth, constrains life chances. Some people are comfortable with high levels of inequality so long as those positions are accessible to all—equality of opportunity rather than equality of result. In this module, we will discuss evidence about opportunities for social mobility and explore data on this question using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Table of contents

• Social mobility
• A prediction task
• Example submission
• Sample splitting
• Machine learning
• Regularized regression
• Nonlinear smooths
• Random forest