As Ezra notes:

The Pew Charitable Trust is about to offer $2.2 million to forge some sort of consensus position on social mobility in America. Consensus because, as The WSJ explains, "the funding will go to scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, which have a conservative bent, and the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, which are more liberal."

Sigh. This bespeaks a certain political naivete on Pew's part. It is certainly true that Brookings and Urban are more liberal than AEI and Heritage, but they are not proportionately liberal. Brookings -- which hosts a large number of right wing scholars and former members of Republican administrations -- is a centrist, establishment think tank, while Urban is just a few ticks to the left of it. AEI and Heritage, conversely, are hard right, movement conservative organizations. That's fine: There's a place for that, and it doesn't make their research wrong. But Brookings and Urban are not their analogues. A wiser study would have tapped the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress.

Who wants a consensus opinion anyway? Lay you 90% it will be bullshit, because Heritage and co. won't sign off on standard stats, so they'll wind up with something like "lifetime consumption" instead of income or wealth (who cares how much money you have in the bank? It's how much you consumed, even if you were two steps from the poor house the entire time.)

This will understate inequality and mobility compared to the current standardly used studies. That's why it's being done.

There's been strong pushback on the inequality stats recently from a number of angles - claims that different measures (which coincidentally always seem to prove there is less inequality than the more common stats) to attempts to attack the integrity of the data (the professors looking at tax data didn't know how to read returns). The goal, as I noted earlier, is to keep the inequality issue at the debate stage, rather than at the "what should we do?" stage, because any serious action would mean doing things like raising progressive tax rates, taxing unearned income at the same rate as earned income and so on.

I will also note, for the record, that this being done by "think tanks" and not by universities. And I distrust that. Let each organization do its study, and then try and get it into prestigious peer reviewed journals.

Then we'll talk.