Not sure how I missed the first post. Must have been a busy day that day. All of these analyses are difficult, because there are so many variables to control for in any one comparison (e.g. race, parents' education, mother's income). As I pointed out in the original thread, the controls in the news article were bad enough that the data aren't incredibly useful. We need to remember also that the very idea of a decile itself isn't very useful, either, if we aren't comparing cross-era data sets. That is, the third decile might be a much lower wage in 2009 in real dollars than the third decile in 1979 (about the time when real wages for low skill jobs started contracting). Any way you look at it, however, I'm encouraged by the numbers. It's not what I expected. Did you happen to see this? I think that reforming the way taxes are collected might further encourage even more mobility.