Do You Have an Ancestry Dot Com?

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In the 19 30 census, what they did was to digitize those records so that you can type it in the comfort of your computer. We're using very flexible relationships between occupation, age and state. So essentially, those three elements of a person can get very close to telling us their true income. And then we're running into trouble with trying to kind of backcast that back through history. But that's really just, you know, we're looking under the lamp post of what's aveilr doing the best you can.

Immigration to the United States, say Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, is more novel than short story: It takes decades for new immigrants to catch up economically. But their kids on average thrive economically and have higher rates of upward mobility than American-born kids. Abramitzky and Boustan talk about their book Streets of Gold with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Using an extraordinary data set of millions of Americans, Boustan and Abramitzky find that today's immigrants and their children are surprisingly similar to yesterday's.