Poverty, redistribution, and the middle class: redistribution via probability distributions vs. redistribution via the linear income tax system.

It has been known for a long time that (1) when graphs of income amount on income relative rank for two income distributions intersect twice, three "transfer groups" are generated, with the poorest and richest both gaining under the same alternative income distribution and the middle group losing; and (2) the linear income tax system satisfies three fundamental principles of tax justice, namely, that as pretax income increases, three quantities should also increase-posttax income, tax amount, and tax rate. This paper links those two ideas, suggesting that the linear income tax system may be the natural and most effective way to guard against poverty reduction policies which, while helping the poorest, as urged by Rawls, may harm the middle, contributing to the weakening of the middle class, thought at least since Aristotle to be the backbone of society. This paper illustrates the two approaches with one initial distribution and three alternative final distributions, contrasting their minimum, median, proportion below the mean, and inequality. It also shows how to guard the linear income tax system against violating the tax amount principle of tax fairness when there is an injection of resources (e.g., from deficit spending or oil revenues) and how to empirically estimate the parameters (e.g., the marginal tax rate) of the linear income system that the population will regard as fair.

Notes on the history of SocialScienceResearch: In celebration of its 50th anniversary.

This paper reports a first look at the founding of Social Science Research, providing a few key signposts but keenly aware that a full history must await recovery of many additional documentary materials. The journal was founded by James S. Coleman and Peter H. Rossi, who had trained at Columbia, taught at Chicago, and founded the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Johns Hopkins. The Coleman-Rossi vision statement embeds three key ideas: (1) quantitative theoretical work and quantitative empirical work are close and constant partners; (2) quantitative theoretical work and quantitative empirical work each require special methods; and (3) crossing disciplinary lines spurs the growth of knowledge. The first issue of Social Science Research appeared in 1972. Then as now, SSR welcomed papers that may be too innovative or too technical (or too long or too short) for other journals, inclusive of papers that cross traditional disciplinary lines. Examination of the first four volumes (1972-1975) reveals a beautiful realization of the founders' vision - a collection of rigorous quantitative papers from across the social sciences, pushing frontiers in both theory and empirics and in both substance and methods. There is innovation and creativity - and a touch of the playfulness that accelerates the growth of knowledge.

Analyzing Migration Restriction Regimes.

This paper develops a framework for analyzing migration restriction regimes, and illustrates it with the case of U.S. immigration law and policy. Nation-states regulate the entry of foreign-born persons, and this regulation comprises three elements: the type of restriction, the apparatus of restriction, and the consequences of restriction. Restriction may be based on personal characteristics, numerical ceilings, or both. Personal restriction notices the characteristics of persons, using them as criteria for granting or denying admission. Numerical restriction places numerical ceilings on admissions. The apparatus of restriction may stipulate specific ceilings, whether some groups are exempt from the ceiling and, if so, by what criteria, and whether admission under the ceiling is first-come/first-served or by lottery or instead preferential and, if so, by what criteria. Two unintended consequences follow immediately: unauthorized migration (under both personal and numerical restriction); and visa-number backlogs (under numerical restriction). These in turn generate a range of policy devices: border enforcement, procedures for legalization and deportation, and procedures for clearing backlogs. Indeed, the history of a country's immigration law may be understood as a sequence of measures for first setting up the apparatus of restriction and then altering it in order not only to re-examine provisions of the initial setup but also to address unauthorized migration and visa-number backlogs. Viewing migration through this lens enables assessment of particular legislation and, more broadly, dynamics of a migration restriction regime, subject to world circumstances, including its possible inherent instability. The migration restriction lens also generates new metrics for a country's attractiveness and its innovativeness and creativity. To illustrate, the paper examines the migration restriction regime in the United States since the country's founding. Finally, the paper provides a checklist for a migration restriction setup that doubles as the basis for table shells for summarizing a country's migration restriction regime and its history.

How impartial are the observers of justice theory?

This paper develops a unified framework for studying justice and impartiality - identifying six opportunities for impartiality, four for observers and two for allocators; generating the person-specific impartiality profile, including separate subprofiles for observer and allocator activities; and characterizing groups and societies by the impartiality profiles of their members. The immediate challenge is to measure the six kinds of impartiality. This paper takes a first step, focusing on three kinds of observer impartiality - the classic just-reward impartiality and the two new kinds identified by justice theory, framing impartiality and expressiveness impartiality. Understanding the two new forms of impartiality is important because their absence could destroy the good effects of impartiality in other justice elements. The paper reports the results of three factorial surveys carried out among college students in the United States, assessing the students' just-reward, framing, and expressiveness impartiality with respect to the earnings of fictitious workers. The paper makes three main contributions. Theoretically, it illuminates the marriage of justice and impartiality, leading to new insights and new research avenues. Methodologically, the paper develops new analytic and graphical tools for assessing observer impartiality. Substantively, the paper shows that (1) while just gender gaps in aggregate analyses of college students are almost nil (contrary to the just gaps found among adults), closer respondent-specific analyses indicate an intricate mix of subsets of respondents favoring one or the other gender; (2) framing impartiality by gender is almost universal; and (3) expressiveness impartiality ranges from 28 to 57 percent, with an intriguing mix of results by sample and respondent gender. Overall these results suggest that there may be "little cultures" of justice and impartiality on U.S. college campuses. If that is so -- and pending future research on all six kinds of impartiality in a variety of samples across countries and over time and as well with respect to rewards other than earnings, such as grades, bequests, and prison sentences - we have offered a way to measure those cultures and understand them theoretically.

Migration and stratification.

Migration and stratification are increasingly intertwined. One day soon it will be impossible to understand one without the other. Both focus on life chances. Stratification is about differential life chances - who gets what and why - and migration is about improving life chances - getting more of the good things of life. To examine the interconnections of migration and stratification, we address a mix of old and new questions, carrying out analyses newly enabled by a unique new data set on recent legal immigrants to the United States (the New Immigrant Survey). We look at immigrant processing and lost documents, depression due to the visa process, presentation of self, the race-ethnic composition of an immigrant cohort (made possible by the data for the first time since 1961), black immigration from Africa and the Americas, skin-color diversity among couples formed by U.S. citizen sponsors and immigrant spouses, and English fluency among children age 8-12 and their immigrant parents. We find, inter alia, that children of previously illegal parents are especially more likely to be fluent in English, that native-born U.S. citizen women tend to marry darker, that immigrant applicants who go through the visa process while already in the United States are more likely to have their documents lost and to suffer visa depression, and that immigration, by introducing accomplished black immigrants from Africa (notably via the visa lottery), threatens to overturn racial and skin color associations with skill. Our analyses show the mutual embeddedness of migration and stratification in the unfolding of the immigrants' and their children's life chances and the impacts on the stratification structure of the United States.

ETHNICITY AND THE IMMIGRATION OF HIGHLY SKILLED WORKERS TO THE UNITED STATES.

This paper examines ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the United States. The paper focuses on five classic components of ethnicity - country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion - among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the United States in 2003 in the three main employment categories (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3), using data collected in the U.S. New Immigrant Survey. Initial findings include: (1) The visa categories have distinctive ethnic configurations. India dominates EB-2 and European countries EB-1. (2) The ethnicity portfolio contains more languages than religions. (3) Language is shed before religion, and religion may not be shed at all, except among the ultra highly skilled of EB-1. (4) Highly skilled immigrants are mostly male; they are not immune from lapsing into illegality; they have a shorter visa process than their cohortmates; smaller proportions than in the cohort overall intend to remain in the United States. (5) Larger proportions in EB-2 and EB-3 sent remittances than in the cohort overall. (6) A little measure of assimilation - using dollars to describe earnings in the country of last residence, even when requested to use the country's currency - suggests that highly skilled immigrants are more likely to "think in dollars" than their cohortmates. Further work is taking a deeper look at these patterns in a multivariate context, attentive to selectivity processes and the Globalista impulse.