Kelly Vosters of University of North Carolina at Charlotte reviews “The Myth That Made Us: How False Beliefs about Racism and Meritocracy Broke Our Economy (and How to Fix It)” by Jeff Fuhrer. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Examines the ways that false narratives concerning race, poverty, and the sources of success in the United States negatively affect the economy, detailing how those with wealth and power have used such narratives to maintain the status quo in a system that slants outcomes toward the already successful.”

Recently Gregory Clark and coauthors have argued that social mobility rates are constant across countries and lower than traditionally estimated, hypothesizing that prior estimates of intergenerational persistence are attenuated from focusing on a single proxy for underlying status. We test this proposition by incorporating multiple proxy measures into a “least-attenuated” estimate of persistence for Sweden and conducting a Sweden–United States comparison. We find no evidence of substantial bias in prior estimates or of similarity across countries. We further extend our analysis to mothers, finding that additional measures improve the ability to capture transmission from mothers to both sons and daughters.