Electoral College bias and the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump's 2016 win despite failing to carry the popular vote has raised concern that 2020 would also see a mismatch between the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the Electoral College. This paper shows how to forecast the electoral vote in 2020 taking into account the unknown popular vote and the configuration of state voting in 2016. We note that 2016 was a statistical outlier. The potential Electoral College bias was slimmer in the past and not always favoring the Republican candidate. We show that in past presidential elections, difference among states in their presidential voting is solely a function of the states' most recent presidential voting (plus new shocks); earlier history does not matter. Based on thousands of simulations, our research suggests that the bias in 2020 probably will favor Trump again but to a lesser degree than in 2016. The range of possible outcomes is sufficiently wide, however, to even include some possibility that Joseph Biden could win in the Electoral College while barely losing the popular vote.

Has social mobility in Britain decreased? Reconciling divergent findings on income and class mobility.

Social mobility has become a topic of central political concern. In political and also media circles it is widely believed that in Britain today mobility is in decline. However, this belief appears to be based on a single piece of research by economists that is in fact concerned with intergenerational income mobility: specifically, with the relation between family income and children's later earnings. Research by sociologists using the same data sources--the British birth cohort studies of 1958 and 1970--but focusing on intergenerational class mobility does not reveal a decline either in total mobility rates or in underlying relative rates. The paper investigates these divergent findings. We show that they do not result from the use of different subsets of the data or of different analytical techniques. Instead, given the more stable and generally less fluid class mobility regime, it is the high level of income mobility of the 1958 cohort, rather than the lower level of the 1970 cohort, that is chiefly in need of explanation. Further analyses--including ones of the relative influence of parental class and of family income on children's educational attainment--suggest that the economists' finding of declining mobility between the two cohorts may stem, in part at least, from the fact that the family income variable for the 1958 cohort provides a less adequate measure of 'permanent income' than does that for the 1970 cohort. But, in any event, it would appear that the class mobility regime more fully captures the continuity in economic advantage and disadvantage that persists across generations.

Clerics die, doctors survive: a note on death risks among highly educated professionals.

AIMS: Mortality is strongly associated with education. We present relative death risks of men and women in 12 educational/ occupational groups in Sweden today, with a focus on individuals with higher education. METHODS: Results from Cox regressions are reported for 12 educational groups with special emphasis on those with professional education, e.g. clerics, physicians, people with medical PhDs, and university teachers. The study is based on register data of the total Swedish population in the age group of 30-64 (n = 3,734,660). RESULTS: There is a considerable variation in mortality between educational groups. Men with compulsory education run a risk that is more than three times higher than that of professors outside medicine, and other educational groups fall in between. Medical doctors and physicians have relatively low death risks compared to those with compulsory education - less than 50% among men and less than 60% among women - although professors in medicine deviate by having higher risks than their colleagues in other subjects. Those with a theological exam show higher risks of dying during the follow-up period compared to others of a similar educational level. Professors outside medicine experience the lowest death risks of all identified groups. CONCLUSIONS: Men and women with a professional education have comparatively low death risks, particularly low among medical doctors and university employees, while the clergy seems to experience relatively higher death risks than others with a similar level of education. These patterns may reflect the effects of education as well as the selection of men and women to higher education.

Social class and cause of death.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that causes of death differ in their relationship to social class, but we lack a more comprehensive description of this variation. The present study provides a detailed and extensive list of social class differences for a large number of specific causes of death. METHODS: All deaths between 1991 and 2003 in Sweden were linked with information on household social class from 1990. Relative death risks and excess mortality in groups of causes according to the European shortlist were estimated separately for men and women in eight classes using Cox Regression. RESULTS: A clear mortality gradient among employees was found for the majority of causes, from low-relative death risks among higher managerial and professional occupations to relatively high risks for the unskilled working class. There is considerable variation in the strength of the association, from causes such as malignant melanoma, breast cancer and transport accidents among women, where no clear class differences were found. At the other extreme, mental and behavioural disorders, endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases and diseases of the respiratory system all show steep slopes for both men and women. Circulatory diseases and cancer together account for 15-20% of excess mortality. CONCLUSIONS: Exceptions to the general pattern--causes of death in which higher social classes are exposed to greater death risks or in which there is no mortality gradient--are practically non-existent. There is nevertheless significant variation in the strength of the class differences in specific causes.

Social class assignment and mortality in Sweden.

The earlier practice of assigning all members of a family to the same social class as that of the household head, typically the father, has in recent years been replaced by either basing individual class position on one's own occupation or of one of the family members, not necessarily the father. These various practices have been extensively scrutinised for more than 20 years. The validity of the approaches has chiefly been tested by checking how well they account for the variation in some criteria, mostly class identification, political attitudes and voting behaviour. Here it is shown, using census data from Sweden, that mortality-rate differences between social classes covering the period 1991-1997 are greater for both men and women when both spouses are assigned to the same social class on the basis of the dominance approach, where the labour market position of either spouse may determine the social class of the family. It is suggested that the common observation that class differences are smaller among women than among men may, at least to some extent, be the result of establishing a woman's class position on the basis of her own occupation rather than the labour market position of her spouse.

On class differentials in educational attainment.

Social class differentials in educational attainment have been extensively studied in numerous countries. In this paper, we begin by examining class differentials in the progression to higher secondary education among 16-year-old children in England and Wales. As has been shown for other countries, the differentials result both from the primary effects of differing levels of academic performance of children of different class background and from the secondary effects of differences in the educational choices that these children make at given levels of performance. Through counterfactual analyses in which the performance distribution of one class is combined with the choice distribution of another, primary and secondary effects are decomposed and the former are shown to be roughly three times the size of the latter.