Extended Data Fig. 2: Intergenerational Persistence of Socioeconomic Status in Facebook and Tax Data.

This figure shows binned scatter plots of children’s mean SES ranks in adulthood against their own parents’ SES ranks. Each point plots the mean SES rank of children who have parents at a given percentile of the SES distribution. The series in circles is based on data from Facebook, with SES rank calculated as described in the Variable Definitions section of Methods. The series in squares is based on administrative tax data analysed in prior work⁹⁰, with SES ranks corresponding to household income ranks. The sample for both series is children born between 1980 and 1982. In both samples, children’s SES ranks are based on their ranks within their birth cohort among children linked to parents, while parents’ SES ranks are based on their ranks relative to other parents in the same group of parents linked to children born between 1980–82. We report a slope estimated using a linear regression for each series, with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors in parentheses.