Suresh Narayanan: This is an interesting and unique study in the Malaysian context. Perhaps for the first time, social mobility has been examined in a more complete fashion because the sample used is significant (4,999 heads of families, although I wonder why the author did not add one more case to make it 5,000!), and presumably representative (since the sample was selected by the Malaysia Department of Statistics). The sample also covers the three main ethnic groups in peninsular Malaysia.
Even so, three major points weaken the study.
First, it is largely an empirical exercise devoid of any theoretical foundation. The literature review offers no insights from theory that might guide the research questions. Yet the area is rich with theories (see Buchmann and Hannum 2001 for a review). There is also a new and interesting theory of intergeneration mobility by Becker and colleagues (Becker et al. 2018). In...