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Comment by sevenless | Hacker News Reader

The USA's social mobility is much worse than the EU's, though. If you're born in the bottom 20% by household income your chance of making it to the top 20% is lower. The proportion of billionaires who inherited their wealth doesn't make any odds to the economic mobility of an ordinary person. It is ridiculous to go from "Overall, heirs and heiresses make up about half of Western Europe's billionaires" to claim "The lack of social mobility is more of a concern" in Europe.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...

> The study confirms previous findings that America’s social mobility is low compared with many European countries. (In Denmark, a poor child has twice as much chance of making it to the top quintile as in America.)

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The spread is also larger. The difference between the bottom 20% and the top 20% in the USA is higher than in Europe. So measuring by that is useless, since, in general, a 40%er in the USA is better off than a 40%er in Europe. Thanks for the propaganda though!

Yet you're arguing that mobilities can't be compared, in response to my post, not to the original article claiming Europe's mobility is worse... :-)

It seems a little like special pleading. The ease of transition from bottom to top quintile is an accepted index of how mobile or stratified a society is, not how wealthy individuals are. Of course different nations will be better or worse off, or will have different Gini indices as a result of social policy, but that doesn't mean we can't meaningfully compare their mobilities. Pointing out the figures isn't "propaganda".

> a 40%er in the USA is better off than a 40%er in Europe

Generalizing about "Europe" doesn't make much sense. Between (say) the UK and Albania, there's a vast economic gap (about 10 fold lower GDP/capita). If you're talking about Western Europe, what do you mean by "is better off"?

The mobility between quintiles is not particularly interesting; it is far too coarse a measure. The changes in inequality that we see in the US, Canada, and the UK affect the relative earning capacity of the bottom 90% vs. the top 10%, with the 90th percentile being an inflection point at our levels of inequality.

The relevant reduction in mobility would primarily be within the top 10% tail of the Pareto distribution for income, the dynamics of the bottom 90% are quite different -- although their absolute share vs. the top 10% has certainly declined.

It's a silly conclusion. If you are born in the bottom 20% of household income you in the US you are probably from a different ethnicity than the top 20%. Meanwhile in Denmark they're all ... Danish!

So essentially that study discovers that if you are born into ethnicity X you will unlikely end up as ethnicity Y.

About 10% of Danes are non-Danish migrants. I don't know the composition of the lowest 20% of the US, but I doubt they are entirely from ethnic minorities.

Even if we take your claim as true, the fact that different ethnic groups are highly stratified and mobility is restricted, like a caste system, is just as significant. Maybe even more so, because it implies a racist society.

Claiming, in effect, that we should discount a lack of social mobility for those born into certain ethnic groups, seems like racism.

1. The 10% of Danes that are migrants are all recent arrivals and hence I doubt there are generations to study inter-generational mobility on. When they will have been in the country for generations, I would be extremely surprised to find them having higher social mobility than in the US.

2. Re racism - I'm sorry but that's typical liberal nonsense. Discounting all differences between groups of people, assuming equal distribution of intelligence & culture and then ascribing resulting group differences to 'racism'.

What's rather interesting is that educational results among various US sub-groups map rather closely to their old-world kin. Ie US whites/blacks/asians correlate fairly well to the countries where they originally came from (hispanics obviously not having an old world mapping). Hence the hang-wringing "Our kids are failing vs X" is actually misplaced as they're comparing apples and multi-fruit juice.

Every so often I encounter people who think that human ethnic groups work like races in Dungeons and Dragons, and I feel rather sorry for them.

Because they won't be admitted to the SWPL heaven?

Your ideas actually remind me of the barely literate from the middle ages who believed that the world was sitting on 3 whales or something like that.

Preponderance of evidence to the contrary was dismissed with 'That's not what it says in the Bible!'.

You've got same religion ("all people are equal") that goes against ALL real-world observations. But just like they waved everything off with 'Because G-d wills it', you've got 'Because racism!'.

So you think human ethnic groups DO work like races in D&D?

Could you share with me the table of STR/INT/WIS/DEX/CON/CHA for Blacks, Whites and Asians? Oh, and Jews, of course.

Do we get skill and attack bonuses or special saving throws?

No, I don't think that.

But I'm enough of a realist to see first generation asians / indians operating laundromats or chinese restaurants and their children becoming doctors or lawyers. So to my mind US is the land of high social mobility - for people who are intelligent and are willing to work.

I don't think that just the color of your skin have unique characteristics for each race. However, I do think that the culture you are raised in does instill different values that contribute to your success in society.

A driven person will have the power to change their community, no matter their skin color. But one culture over another may be more effective at establishing the preconditions that driven people arise from. Evaluating people based on the cultural enviornment seems effective but I'm not entirely convinced that the fault lines are strictly related to race. I think people get confused when they see a group of people associated with a specific economic outcome and erroneous attribute that to race instead of culture.

Those conversations seem valuable, but it seems easy to misinterpret such a conversation as either racist or classist. Definitely these things should be talked about behind closed doors to avoid character assassination attempts.

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