A study doesn't necessarily have to advocate a solution - it can just bring attention to a problem.
Similarly, if 20% of the population is always below the poverty line, zero sum mobility means that for every person rising out of poverty, someone else sinks into it.
I think the metric we should focus on is reducing poverty.
To be facile, if you want to reduce poverty to zero, merely reduce the poverty threshold to zero - as long as you're alive, you're not living in poverty.
Based on standards of living, nobody in the United States right now compared to the rest of the world throughout history is living in poverty.
That use as a proxy has not been justified. It is a massive cognitive leap. Nobody brought up poverty in the article.
>Research by economists from Harvard and Berkeley found that fewer than 10 percent of people in the bottom fifth of the wealth distribution will make it into the top fifth.
Poverty is an arbitrary threshold. Its definition if you Google it is "the state of being extremely poor" and as you noted, you can eliminate poverty by reducing the threshold. This is why the article chose quintiles.
As someone else said here, the article is bringing attention to a problem--lack of intergenerational social mobility. This has a lot of implications, one of which is that families born into poverty are unlikely to get out. It has other implications too, such as that middle class families will stay middle class and the elite stay elite. From what I have seen, the middle class are pretty happy being middle class and the elite like being elite, but the anxiety and stress of the low-income lifestyle is pretty horrible for people living in it.
If people were happy at all tiers of the socioeconomic ladder, social mobility wouldn't be worth discussing. We brought up poverty because those are the people who are suffering the worst.
As for living better than Aztec kings, that's too sweeping a claim. Aztec kings might not have been able to enjoy hot pockets or McDonalds, but they knew they were going to have dinner every night.
Edit: I know what you're both saying that being in the bottom 20% does not imply a low standard of living in the same way that being in poverty does. But in the US, the bottom 20% implies a low standard of living. The median net worth for the bottom 20% in 2011 was about -$6,000 [1], which means the lowest income households are consuming more wealth than they are creating. Combine this with the article's thesis that people are stuck in their quintile, and it's a statement that our nation's poorest are not able to escape a cycle of living off subsidies, presumably from the government.
http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/files/Wealth%20distribut...
TFA: Things weren't much better for the middle class: Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would rise into the top fifth over the course of their lives.
Isn't that expected? If you were to just randomly toss names into a hat, and pull out people who would be ranked on the order in which they got pulled out of the hat, wouldn't that be what statistics would say would be the case?
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
> As for living better than Aztec kings, that's too sweeping a claim. Aztec kings might not have been able to enjoy hot pockets or McDonalds, but they knew they were going to have dinner every night.
Anybody in the United States can scrounge one meal a day. It might not be the best food, and not to your liking, but it would be food none the less. The main thing that makes people feel poor is that other people have more than they do.