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RandomName2020

> it's harder to move from a class to another compared to the US.

Not true: social mobility in US is lower than in Europe and Canada.

There's at least two Americas.

If you are born middle class or with an intact family structure or immigrate, opportunity is unlimited. If you're born here poor/without a family structure, or were born in the wrong place, you're stuck in a feudal-like system.

Anecdata: It can be escaped. I grew up in a divorced household. Poor. In the middle of nowhere. I even had a kid early, at 15. I'm now firmly in the middle class. I feel that if I were less risk adverse, I could find myself moving even higher up.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/dec/19/...

> Not true: social mobility in US is lower than in Europe and Canada.

I can't speak about Canada but I seriously doubt that social mobility is higher in Europe. Again, you can't generalize. It may be far easier to move from a class to another in Germany than for example Italy or France.

It's a difficult thing to compare, so I wouldn't totally believe the absolute comparisons, but generally most countries in Europe are considered to have higher social mobility than the US. The exceptions are Italy & the UK, with maybe France level pegging with the US.

e.g. https://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/NERO-22-June-2015-income-ine...

Can you back your doubts with numbers from a credible source?

Another comparison of social mobility:

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/81/1/WRAP_Naylor_twerp_781.pdf

Mobility is lower in the U.S. than in the U.K., where it is lower again compared to t he Nordic countries. Persis- tence is greatest in the tails of the distributions and tends to be particularly high in the upper tails: though in the U.S. this is reversed with a particularl y high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers will remain in the lowest earnings quintile . This is a challenge to the popu- lar notion of ’American exceptionalism’.

Probably harder but social class in Europe is mostly unrelated to wealth, while in the US the two are closely knit, which is what is often measured.

This is only because "social mobility" is in terms of percentiles, which doesn't account for differences in income variance between countries. The US has anomalously high income variance, so large changes in absolute income can equate to relatively small changes in the percentile.

To put it another way, if everyone made the same wage, an increase in salary of $1 would check the box for "social mobility" because it would move you into the top percentile.

Not sure about this kind of rationalization. Social mobility is a more sophisticated measure.

On the other hand, the incentive to rise above your parents' percentile is much less if that next percentile doesn't feel much better.

At the end of the day, the difficulty with these comparisons is that social mobility measured in percentiles may be the same in a country where it is next to impossible to rise above your parents' social class as in a country where it is completely pointless to even want that.

I'd claim in many european nations rising is motivated by percieved better chances to have a psychologically fullfilling career, rather than considerable improvement in finances - since the increases are not that thrillingly high. But does this make the urge to rise pointless?

In my country (Finland), for instance we don't force anyone to live in the streets. IMO, this creates huge amount of value from second order network effects - better childhoods, better social stability, people are more employable (if we only had jobs). I hope we can still afford this amount of social wellfare after a few decades.

I agree completely. But doing something _only_ for the purpose of moving into a higher income bracket may indeed be pointless (or less desirable) in a more equal society.

In such a society, any meaningful definition of social mobility has to include more than just income percentiles.

Personally, I would love to live in a communist society unless the workings of it were not proven completely impractical and incompatible with basic human instincts.

So, we probably need prices and actual money for resource optimization, with human-sized goals for individuals to aspire to. But how to optimize human condition is partly a separate question and requires placing some value on the life experiences of individuals disrespective of their economic status.

That might be true in the aggregate, but I imagine it's not for specific groups. Why else would so many people move to the US for job opportunities?

1. Because US is big. 2. Because it is more welcoming for immigrants. 3. Because of broken H1B system.

Because it had great (and I mean multi-generational enduring American Dream great) PR from after WWII thru at least the late 60's.

The post-WW2 soft power strategy by the US was awesome and extremely effective. Sadly, it seems that by the 70s the pentagon had become solely obsessed with the projection of hard power. I personally reckon this has a huge amount to do with the decline of the US's popularity around the globe in the subsequent decades.

As an outside observer and frequent critic of US foreign policy I would agree.

The number of immigrants per capita in the US is not especially high. It's lower than in Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Germany and similar to most Western European nations.

[Citation needed]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/the-mobility-my...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-...

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

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/05...

http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/03/there...

A little Googling seem to suggest that this figure is somewhat representative: the US has slightly more mobility than the UK, which have less mobility than most of Europe:

http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...

Wait a second. That data just measures correlation between father and son in terms of income. Thinking through it, if you had more sons do worse than their fathers economically, they would show up better in this data.

It's not measuring upward mobility, but mobility in general. Seems suspect.

Yes, this is true - a short article with more data on Canada goes a little deeper:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2016059-eng.ht...

The rich stay rich, more than the poor stay poor (in Canada).

But the number is about [relative change in income across] the population - if most people are poor (which they are) high mobility across the population likely means poor people are moving up (or indeed getting much poorer - halving your income when you're already in the lower quartile would probably be as big a shift as doubling it - if not more).

You're right to ask for more detail, though.

Yeah, it baffles me when people bring this up.

US social mobility and wealth inequality are among the worst in the developed world.

Source?

First hit on Google:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

Graph down the bottom.

A bit disappointing to see you're being down-voted, based on a glance at that wp article, it links to a lot of relevant research (and the gp's statement can hardly be seen as controversial to anyone that's paid even cursory attention to social (in)equality and social studies in the past decades?).

It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of the UK on the various countries though.

That data is a proxy for income mobility. It's measuring the correlation between generations. As I mentioned in another reply, it's not measuring upward mobility, but mobility in general. If a country had a future generation do worse economically it would show up as having better mobility.

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