Is it? To me it's intuitively obvious and I can't think of any real person who would disagree?
I can't even conceive of a different way this could work. Reducing the correlation to zero would require basically removing money's functional utility.
Your link seems to say otherwise. If economic mobility were low then most rich families would not see their wealth meaningfully eroded for generations. This was the case in feudal Europe and many ancient empires like Rome. The fact that most families lose wealth in 3 generations due to mismanagement implies someone else is gaining that lost wealth - ergo economic mobility should be high.
Personally I feel the economic mobility afforded by high paying jobs and widespread capital in the US is unmatched. I started making more money than my parents by my junior year in college and genuinely feel like I have a non-zero chance at hitting 25 million USD net worth during my life. I have friends who have gotten millions of dollars in startup funding and have 10+ paid employees. You can't say the same if you live in Europe.
They're creating it. Wealth is not a zero-sum game.
> Where is that money coming from?
Not sure what you mean by this?
I might be misinterpreting the facts but Gates got the deal to sell DOS to IBM because his Mom knew someone or was on the board. Bezos went from a successful career in finance to start Amazon. Zuckerberg started Facebook at -Harvard- and partly, the success of Facebook was predicated on Harvard's social prestige.
I just don't understand where people come up with these weird bootstrap narratives from.
They're saying that he didn't start a billionaire. He multiplied his wealth by a factor of a thousand or more.
The ways one can use to multiply millions by a thousand aren't open to people that only owns thousands. And you really don't want to multiply your possessions by a thousand if they are negative.
Simply because if you've such wealth already you're most likely in a position to take risks, etc.
A billion is actually just a lot of money, there's a much more finite amount of room at the top.
All you need to do to make a million quid in the UK is get a 75th percentile job and save half of it. After a few decades you are now a millionaire. I mean, everyone can't do it, but it's not some unfathomable task.
In the US I imagine it's even easier. Your median income is lower but the top end is insane.
I agree that it is possible, but it is sadly an impossible task for most. That's my point above: for those who have wealth it is easy to grow it. It takes money to make money.
My other point was that those who have a billion started with millions.
Let's use the less emotionally charged example of the gym rat.
An individual who sets out with the goal and drive to become substantially physically stronger can be successful with high probability.
But not everyone will do that. Most will give up or just not even bother in the first place. Lots of people don't even care, despite it being almost strictly superior.
It would be logically incorrect to use that fact in order to argue that muscle mass is likely to be unchangeable. It is changeable, it's just not the path of least resistance.
edit: or, to put it succinctly - prevalence is not probability
Nigeria is a poor country which still has a high birth rate. Outside of Africa, almost all countries are past that. Even China and India.
In fact, if you jointly score social mobility & ethnic diversity, the United States looks to come out very close to the top (if not the top). It's probably not a "one size fits all" solution, though social safety nets are obviously a critical part of the equation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...
It's the legal framework, the laws being actually enforced (low corruption), and just the culture of the lay people who learned to trust each other after centuries of that. Formally Sweden is a kingdom while Nigeria is a democratic republic, but it does not change much.
Sweden has a ~55% marginal tax rate for everything over SEK 309,000 (approx 55k USD).
55k USD isn’t much in most US tech companies.
Liberal economics are surrounded with those kinds of ideals that always explain that the poor deserve their status, that they only have themselves to blame.
Let's use the less emotionally charged example of the gym rat.
An individual who sets out with the goal and drive to become strong can be successful with high probability.
But not everyone will do that. Most will give up or just not even bother in the first place.
Of course, the number of new doctors per year is capped, so not everyone can be a doctor.
Even independent of educational quality, there is a world of difference between a school's ability to teach a well fed, comfortable child and a child whose only meal of the day is the free school lunch. Similarly, a rich child can afford to do unpaid internships on summer break, whereas a poor one may be working minimum wage jobs to generate an income instead.
This is before you get into the weeds of things like teachers preferring to be placed into good schools because it makes their jobs easier, that well-connected schools can raise money outside of the public system, etc. People say they want educational equality, but this is almost never at the perceived cost to their own children.
America spends the most in the world per capita on our schools and has terrible results. It's clear that tossing more money into a black hole won't fix the problem.
Anecdotally, in high school I never heard any white/Latino/black friend joke about getting yelled at if they got a B.
> unpaid internships
You might want to take a look at levels.fyi. Internship salaries are higher than a lot of full time jobs nowadays.
As an example, nearly all starting first-year internships in law are unpaid. People who don't take those will be competing with those that did do them the next year.
About the only place where you can reasonably say "we need more of these people" but is unpaid is legislative offices. And I agree, government should hire fewer but more highly paid and higher performing staff.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
This seems like a child of recent immigrants thing more than Asian. Don’t 2nd and 3rd generation Asian perform on par with society at large?