You state that like it's a bad thing. If you can bump a bracket or two per generation, 2 generations can take you from near-penniless to upper-middle class.
If we value class mobility enough to talk about the "_American_ dream" maybe the US should actively work on improving that.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...
https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
I'm not sure the American dream is income mobility, though. The American dream is wealth accumulation and amassing wealth often requires trading for a small, even no, income (e.g. founding a startup). At some point you will likely hope to cash out, but those capital gains will only be recorded as income approximately once in your lifetime.
1. John is a banking executive who makes millions of dollars a year.
2. John has a son, Jack. Jack sees how much his father worked and decides to take a very different path, becoming a documentary filmmaker. From his family's wealth, Jack never worries much about money, but his nominal income is quite low.
3. Jack has a son Joe who decides he'd rather live in the giant estate of his grandfather than the small suburban house of his father, and goes into banking. He gets help from his grandfather's contacts to land his first job.
Thus, if you look at these 3 generations in isolation, you'd count them as going from the top quintile to the bottom quintile to the top quintile again. But, in reality, nothing about their social status has really changed, nor their access to opportunity.
There was a post on HN from a couple years ago that looked at a study that said the rich families from Florence, Italy in the 1400s were still the rich families today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872376. The argument was that there was much less actual social mobility than some other studies suggest.
I couldn’t find top 20% but top 10% in Sweden seems to be $54,000/yr while in the US it’s $132,000
So you aren’t exactly comparing the same absolute level of success.
The USA has larger disparaties across quintiles, in large parts due to its history as a country of (sometimes involuntary) immigrants. I think it will be interesting to see how Sweden's favorable metrics here change as a result of their wave of unskilled immigration, which is probably too recent to be fully incoporated in any generational study. I'd also be interested to see mobility in 'absolute' terms, perhaps relative to global percentiles. Moving up 10% in a very disparate country might reflect more social motion than jumping two quintiles in a very flat country.
Also, moving between income quintiles misses other aspects that might be relevant for a broader definition of social mobility: moving into the top 1% or top 0.1% of income and any movement in wealth. I'm not having luck finding a source at this moment, but I recall seeing that the USA performs favorably on this metric compared to europeans with millenial legacies of state-sanctioned hereditary nobility.
They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy.
They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope.
This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history.
> They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy.
Should they? Sure. Will they? History says it is very unlikely.
What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them. Person A decides the split, person B chooses whether to accept the split or reject the split, in which case the $100 is taken back and neither person gets anything.
The problem with your whole philosophy is that it supposes that Person B will accept the split no matter how much it is skewed to Person A, because it is the 'rational' thing to do from an individual's perspective (any money is better than no money). However, what actually happens is that above the 60% - 70% mark, Person B will often reject the split, just to spite Person A.
> They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope.
Demagogues work to convince people that they are getting an unfair split and that they should reject the split. It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split.
I think you're interpreting my statement to suggest that people generally prioritize the public interest over their personal interest. I'm not. I'm only claiming that people, ceteris paribus, generally would prefer that society at large prosper. But they would not at their own expense.
>>What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them.
This is very true.
Thiel famously believes in Rene Girard's theory that jealousy emerges from the mimetic instinct, and that religious admoninations against it are a social innovation to constrain the dark side of mimesis:
https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/
>>It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split.
Yes of course, but the presence of inequality does not suggest unfairness as such demagogues usually imply.
Are you calling USA "well structured"? Socialist European nations have much more income mobility than USA has. Few are threatened with penury, most employers pay a living wage, and many more people who have a great idea and the will to build it, do so.
Consider the US in 1870: per capita GDP was $3,000, so even with a totally noncorrupt and absolutely competent government, and perfect wealth inequality, the entire population would be in poverty by today's standards. Income growth takes time.
As to your point: wages in Europe are lower than in the US, and there is much less funding available for startups.
Europe is also not appreciably more socialist than the US:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_...
Almost all of the advanced economies became dramatically more socialist over the last 60 years, the US included:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
Consider what would have happened if society had followed John Stuart Mills' advice in 1848 and maximized for equal distribution of income, resulting in per capita GDP barely increasing from its $2,000 level over the last 170 years:
"It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution"
-John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848, book IV, chap. VI)
"What if" is a wonderful game.
True mobility is when you can work reasonable hours at your horrible warehouse job, enroll in a higher education programme and in 2-3 years, switch jobs to something that pays better. No need to rack up decades of student debt, no need to work crazy long hours or multiple jobs just to afford a place to live.