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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

But the stats seem to show that it's substantially less common in the US than in a bunch of other developed countries, including countries that literally still have monarchs. A "Global Social Mobility Index" doesn't even put the US in the top 20. It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American, and the American's son is 68% more likely to remain n the bottom quntile than the Swede. That's a pretty big difference.

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...

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These studies of intergenerational class mobility can be highly problematic, because they often just look at income, very much less access to opportunity. The reason being patterns like the following are not uncommon:

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 don't think this shows the entire picture.

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.

Incomes in Sweden are more compressed so comparing quintiles is somewhat biased.

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.

A society composed of 99% peasants, who all earn and own about the same amount, and 1% nobles (who dont 'earn wages' and own many times more than all peasants combined) would look very good through many social mobility metrics.

> It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American

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.

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