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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

Despite these factors, the US has actually less social mobility than many European nations e.g.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/these-are-the-10-coun...

When wealth is inceasingly locked up in dynastic families, they will try and control the legislature and economic system to maintain their privilege and stifle innovation from upstarts. This is the problem Europe traditionally has struggled with, and it is saddening to the the US fall into this trap.

So while Europe has a lot to learn, the US is not exactly trending in the right direction. Perhaps this is why much of the current generation of VC is hype-driven, pump-and-dump schemes and attempts to create monopolies rather than genuine, long-term innovation.

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The ranking the article links has the US below the nordic/germanic countries, but above most latin/eastern countries. As a European-American, that squares with my experience.

https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....

raw data to save others the copy pasting i did into a spreadsheet:

{"Denmark": 85.2, "Finland": 83.6, "Norway": 83.6, "Sweden": 83.5, "Iceland": 82.7, "Netherlands": 82.4, "Switzerland": 82.1, "Austria": 80.1, "Belgium": 80.1, "Luxembourg": 79.8, "Germany": 78.8, "France": 76.7, "Slovenia": 76.4, "Ireland": 75, "Malta": 75, "Czech Republic": 74.7, "UK": 74.4, "Estonia": 73.5, "Portugal": 72, "Lithuania": 70.5, "USA": 70.4, "Spain": 70, "R Cyprus": 69.4, "Poland": 69.1, "Latvia": 69, "Slovakia": 68.5, "Italy": 67.4, "Croatia": 66.7, "Hungary": 65.8, "Bulgaria": 63.8, "Romania": 63.1, "Greece": 59.8 }

Those are income-based and the quoted generational figures look at mobility from poor to median, not median (or above median) to rich.

I would like to see these figures for wealth. I have a hard time believing it’s easier to climb from the top 20% to top 1% of wealth in any European country vs the US or China. Wealth is a more consequential measure of socioeconomic status than income anyway.

At a guess wealth is _probably_ quite a lot worse - average American wealth is very high (~ $551k), but the median American wealth is quite bad (~ 107k, on par with Spain or Italy. Whereas median British wealth is $151k and in Canada it's $131k.

But once you remove sterotypes, what makes you think it's easier to climb to the top in America?

I'd be interested to see a comparison of the median wealth by age bracket.

You're still focusing on median which I think is a valid measure on its own but not wholly representative of mobility at all. I'm personally very biased, but I think social mobility is most important between upper-middle (usually the most educated and hard-working) and upper-classes because that's where the most value creation happens, and personally I think that it's much more motivating to have a chance to become very wealthy than it is to increase your income by $10k

> But once you remove sterotypes, what makes you think it's easier to climb to the top in America?

We have lower marginal income taxes, self-funded retirements, and proportionately less capital tied up in generational assets like buildings. My impression of the EU is that most of the upper class and upper-middle class are land/building/family business inheritors, whereas in the US equity in large businesses take a larger share of the upper/upper-middle class asssets.

You don’t understand social mobility, it does not imply what you think it does. It primarily reflects the smallness of a country and wage compression. Countries that are neither small nor have wage compression, such as the US, will always show poorly by that metric.

You can, in absolute terms, dramatically increase your income in a country like the US and still be less “socially mobile” than a small income increase in a poorer country. People care about dramatically increasing their income much more than they care about being “socially mobile”. If you care about individual prosperity, social mobility is at best a secondary measure of success.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, the EU still struggles to produce genuinely innovative companies.

The US has seen decreasing social mobility in past decades. So this isn't just the US vs European countries, it's the US vs itself.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

The reality is that “social mobility” is a term of art in economics that measures something few ordinary people care about. People mostly care about economic mobility, which is strong in the US. People want the to be better off financially, not more socially mobile. These are not the same thing. You can readily increase your earnings by large amounts without being socially mobile.

The notion that people prefer to be “socially mobile” but poorer isn’t backed by a lot of evidence. People like more money, as a general rule.

Appealing to “social mobility” is something people with money do.

First you say that I don't understand "social mobility", now you are saying people don't care about social mobility...I mean, at least pick a lane.

Social mobility is literally only about money today, not too many opportunities to become a noble anymore. And no you cannot "readily increase your earnings." The best indicator for a person's future earnings are still the parents wealth. There are outliers but basically social and economic success are largely inherited.

The people that don't realise this are nearly always the ones that grew up with a silver spoon and feel like they "worked hard" for what they have, when in reality most of their opportunities were open to them because of their social circle.

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