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The answer to your question is in the US there is less economic mobility than most of its peer countries. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/
by thinkcontext 4y ago
The answer to your question is in the US there is less economic mobility than most of its peer countries.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...
- murderfs 4y agoEconomic mobility studies are interesting, but there's a fundamental issue with the way all of them look at things: they're measuring relative success, not absolute. Of course it's easier to move between deciles if the distribution of income is flat, but the net result of the movement also has less actual impact. It's also zero-sum: everyone moving up from the bottom decile has to be replaced by someone! Overall quality of life is the metric that should be optimized around, not economic mobility.
- cycomanic 4y agoMeasured by what metric, mean, median income? Work/life balance? Quality of life is such a broad and nebulous term, any two measurements can come to completely different results so it is largely useless.
- murderfs 4y agoSure, you probably can't come up with a metric that quantifies the whole of human experience, but picking any of those is going to be better than picking a metric that is completely unrelated to quality of life!
- thinkcontext 4y agoThe comment I replied to asked about this specific metric. Beyond that, when I was growing up US superior economic mobility was touted as one of the key characteristics of American greatness. Its been interesting to watch the conservatives that were the biggest cheerleaders for this and other greatness indicators now make excuses when empirical data challenges these myths.
- lostmsu 4y agoCould this be explained by heritability of natural abilities + high economic mobility in the past?