"Every single person" in the world has not been moving up. ;) In the USA, there's a lot of data that says both absolute & relative mobility is getting worse:

"Every single person" in the world has not been moving up. ;) In the USA, there's a lot of data that says both absolute & relative mobility is getting worse: > The income of a typical working-age family grew considerably in the late 1990s. Around 2000, it stopped growing. In 2007, it started falling. and > An under-rated source of income growth for the middle class in the last 30 years, in face of slow-growing hourly wages, has been increased hours and the rise of dual-earner households, where the mother and father supplement each others' income. As a result, household income might actually understate* the middle-class crisis by counting the rising participation of women.* Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-statistical-round-up-of-the-income-inequality-crisis-in-16-charts/266074/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-... Because "absolute mobility" uses household income as a barometer, it appears on the surface that households are doing better. But we've actually added a lot of dual-income earning families since 1950, which skews those stats. In reality: > The typical family with a stay-at-home wife/mom has seen incomes grow only 1 percent, after inflation, since 1980. > The good news here is that women have the degrees, the means, and the freedom to work when they want to. The bad news is that the Typical American Family has only seen rising incomes in the last half century because of working wives. Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-americas-marriage-crisis-makes-income-inequality-so-much-worse/280056/?utm_content=buffera55d7&utm_source=buffer http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-amer...