The same results have been reported by many other studies. The facts are clear - for the poor the US is a land of economic handicap, not a land of opportunity.
There will always be individual exceptions to this, but they'll be single data points. Put crudely, for every heart-warming success you see interviewed in Forbes, there will be millions of failures no one hears about.
The most useful picture is broad-based and statistical, and studies like this one:
show that mobility depends as much on where you were born as to whom you were born.
Broadly, inequality has exploded since the 1980s and in areas with limited social capital - including good free education - it's now more difficult than ever to work your way up from the bottom.
But this is balanced by increased opportunities in other areas - mostly affluent, mostly urban - which have created a halo effect for the poorer communities around them.
So average mobility has remained approximately constant, but only because bad areas have been balanced by good areas.
Meanwhile average mobility in the US continues to be worse than mobility in other countries.
Meanwhile average mobility in the US continues to be worse than mobility in other countries.
What's the best study you can find that demonstrates this? I haven't seen any that don't appear to succumb to the flaws I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, such as measuring relative mobility instead of absolute mobility.
I would define absolute income mobility in terms of some globally comparable good. Dollars, PPP adjusted or not, for example.
Relative mobility to me means mobility within some particular income distribution: Moving from, say, an average household income in the first quintile to an average household income in the fifth quintile.
I prefer absolute mobility as a measure of economic mobility for the same reason that any rational actor would prefer to win a lottery for the difference between the income of an average bottom 20% household and an average top 20% household in the U.S.[1] vs. Sweden[2]. According to OECD, that's $75K vs. $37K.
There will always be individual exceptions to this, but they'll be single data points. Put crudely, for every heart-warming success you see interviewed in Forbes, there will be millions of failures no one hears about.
The most useful picture is broad-based and statistical, and studies like this one:
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
show that mobility depends as much on where you were born as to whom you were born.
Broadly, inequality has exploded since the 1980s and in areas with limited social capital - including good free education - it's now more difficult than ever to work your way up from the bottom.
But this is balanced by increased opportunities in other areas - mostly affluent, mostly urban - which have created a halo effect for the poorer communities around them.
So average mobility has remained approximately constant, but only because bad areas have been balanced by good areas.
Meanwhile average mobility in the US continues to be worse than mobility in other countries.