In fact, Denmark and several European countries have the greatest social mobility. Canada is 14th, and the United States 27th. (See excerpt in next post).
Excerpt: Global Social Mobility Index (2020)
”Among the G7 economies, Germany is the most socially mobile, ranking 11th with 78 points followed by France in 12th position. Canada ranks 14th followed by Japan (15th), the United Kingdom (21st), the United States(27th) and Italy (34th).”
”Among the world’s large emerging economies, the Russian Federation is the most socially mobile of the BRICS grouping, ranking 39th with a score of 64 points. Next is China, which ranks 45th, followed by Brazil (60th), India(76th) and South Africa (77th).”
Note that WEF’s Global Social Mobility Index doesn’t quantify differences in movement of people* within or between social strata, which is how pretty much everyone else approaches social mobility. If something like adolescent birth rate correlates with low mobility, it’s the birth rate itself that is measured and that factors into their index, not the actual mobility outcome. That doesn’t make it bad or not useful, but I’d caution against using it to compare current differences in actual mobility between countries.
Gregory Clark’s The Son Also Rises examines social mobility, with the conclusion (IIRC) that it’s similarly low pretty much everywhere. But he looks at very long time scales and I remember finding some of his methods . . . ambitious. It’s a tricky topic.
*individuals, families, households, etc.
This is a good point. The article states this index indirectly measures whether institutions, etc. allow mobility as opposed to directly measuring if “children do better than their parents”, claiming measuring this is incomplete and takes many decades:
Historically, indices have analysed social mobility across generations by comparing earnings of children with those of their parents. Others have focused on outcomes, and as such, struggled to provide timely insights. The more academic tend to look at tracking income inequality. The problem with these approaches is that they capture the effect of measures that were taken 30-40 years ago.
The Global Social Mobility Index, however, focuses on drivers of relative social mobility instead of outcomes. It looks at policies, practices and institutions. This allows it to enable effective comparisons throughout regions and generations. It uses 10 pillars, which in turn are broken down into five determinants of social mobility – health, education, technology access, work opportunities, working conditions and fair wages and finally, social protection and inclusive institutions. One of its key recommendations is the need for a new standard.
Unless you inherit it, “great wealth” almost never happens for most people, regardless of where they start out.
Really the focus should be on elevating people to the relatively obtainable middle classes. Really all that takes is a commitment to learn a specific trade or profession.
One of the biggest problems in this country IMHO is that people obsess over extreme wealth and have largely dismissed most working class and in many cases regular professional jobs. And the notion of college itself has become this sort of abstract concept of an institution to lift people out of having to do real work for a living. So unless you have a clear plan about how to use college to elevate your station in life, you have a high likelihood of taking on a hundred thousand in debt with only a vague idea of what you plan to do after you graduate.
Here’s a question regarding social mobility. Someone still has to do those low-level low paying Mike Rowe jobs that actually make society run. Who does them if everyone elevates themselves to college educated middle management professional?
Young people (I performed low-paying work until my 30s.) Old people. Part-time, secondary earner spouses. Guest workers.
People who can only perform low-level, low-paying work but who receive support funded by the rest of us so they can still live good lives. Oh wait that sounds like commie talk. I’ll go clean my monocle, wax my mustache, and drink some more cognac (it helps with my “trickle down” duties.)
More seriously, note that social mobility is not the same as income or wealth mobility, although they’re all related. And mobility is not equality. Although they’re correlated, and in a more equal society, it takes less change to move between strata. And mobility also includes moving down. So a high-mobility society, there can still be plenty of people doing that low-level work. It’s just that doing that work now says less about what you have done or will do, and less about your parents or kids.
Although I agree, who among us can honestly say we had a very good understanding of the world and all our choices when we were nineteen years old? Higher education is not for everyone, and I don’t mean that in a condescending way. There is need and honour in being a good tradesperson. A system taking advantage of the naïvété of young people is not fair and universities may not be honest about costs, funding, debt or prospects. The situation is even worse for international students. At some level there is a duty of good faith which so often seems to be lacking.
It’s perfectly possible and valid to be s college-educated tradesperson, as well: education is for the person, not their employer.
I also think that a lot of jobs requiring a college degree don’t need to. The whole way we conceive of education as a stepping stone to the white-collar world and nothing more depresses me.
Market forces would force a rise in what those low-level jobs pay to the point where someone is willing to do them. (Heck, pay me enough and even I would go around and empty people’s septic tanks.)
College is potentially a way someone from a low income family can transition into office or professional work.
That’s especially true of the rural and inner-city poor. They often attend small, underfunded schools. They need extra help to get into college. They often need to attend a community college and get the necessary prerequisites for college. Many of these children need tutoring to catch up.
We need need scholarships and extra help for the poor. That would included people of all races.
We should be looking at the economic background and education opportunities of children
I graduated with a degree in civil (structural) engineering. I only stayed in the profession for about a year (not including summer internships) before changing careers to busfintechsulting. But I think working in a field that is so closing integrated with actual trades gave me a bit of a different perspective from many of my peers who have only been students or worked in corporate office jobs pushing emails and Powerpoint.
If nothing else, working in trades is more tangible. You are actually out there building something and if you don’t do it correctly, you can create dangerous and expensive problems for people. As a 22 year old recent college grad directing work crews around a construction site, I needed to figure out how to command the respect of people who were often a lot older, sometimes ex-military, maybe weren’t native to the USA, basically men with real life experience who didn’t really have a lot of patience for bullshit.
In contrast, corporate America seems like mostly bullshit to me. Having the right degree or contacts gets you a position where you can describe work, theorize about work, sell work, maybe even assign and monitor work (if you can get past debating with your colleagues about what work should get done). But I find very few people can actually DO work that really ads value.
And in my observation, most of those people despise actual work and the people who do it. Some executive making a few hundred thousand a year has no problem budgeting a hundred thousand dollars on consultants to advise them on what sort of work to do. But the actual work itself they will micromanage to the hour.
I know this is somewhat OT, but this describes my workplace.
I work in a large research lab. Lots of people with engineering and physics degrees. But very few of them can do real lab work. Most of them spend all of their time talking, writing emails, going to meetings, traveling, etc. Oh, and taking credit for the work done by the (few) people actually working in the labs.
FWIW a primer on university admission rates. (Just 6% of students attend a university in the US with an admission rate below 25%).