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Also, on a purely pragmatic note, capital is mobile. If you penalize the rich, they just move, and then the new system will stop class mobility.
<meme>hahahaha no</meme>
There are countless places that are more than happy to accept capital with few questions asked. Including, funnily enough, the US itself.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-becomin...
Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.
Mississippi has a GDP per capita of $53k.
11% of Mississippi's population has no health insurance.
Mississippi is one of the highest inequality states in the US. Its median income is $30k. It's Gini Index is 49%.
It has poor physical and social infrastructure by advanced country standards.
Spain has a GDP per capita of $35k. Its median income is $20k.
Everyone in Spain is covered with modern healthcare.
Spain has a nationwide high speed rail network. A lot of its infrastructure is top-notch compared to Mississippi and even wealthy parts of the US.
This is despite Spain having some of the highest inequality in Europe, and undoubtedly a host of other problems, including decreasing affordability for average people. Yet it's inequality is far lower than Mississippi, with a 31% Gini Index.
So perhaps GDP per capita doesn't tell the full story. Also, I'm being fair by comparing Mississippi to one of the poorer countries in Europe, not one of the middle or wealthier countries.
Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries.
This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizens.
A top 10% earner in the US would be in the top 1% in Canada. An AVERAGE earner in the US is about top 10-15% in Canada.
Class mobility (or social mobility) indicates ability to go from lower to middle class, working class to generational wealth, etc... All income statistics show the US as having a particularly large amount of high income earners, self made millionaires (and billionaires), etc...
As do I. They all seem to have moved to cosmopolitan places with advanced economies, not Mississippi. I also have friends and relatives that have migrated to Spain. Overall, there is no mass migration in either direction.
> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality
A high speed rail network and universal healthcare are not statistics, they are as real as it gets.
But I definitely agree that Spain is probably not a good place if you want to make an absolute shitload of money.
But yeah, some statistics indeed are just likelihood that the ranking order changes, or even self-reported...
It's like the definition of "middle class". Everyone thinks they're middle class. The OECD calls anyone with 75% to 200% of the average income "middle class". Classically the term means you are above the labour class but not noble.
Statistics might not be ideal, but making policy decisions based on anecdotes is far, far worse.
My priorities do not align with your postulating
Quality of life, by a number of metrics like HDI, is higher in (Western) European countries compared to the US. And even while total salaries might be lower, healthcare infrastructure, life expectancy, food quality etc are better.
Pure take-home money doesn’t tell you the entire picture.
And for pure anecdata, I have friends who migrated to the States and then moved back to EU when they had kids because EU seemed like the safer and better place to raise them.
You can find anecdata to tell pretty much any story you want to tell though.
AFAIK class mobility is measured by class at birth compared to adulthood (i believe as measured by net household wealth)
I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.
I'll stay thanks.
It’s also due to the lack of investment in heathcare, education and other public services over the last 14yrs
Britain still has very many extremely rich people - London has more billionaires than NY - Serious Money by Caroline Knowles is an interesting exploration of the subject
>Individual studies have estimated absolute mobility rates for recent cohorts of roughly 50% in the US (Chetty et al. 2017), 53% in Canada (Ostrovsky 2017), 70% in Germany (Bönke, Harnack, and Luthen 2019; Stockhausen 2018), and 77% in Sweden (Liss, Korpi, and Wennberg 2019).
From https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2020/wp-2020-11-tren...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
Support ambition all you want - just don't come crying to us when the B2C market dries up entirely.
Look at this chart: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Look at the divergence from the US.
Canada's GDP per capita is barely above 2013 levels (~4%), meanwhile the US' is 60% higher. Wages in Canada have been stagnant, there is NO social mobility at all, it's completely fucked.
Where I came up with this statement? Actually knowing things about economics and following the CURRENT numbers. Not a 2017 study (which probably took a couple years and using data from 2015 or earlier) which is completely worthless in 2025.