[bjornsing]

I don’t think that measurement of social mobility makes much sense in this context.

Sure, moving from lower working class to upper middle class is probably easier in Sweden than in many other countries. But the thing is: it doesn’t make much of a difference.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the Nordic welfare state kind of games the social mobility score in this way, by having such a compressed income distribution. If you go from $20k after taxes to $35k after taxes you’ve moved through more or less the whole income distribution, but your life is pretty much the same.

[oblio]

The thing is, there's only 1 situation where being a part of a certain socioeconomic group sucks. Being poor.

So any country that optimizes for improving that, kind of by definition, improves the average happiness of its citizens.

[ethbr0]

The report itself [0] notes many of the contradictions in the US:

> "Despite scoring high on the Work Opportunities (83.0) pillar—because of its low unemployment rate—as well as on the Technology Access pillar (90.2), it has the lowest score in the region on the Fair Wages pillar (43.8 against an average of 64.6 for the region). With an incidence of low pay (less than two-thirds of median wages) at 24.9, it has one of the shares of low-paid workers among OECD countries. The lack of effective social protection in the United States also translates into a low score on the Social Protection pillar (61.7). The minimum guaranteed income benefits for a family with two children (where one partner is out of work) is only 20% of median income. The United States could also improve on the Health pillar, where it performs quite poorly compared to peers in its region (75.8) due to a low healthy life expectancy at birth (66.6 years)."

When you average things down to a single number, you lose a lot of nuance.

For the US, the data the report collected generally supports something like 'You have the opportunity to succeed greatly, and be rewarded extremely well, but this requires financial resources at birth.' While also being true that 'If you are less successful, there are few and poor support nets for you, and serious pitfalls to avoid (f.ex. health care costs).'

[0] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....

[joshuamorton]

> 'You have the opportunity to succeed greatly, and be rewarded extremely well, but this requires financial resources at birth

This is the opposite of financial mobility.

[ethbr0]

No, it is not. The opposite would be that it requires financial resources of the class you want to be part of to be part of a class.

Which wasn't what I (or the report) said: the idea is that it takes some level of financial resources as a prerequisite for a chance at top-level success.

[joshuamorton]

Yes yes, class mobility but only for the already wealthy. Tell me more.

[ethbr0]

Which part of the report do you see as equating "financial resources" (my words) with "wealthy" (your words)?

[yunohn]

> If you go from $20k after taxes to $35k after taxes you’ve moved through more or less the whole income distribution, but your life is pretty much the same.

100% agreed - my sibling comment about NL also implies the same.