[mfitton]

As far as the change over time goes, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you that social mobility used to be higher. I think part of the reasoning for that was an incredibly strong domestic economy compared to the rest of the world, as well as a lower baseline (strides in standard of living and pay get harder and harder to increase the further you increase them).

As far as the comparisons globally, they're ranking countries based on "education, access to technology, healthcare, social protection and employment opportunities" which has the implicit assumption baked in that those 5 metrics are proxies for social mobility. They might be, but why not actually measure the thing you care about? Social mobility to me means changing social classes based on income. Something like moving from a 25k/yr household to a 75k/yr household, or moving from a 75k/yr household to a 200k/yr household, maybe another jump up to 500k or a million/yr.

It seems to me that there is a much more equal distribution of incomes and outcomes in the countries you linked. That makes me think it would be much harder to go from being middle class to upper class in those countries than in the US, simply because almost everybody is part of the middle class. Thus, I think if you measured what most immigrants (and what I) actually care about when we hear about "social mobility," then the countries you mentioned would have great social mobility into the middle class, and basically no other social mobility.

[throwawaydizjsj]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/americ...

Actually the data I've seen states one is way more likely to go from the bottom 20% to the top 20% in many other countries than if you were doing it in the USA.

I'm open to any counter data, but I've read these same numbers in several sources and you can tease it out of my first link.

[jandrewrogers]

This effectively defines social mobility as wages being compressed around the median. Small changes in income will create large changes in percentile since it is a relative measure in these cases. For countries where wages are not compressed around the median, like the US, large absolute increases in income produce small increases in percentile.

To put it another way, it is much easier to increase your income in the US but harder to increase your income ranking. I think most people would prefer to have more money than a higher ranking given a choice between the two.

[throwawaydizjsj]

So this is just moving goal posts IMO. End of day it's harder to go from the poorest to the richest. Speaking as someone that was born below the poverty line and but later was earning in the top 1% in the USA, going from sub 14k to 36k was gigantically huge...going from 50k to 250k in as short of a span didnt affect me very much, but moving to France and not worrying about medical bills or insurance companies again was a game changer ... YMMV and everyone is different