[throwaway22032]

A company, not the same company.

I don't think that social mobility can be measured statistically, because it depends on people actually trying. I actually think that the UK does have fairly high social mobility _but_ the vast majority of people get stuck in local maxima, and the laws are influenced by that (e.g. stuff like obsession with the mediocre outcome).

Having said that, the index you've pasted is complete bollocks. I don't know what they are measuring but it has nothing to do with what I would consider social mobility (e.g. ability to move into a different social class or perhaps earn a significantly different amount to your parents). The factors they use seem super focused on socialist policies which I don't think have anything to do with mobility.

[IdiocyInAction]

Self employment is 3 times higher in the UK than in the US actually: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SL.EMP.SELF.ZS/r...

[jltsiren]

Interesting that you consider it socialist, because the World Economic Forum has often been considered as the embodiment of neoliberalism. Around 2000, when there were huge anti-globalization protests by left / green / anarchist activists around the world, WEF was one of the primary targets.

[throwaway22032]

My use of the term "socialist" was lazy.

I think that the main issue is that it tries to come up with a metric that works across every country which is basically pointless because a lot of them are failed states where income information isn't reliable or meaningful.

So they come up with stuff like "how high is teenage pregnancy" and "what is the male female work balance" which they define as being proxies for social mobility I assume because if you have five kids at age 20 and you're forced to stay at home then you have none.

The problem is that it just introduces a billion ways to influence the actual rankings, they are value judgements.

If you look at well functioning countries only, then you can pretty much look at how many people in the bottom decile of parental household income end up in the top decile of household income.

You still have the issue though that this only tells you how the distribution actually ends up, not how it _could_ look in a specific country if everyone actually tried their hardest to climb the social/financial ladder.