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by lars
4050 days ago
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You seem to be talking about average wealth and social mobility. This is different from inequality, which is about the distance from the bottom to the top. Some of these results are counter intuitive. For example: There's data to show that the top quartile of earners in low inequality countries live longer than their top quartile counterparts in high inequality countries, even if the high inequality counterparts earn much more both in absolute and relative terms. Edit: Since this is getting downvoted, here's a talk that spends 17 minutes listing studies showing that this is in fact about inequality, not average income. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ7LzE3u7Bw |
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The relevance of social mobility in the discussion was because the GP assumes the correlation that the problems related to inequality/poverty is the result of a third factor that is cause of the other to: personal choices.
My position is that if this is the case, we should be observing strong social mobility in both ways. Surely there are a number of "deserving poor" that started life in a disadvantaged situation but are able to lift themselves out of that by intelligent choices and hard work, as well as there are privileged folks who make enough ill choices and land themselves in trouble.
IF this is not the case, we should adjust the level of agency that people are capable. To what degree is it personal choice able to influence the well being we enjoy in life.