Social Mobility (OECD and selected other countries): Number 27
How about Social Mobility, that widespread assumption that American sons and daughters, if they worked hard and played by the rules, would have a better life than their parents? This may be true in some countries, but increasingly not in the United States.
But in groundbreaking economic analysis, titled “The Fading American Dream,” economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shown that the prospects for children to earn more than their parents “have faded over the past half-century in the United States. The fraction of children earning more than their parents fell from approximately 90 percent for children born in 1940 to around 50 percent for children entering the labor market today. Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class.” What would help reverse this downward trend? “A more even distribution of economic growth, rather than more growth, would allow more children to fulfill their dreams.”
Why is the United States only 27th on this list? The OECD used several pillars to calculate its rankings. The US ranked high on Work Opportunities and Technology Access pillars but had the lowest scores in the region on the Fair Wages pillar; further, it ranked low on the Social Protection pillar and the Health pillar, where it performs “quite poorly.” Indeed, in America today, a child’s future ability to earn is closely tied with the socio-economic standing of its parents. “The game is half over,” wrote philosopher Matthew Stewart, “once you’ve selected your parents.”
The Scandinavian countries—Denmark (85.2), Norway (83.6), Finland (83.6), Sweden (83.5), along with Iceland (82.7), the Netherlands (82.4), and Switzerland (82.1) In addition, Germany ranked 11th (78.8), France ranked 12th (76.7), Canada and Japan ranked 14th (76.1), and South Korea ranked 25th (71.4)—all having social mobility scores higher than the United States (70.4). The Russian Federation ranked 39th (64.7), China ranked 45th (61.5), and Mexico ranked 58th (52.6).
Source: Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream” Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940,” Science 356 (6336) (April 24, 2017), https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal4617#editor-abstract. Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy,” The Atlantic, June 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/.
