Economic mobility - the quintessentially American idea (ideal, really) that any one, no matter how humble their origins, can become wealthy - has taken some terrible hits in the last few years. Writing in The New Republic, Timothy Noah notes that income heritability ("a measure of how determinative one generation’s relative income status - what we used to call ‘station in life’ - will be of the next generation’s relative income status') is much higher in the U.S. than in many of the countries that people once emigrated to America from, in search of greater opportunities. “Mobility in the United States has fallen dramatically behind mobility in other comparably developed democracies," he writes.
A 2007 study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development combined a number of previous estimates and found income heritability to be greater in the United States than in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and France. The United Kingdom, which had been far less mobile than the United States during the late nineteenth century, brought up the rear, but this time it was just a bit less mobile than the United States. Thanks to a 2012 recalculation by Miles Corak, an economist at the University of Ottawa, we can now add Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan to the list of societies that are more mobile than the United States.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Why Some States Are More Economically Mobile Than Others - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities
