"... Looking at this in YOUR context which has NOTHING to do with Grace's quoted comment, provides a poor picture for anything except these socialist author's pseudo or useless conclusions. ..."
A comparison of social mobility between Europe and the U.S. is perfectly in order as it addresses the ideological twist that Grace tried to introduce into her argument by mentioning LBJ. The fact is that the social programs in Europe are much more developed and have interestingly enough resulted in greater upward mobility than the U.S. with the notable exception of the U.K. The U.K. case is addressed nicely in the study mentioned below.
However, I am not surprised that YOU don't like the message the charts and my post convey. Your ideology consistently trumps reality. However, the facts are quite well supported by other studies.
suttontrust.com
"... Conclusion
Social mobility and equality of opportunity have once again become issues of political and social concern in the recent past. Our research has highlighted the decline in intergenerational income mobility in Britain over the last few generations of school leavers. The wider focus of our research is to understand better whether the extent of intergenerational mobility seen in Britain is mirrored in other developed countries and to measure the role of education in this process. The research we have described offers a comparable benchmark of Britain’s performance in this dimension. The results show that Britain and the United States have the lowest levels of cross-generation mobility, lying well below Canada and the Nordic countries. ..."
And here from a Wall Street Journal article:
"As rich-poor gap widens in U.S., class mobility stalls
First in a Series
post-gazette.com
Friday, May 13, 2005
By David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal
...
Despite the widespread belief that the U.S. remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity. Miles Corak, an economist for Canada's national statistical agency who edited a recent Cambridge University Press book on mobility in Europe and North America, tweaked dozens of studies of the U.S., Canada and European countries to make them comparable. "The U.S. and Britain appear to stand out as the least mobile societies among the rich countries studied," he finds. France and Germany are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so.
...
In 1992, though, Mr. Solon, the Michigan economist, shattered the conventional academic wisdom, arguing in the American Economic Review that earlier studies relied on "error-ridden data, unrepresentative samples, or both" and misleadingly compared snapshots of a single year in the life of parent and child rather than looking over longer periods. There is "dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research," he said. Subsequent research work confirmed that.
As Mr. Mazumder, the Chicago Fed economist, put it in the title of a recent book chapter: "The apple falls even closer to the tree than we thought."
..."
And here is a chart from the NY Times:
nytimes.com
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