It really depends on how you define social mobility. Immigrants in the US often jump from the bottom to top income quartiles within a single generation.
For those born in the US, there's less movement and that's exactly what would be expected in a system that has been relatively meritocratic for multiple generations. Regardless of whether of the previous generation excelled due to cultural or hereditary reasons, their children will likely inherit both. Children also inherit money, which is a factor. However, if money were the primary factor, poor immigrant families would tend to remain poor and they don't.
The times when there's a great deal of mobility between generations of native populations is when there's a change in structural obstacles (or benefits). This can be seen especially clearly in Jewish populations in the US when various discriminatory regulations were removed early last century or with (ethnically) Asian Americans later in the century. In both cases, many families made rapid gains in relative income and wealth. In the subsequent generation, children of the winners generally kept winning and metrics of "social mobility" displayed a decline, even though society had become objectively fairer than it had been two generations before.
This isn't to say society is "fair" now, only that simple inter-generational economic mobility comparisons poorly answer the question of where a conscientious person with no money would have the best chance of success.
Legally, no, but culturally yes - mostly because of family influence.
The immigrants children born in the US would be american. not immigrants. However, they are obviously going to get a lot of culture from their parents. They might get a second language when young, different customs, and more than likely different food. This was my grandmother. Most of her brothers were educated and lived decent lives, most definitely better than their parents.
My father - and his brothers and sisters - were split in how well they've done. The older children did just as well as the previous generation. They had less influence from the grandmother, but still carried a lot of traditions forward. The younger children had a rougher life after their father died (the older children were better able to cope).
My generation is likely the last that'll carry some of the traditions forward. We are basically normal folks. We have fond memories of eating Syrian food at Grandma's house, and most of us can cook a bit of it. It isn't often enough for our children to have fond memories of it. My generation really isn't passing that stuff along, even though it is part of our memory, our identities, and we might even talk about it in casual conversation. It just isn't a distinct enough part of our identity to pointedly pass along.
I agree, and believe that there is a strong case that the primary defining characteristic is cultural and skill-based. Which suggests that addressing the self-defeating culture and skills in the US underclass would be more effective in helping them than more direct methods of trying to prop them up.
Unfortunately as a society we are running in the other direction. :-(
> It really depends on how you define social mobility. Immigrants in the US often jump from the bottom to top income quartiles within a single generation.
If you read the FA, you see the same is the case in Canada. In general though the US has very low mobility for a developed nation. Canada is fairly average for a developed nation.
Why would you say social mobility is better in Canada vs. the US? Do you have any data to back that up?
You also have to remember that social mobility can be skewed by wealth distribution. Let's say a person goes from earning $75K to $100K in Canada. That might mean you moved from the 3rd quintile to the 5th quintile. But the same person moving from $75K to $125K in the US might only move from the 3rd quintile to the 4th, even though the US person overall improved their situation more.
The US does not do well on social mobility. Generally, poor families stay poor and rich families stay rich.
Also to be clear, the problem you cite does not exist. This is a percentage relationship between father-son earnings and doesn't have anything to do with quintiles or the magnitude of those earnings.
No offense, but that seems like a really odd way to measure social mobility because it's not measuring the resulting income level.
And after a few google searches, it appears that others have called out the challenges as well[1] and tried to work with other data sets. This analysis found very little different in income mobility between the US and EU and overall...
Canada has the most downward mobility while the U.S. has the least, with Sweden in the middle. We find some differences in upward mobility but these are somewhat smaller in magnitude.
It was a tidbit that I ran across in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9UmdY0E8hU which had some other interesting data points as well. Such as the fact that when you look at rich people per capita, it seems that social democracies like Canada, and Scandinavia create rich people more easily than the USA does.
For example if you look for people worth $30million+ per million people, Canada has 186 while the USA has 126. That's about a third more per capita.
And watching the video, you find that 42% of the children of the bottom 20% in the USA wind up in the bottom 20%. Very little of Canada does anything like that poorly.
Not really, a lot of the income inequality comes from having a large underclass stuck in a cycle of generational poverty for various reasons (often/mostly related to structural racism).
There's plenty of "data to back that up," and the delta is getting bigger every year. Fire up any search engine or look on any reliable media source (doesn't have to be a Canadian one). They've even talked about it on CNN (if you consider that journalism).
I'd be interested to see that, and another axis for race. I'd imagine the opportunity for social mobility for most Canadian First Nations people, for example, is pretty grim.
What is it with this idea that things are always better in Canada? Without any data to back it up? Considering Canada has been blamed at the UN for their treatment of First Nations, I wouldn't race to this conclusion. Considering how terrible it is in Canada, it would be good to question what can be done in Canada instead of trying to diminish the problem by "betting" that at least we are better than Americans ??!
I live in a heavily native populated area in Canada, the anecdotes I hear from them is it is far better to be an American Native than a Canadian one because of the Indian Act which doesn't grant them title to their lands, so they legally can't own a house on a reserve and use it for collateral to obtain loans or pass it to another generation as a way of transferring wealth. Americans also have much more freedom to do what they want on their own land such as building casinos or whatever they want, here it requires navigating the ancient Indian Act.
I vaguely recall learning that the collective ownership of the First Nations lands was at their own request. Before Europeans, First Nations had no concept of individual land ownership.
Your point still stands of course, I just thought that should be pointed out.
Anecdotally, I had high school friends in rural Oregon who were something like 1/4 native American, and they all got a free college education because of it.
It's hard to draw such conclusion without data. My income more than doubled after moving from Toronto to NY. Adjusting for cost of living, the gap is paradoxally, even larger. I'm not extraordinary, bit the opportunities in the States are just better (for me).
Which is an important but under-appreciated fact.