Social mobility

Andrew Hacker reviews several new books on class and inequality in the NY Review of Books. The table below summarizes both upward and downward mobility from a recent study. I've seen claims that social mobility in the US has decreased, and is now less than in some european countries (particularly Scandinavian countries in which university education is free). Nevertheless, you can see that about a third of kids from the top or bottom quintile will jump by two or more quintiles in their lives (the poor kids moving up and the rich kids falling from affluence). Furthermore, the distributions are relatively symmetric.



(BTW, the article by physicist Jeremy Bernstein on nuclear weapons and intelligence failures in the same issue is very good.)