meehawl

all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned

Social Climbers

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Duncan, et al. (1993) use a variety of national longitudinal data sets to study transitions out of poverty in seven countries for families with children 17 or younger during the early to mid-1980s. Examining post-tax, post-transfer income, they find that one-year transition rates out of the bottom decile of the income distribution are generally quite uniform across countries, with rates in six of the seven countries between 21 percent and 27 percent (the rate in Sweden was 16 percent). The United States was near the middle of the distribution, at 23 percent
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There is also no evidence that mobility is significantly different in the United States than it is in other countries. This suggests that the United States has not only the highest year-to-year inequality in the industrialized world, but also likely has the highest lifetime inequality among similar countries.

Overall, therefore, it is possible that one cause of the increased in public discontent in the United States is the growth in the inequality of economic rewards, unaccompanied by any increase in the accessibility of those rewards to workers.

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