[ExI] Social right to have a living

[Damien Sullivan]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 04:19:18PM +0100, BillK wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Damien Sullivan  wrote:
> > http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/02_economic_mobility_sawhill.aspx
> > and from it:
> > http://i46.tinypic.com/ve3go9.png
> > Particularly table 1. ?42% of American men whose fathers were in the
> > bottom quintile stayed there; 26% of Swedish men did so. ?8% of US men

> Europe isn't one country. As you mentioned, the UK is worse for social
> mobility than the US.
> (probably for different reasons).

The UK was slightly worse by the income elasticity measure.  It's still
a lot better by the quintile-escape measure, retaining 30% instead of
our 42%, and 12% making it to the top quintile.

Looking at Brookings PDF more...

Germany has 0.32 elasticity, between France (.41) and Sweden (.27);
Brookings calls them middle-mobility, vs. high-mobility Canada (.19) and
other Nordics.

Top fifth quintile is different; retention is 35-37% for US and Nordics,
but only 30% for UK.  Falling to bottom fifth is 10% US, 11% UK, 15-16%
for the others.

Of course, the US bottom quintile is relatively poorer than those of
the other countries, too: more people are trapped, and trapped in a
worse and shorter-lived place.

Per capita income growth was 1.9% per year between 1973 and 2001 in
both US and Western Europe.  More evenly distributed in Europe, of
course, vs. stagnant real wages in the US.

> Giulio was thinking of Italy, I was thinking of the UK.

I can't find stats on Italy, apart from your quote.  OTOH, no one holds
up Italy as an economic model.  The countries that *are*, in various
ways, champions of the "European social model", do better than the US in
social mobility.

-xx- Damien X-)