[ExI] Social right to have a living

[Damien Sullivan]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 03:17:37PM +0100, BillK wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 3:04 PM, Giulio Prisco wrote:
> > WHAT???????? Damien, please elaborate.
> >
> > On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 3:36 PM, Damien Sullivan wrote:
> >> By everything I've seen, Europe is doing better in social mobility than
> >> the US is. ?Or at least parts of Europe are. ?More small businesses and
> >> entrepreneurship too.
> 
> I think he means 'better' only in comparison to the wealth pyramid in
> the US where a tiny % own almost all the wealth.  It is still pretty
> bad in Europe.

Bad compared to what?  What's the evidence, vs. received wisdom?

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
climbed to the top quintile, vs. 11% of Swedish men.  Note that the
baseline for totally random mobility, no correlation between parent and
child, would be 20%.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_MobilityAnalysis.pdf
has stuff too, including rising American belief in social mobility, even
while actual mobility decreases.
Father-son income elasticity is 0.47 in US; only UK is higher, at 0.5.
France is 0.41, Sweden 0.27.
It has 46% of American children born to the bottom quintile staying there. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/opinion/13fri2.html
more of the same

-xx- Damien X-)