Replies

"It is true that economic growth creates inequalities, always and everywhere. In a market economy, however, such inequalities do not create trans-generational economic classes. Only static economies do that. That is the experience of the US, where new economic inequalities do not become social inequalities. Indeed, they subvert them."

Actually, I read a study somewhere on the net that there is more inter-generational economic mobility in the UK than the US. The economic mobility in the US is way overdone. It is part of the national ethos, and that has its own import, but the numbers don't support the assertion.

Ah, I read it in the Wall Street Journal.

CAPITAL By DAVID WESSEL

How Parents, Genes and Success Intersect May 26, 2005; Page A2

Incoming email suggests that recent Wall Street Journal stories on mobility from one generation of Americans to the next confirm readers' prejudices: Some read the stories as proof that the American glass is half full; others read it as evidence that it's half empty.

The opening story reported several facts: Escalators of social mobility haven't compensated for the growing distance between economic cellar and penthouse; America has become more unequal in the past 35 years, but it's no more common for people to rise from poverty to prosperity or to fall from wealth to the middle class. Researchers find less intergenerational mobility in the U.S. than academics believed a couple of decades ago. And available evidence suggests that an American's economic fate is more closely tied to his or her parents than a continental European's.