re: #217 Daniel Ballard

So those HS, Trades & college graduates that endure minimum wake jobs don’t get better income overall? For decades? Ridiculous.

I’m not sure what argument you’re trying to make here.

There are two different things to examine: intra-generational mobility and inter-generational mobility.

On the “inter” front, the US lags behind Europe somewhat (or at least it seems to - it’s apparently a fairly hard thing to quantify according to researchers, and this isn’t my field of expertise). That means that if you’re born into a certain quartile of income, say, you’re more likely to stay there in the US than if you had been born in Europe.

On the “intra” front, (some) people progress through various jobs over their working lives and become better paid (though it’s worth pointing out that a lot of people don’t - there are plenty of older folks working on the checkout at the grocery store). However, even that isn’t necessarily true economic or social mobility, since a certain amount of income progression is assumed as the baseline for, say, a “middle-class” person.

Finally, middle-class wages (and below) have stagnated in real terms for the past 30 years, while some things that are not typically factored into inflation (e.g., college education) now cost far more than they did a generation ago, so you can argue that the bottom portion of the population has gone backwards in terms of their ability to maintain their lifestyle/social position.

Anyway, I’d like to see evidence of upwards social mobility among a broadly-defined majority of the population, if that’s what’s being claimed in contrast to my observations.