Social mobility is a tool of the bourgeoisie to use hope and prosperity to rob the proletariat of their revolutionary spirit. How shameful!

🤔

I haven't read the study cited but there is another confounding factor (among many) which is the range of affluence in the country. If a country has a very high upper range of wealth (as in, say, the US or UK, where billionaires are a thing), if you divide the socioeconomic classes into the same number of buckets as a country with a much tighter spread, they will be much further apart from each other. In which case, even if the economic mobility is the same in absolute or even relative terms, i.e. a given child in either country has a 50% chance of rising 50% above his parents in income, the apparent mobility in the country with the wider spread will be lower, because that 50% increase in income will be less likely to cross one of the arbitrary borderlines between "classes" even though that person would have experienced the same 50% increase in standard of living as their neighbor in the other country who crossed into a "different" socioeconomic bracket.

The total spread shouldn't affect the correlation since it's scaled to the variance.

Assuming that's how they produced those numbers obviously.

the variance in what measure?

The variance of the income.

As in the expected value of the square of an individual's income minus the square of the expected value of that individual's income.

I'm talking about the size of the categories used to define "low income" and "high income"

Those are usually in terms of national percentile.

exactly

I don't see your point.

Well, in a small african nation if you make eleven dollars a year you're in the top 1%, so it's way easier to get a huge leg up on your parents. In America, it's like 100 grand a year or some shit, so it's significantly more difficult to, say, go from middle to upper class

Depends on the general trend of wealth in the country.

But, uncephalized, unless I read the study wrong, they're actually measuring the absolute amount of money rather than the individual countries subjective class distinctions

The difference in moneys made a year rather than the difference in, say, tax bracket

The wealth of a country doesn't necessarily relate to income mobility.

@Louis Carlos Fer they are using a pretty sophisticated measure which is percent of variance inherited across and within families

but hang on a sec

Say we have two countries, Egalitaria and Ancapistan. Both have their incomes divided into quartiles:

Egalitaria: Q1 $0 - $20,000, Q2 $20,001 - $55,000, Q3 $55,001 - $120,000, Q4 $120,001+
Ancapistan: Q1 $0 - $30,000, Q2 $30,001 - $100,000, Q3 $100,001 - $400,000, Q4 $400,000+

In Egalitaria a person could go from 'low income' to 'medium income' by jumping from $12k to $24k, whereas in Ancapistan, both of those incomes are still in Q1, because the spread of incomes is much larger, and so the categories are larger as well--but in either country, their income and material standard of living would still have doubled.

Presumably being in Ancapistan makes gaining $12k in income easier than it would be in Egalitaria.

easier isn't the right word.

I should say "more likely"

Otherwise Ancapistan wouldn't have a greater wealth spread.

Perhaps. That would have to be compiled from data on historical economic mobility. 😉

hard to come by in fictional countries

The whole point is to compare mobility.

It is possible that a nation with a higher wealth spread has lower absolute mobility but I think those charts generally chart relative mobility.

Certainly possible in a more rigid class-based society.

I'm not throwing shade on that study btw, so far it seems to be pretty rigorous.

@Fondboy I'm in AEST. It's currently 1640 here

So pick a time after 2200 my time, preferably on the weekend but whenever. Let's have a chat

I still don't see why that can't happen here

My money is now on fondboy having a discord-debate-ASMR fetish. Must be why he always asks for voice and records people

We're constantly blue-balling him with all this text debate

lol

it's a terrible format since every time he;s been in voice there are like 3 people trying to get a word in edgewise

we prolly all sound like idiots

maybe that is his purpose

I mean

I admire his bravery violating multiple state's laws