If you must scope your argument that narrowly, it does not hold. The US also has the greatest opportunity and socioeconomic mobility in the world and this has only improved. Your attempting to piece together a narrative from disparate data while ignoring the world, even though we already track measures for what you're talking about and they all show great improvements.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
>The US also has the greatest opportunity and socioeconomic mobility in the world
Hahaha no. We are lagging behind Canada, Australia, Spain, for example, and not by a small margin[1]
>we already track measures for what you're talking about
Yes! That's my point!
>and they all show great improvements.
No they do not! They do the opposite!
See the little numbers in square brackets, like [1]? They refer to footnotes. There are links in the footnotes. There's data there, data that supports what I'm saying.
Try arguing in the same way: make your statements quantifiable, and follow up with references that support your statements. It's fun, and we all learn something!
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...
Talking about a country with population of ~325M which we both happen to live in far from being merely "random examples" in my opinion.
>higher education is not necessary to fill the 6M blue collar jobs
6M jobs in a country of 325M. That's 2 years worth of high school graduates for you. Not exactly inspiring, don't you think?
>The people at the bottom [...] are much better off than the people at the bottom even 50 years ago.
I made my case above why I can't agree with that statement, with sources. If you have a different metric, please provide it, with sources. Then we can discuss that.
>You can't [...] ignore [..] opportunity available today.
Sure, there' plenty of opportunity for some people - including you and me, given that we're on HN. Arguably there's less opportunities for vast amounts of others. Less opportunities than there was in the 70's, in particular.
You can ignore that, but that's a part how we got Trump. Saying that the lives of poor people are improving doesn't seem to bode well with the said poor people.