I would caution that "economic mobility" is a term of art that does not mean what most people intuit it to mean, usually conflating it with the ease of improving absolute financial position. You can easily improve your absolute financial position and still have "low mobility", and you can have "high mobility" while having minimal opportunity to improve your financial position. A limitation of economic mobility is that it is only comparable between countries with similar geographic/population size and with similar levels of wage compression. The US is an outlier in all three terms.

Average people want the opportunity to significantly improve their financial position, and economic mobility doesn't measure that. As a country, the US outperforms most other industrialized countries at the former.

Average people measure their financial position relative to others. Economic mobility precisely measures that.

Economic mobility doesn't measure relative financial position either. Economic mobility only indicates position relative to a (highly variable) income distribution within a country. A "high" income mobility does not imply high relative changes in financial position, nor vice versa.

At the extreme, very small differences in relative income can make you "highly mobile" even though you've barely moved your relative financial position. This is seen in smaller industrialized countries with very compressed wage distributions. People in low mobility countries can have better financial outcomes in both relative and absolute terms depending on the mathematical distribution function, and do in practice.

The term "economic mobility" is widely used to push misleading narratives precisely because most people don't understand what it measures.

What is the source of this claim? I see in this OECD report[1] the US is in the middle of the pack.

[1] http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/1-5%20generations.png

We have improved! You are correct. I was citing data from 2010-2012, when I was still wrong - we used to be 4th from the bottom.

That chart is so depressing. 5 generations?! To "approach the mean income"?

> Kid from poor impoverished rural town made big bugs as a software developer!

Freudian slip? Although if they make big bugs perhaps they won't make big bucks...