Narrative is important because the language it provides frames a way of life for many who haven't framed their own perspective based on the information they have and haven't seen. It's easy to pickup a narrative, it's far more difficult to dig through and generate your own perspective. It's even more critical because childhood education relies on providing narrative frameworks because children often don't have enough information of processes yet to think critically.

The reason I say this is as you point out, in the US we frame everything as being highly mobile. The illusory framing of our society in "the American dream" in K-12 education and freedoms dangles this carrot of possibility of high social mobility to children. It's not completely invalid, it is possible to make massive transitions in socioeconomic brakets, but it's just a framing of the rare exceptions, not the norms.

Most of us are going to be the norms, so these narratives are a disservice to people about what their real socioeconomic mobility potential and probability is. It's fine to dream, aim high, and shoot for the moon as a society-- that promotes growth and avoids stagnation. At the same time, we should be very clear what is and isn't a moonshot that way many aren't so resentful when they later discover what they thought was reasonable was actually incredibly difficult bordering on impossible. What's possible and what's probable need to be distinguished and the American dream framing doesn't talk to probability.

There's this whole lie painted to children that the US is somehow a meritocracy when it's not. Merit can help, but it isn't everything and we need people to understand this.

I've seen those reports myself. However they don't note anything about the entire class changing. Today even the lowest cast things nothing about having an entire encyclopedia in their pocket (a smart phone), 40 years ago encyclopedias were something you needed to be middle class to have one in your house, and nobody could have them in a pocket (meaning you both could afford one, and the space to store it at home)

Going back farther, 120 years ago cars were the play thing of the super rich. Now the poor have much nicer cars (including options like electric start, not to mention the unheard of AC), that are fast and never break (by todays standard they break down all the time).

I can't help but read this as a kind of "let them eat cake" argument. Sure, some cars have electric starters now... how does that matter? Plenty of poor, working class people do not own cars. They're getting priced out of the cities they've lived in their whole lives. Working class wages have been stagnant for decades. Healthcare and education costs have risen much faster than inflation. A huge percentage of Americans are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

But yes, they do have access to cell phones and refrigerators, so good for them.

Look at the kinds of projects apartments and leaky rural shacks the poor of the 50s-70s lived in. You might have to combine five to get what we today consider one working set of appliances and utilities.

Section 8 apartments and double wides are such a massive step up from that. There will always be a bottom of the economic latter. But that bottom has moved up a lot over the past couple generations.

Mobility is a somewhat separate topic from what standard of living constitutes the bottom.

I'm not denying that. Of course average standards are better now than they were in the 1950's. But that argument is frequently used as a distraction to avoid talking about very achievable ways that we in America could improve living standards even further, or about very real ways in which lower class people are still suffering even though they might have an Xbox at home. All of the problems I mentioned in my above comment are still valid even though a section 8 apartment is better than a tin shed, yet you didn't address any of them. "There will always be a bottom of the economic ladder" is not an excuse for the wealthiest nation on earth to still allow people to be financially ruined for visiting the ER, for example.

Also, the myth of mobility is not an entirely separate topic, in that it's another distraction frequently employed to place problems on the individual and avoid talking about systemic changes that could take place to benefit people on a broader scale.

Their standard of living is going up.

And yet, if they or a family member have to visit the emergency room, they will likely be financially ruined.

I recently visited the ER for some chest pain which amounted to nothing and was charged $4,000 for it. Imagine what that would do to the 60% (!!) of Americans who can't come up with $500 for an emergency (see my top comment about stagnant wages, rising rent, and astronomical health care costs).

Comments like yours are easily and frequently used to distract from very real systemic problems that working class people still face. Access to cheaper smartphones doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but food and housing security and the ability to get medical treatment without fear of going bankrupt sure do.

I'm not so sure about this. Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years, I'm willing to bet most will say no. The world is far more competitive, has undergone a large amount of cultural decay and fragmentation, and certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive.

> certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive

This is what classist "but they have refrigerators" arguments love to obfuscate. Yes, a poorer person might still have a roof over their head and a smartphone. But they're spending a huge chunk of their income on rent. They want to move somewhere cheaper, but there are fewer opportunities, or their pay would go down too. They avoid seeking medical care because of how astronomically expensive it is, which makes future negative outcomes more likely (and more expensive). And seeking higher education amounts to taking on tens of thousands in debt from predatory lenders, with only a few college majors actually amounting to a good ROI.

It's not that poor people now have it worse than poor people in the 50's, it's that we shouldn't set the bar that fucking low in the richest country on earth. Our society could do so much more. That's what all these commenters are missing, willfully or otherwise.

Adam Smith observed many years ago that if you give people more money they tend to spend it on better dwelling places.

Medical care has always been expensive. We have made a lot of progress: 200 years ago those ER bills would be zero: because everyone just died from what we consider solvable today.

1. Have you observed that almost every other developed, first-world nation on earth has some kind of nationalized health care service for its citizens, rather than leaving them to fend for themselves?

2. Have you considered that Adam Smith's anecdata from 200 years ago may not be accurate anymore?

Having made progress since 200 years ago is no excuse for piss-poor progress compared to where we could be.

I've seen lots of people follow what I think are stupid things. You think national healthcare is a good idea, I don't. (I think we went wrong by making health insurance come from your job, and all the things you hate about our system are a result ofthe current system being good for the employers)

You don't need to get insurance through your employer anymore. That's what the ACA did. You can buy it on a marketplace and choose from dozens of plans, employed or not. It costs hundreds a month for an individual - thousands for families - for barebones insurance that covers almost nothing.

I'll restate my earlier point. The vast majority of Americans would suffer huge financial setbacks (to put it lightly) from one visit to the emergency room. Health insurance historically being tied to your employer isn't the problem, health insurance itself is the problem. It's a predatory industry which has successfully lobbied to make healthcare immensely lucrative for themselves and financially ruinous for average people.

It's interesting to me that you still think nationalized healthcare is "stupid" even though dozens of countries [1] have successfully implemented it. And yet you can look at the system we have here in the US, and say "oh it's just that it's tied to your employer. Otherwise it'd be fine." Healthcare isn't a commodity and shouldn't be marketed as such. The evidence that nationalized health systems can work well is everywhere. I also refused to see it for a while because of internalized fear of the "socialism" boogeyman, but turns out you can just do it and still have a capitalist market for other things. Go figure.

1. https://www.health.ny.gov/regulations/hcra/univ_hlth_care.ht...

>Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years

What people say is often very different from the truth. It is hard to measure make an objective measure of quality of life, but that doesn't mean the subjective measure is actually correct.

Subjective measures are everything when considering quality of life.

Fine, then subjectivity I conclude they are liars. Since you don't accept objective facts you have to agree I'm right for me and we are done.

Suit yourself, but this kind of thing matters in a democracy where everyone has the capacity to influence the direction of the government.

High rent is a reflection of that. The problems start when the standard of living grows faster than your income.

Edit: High rent grants you access to higher paying jobs but not everyone actually gets those.

It's interesting how political ideology and religion has so much in common when it concerns social mobility.

There are many different religions in the world, but I don't think it is a coincidence that the major religions tends to be very convenient for the top 1%.

They often teach that your life situation is a result of your actions (either in this life or the previous life), and if you follow all the rules you will be rewarded in this life or the next. There's a natural order to things, and it is all part of $deity's plan

Maybe people are waking up and realising that there are more to life?

Edit: This is not a rant against religion as a personal choice. I don't care about what you believe, so long as you do not use your religion as a tool to control politics.

> My college US history course ~20 years ago very much drove home the fact that (at least at the time) social mobility in the US was the same as in India.

This is flatly false, and to be honest it's a little embarrassing that you would parrot it without Googling it (which you were happy to do to pull up a tangential stat that didn't contradict the dishonest narrative you're pushing). The US is ranked 27th out of the 82 countries the World Economic Forum studied in 2020, and India is ranked _76th_.[1]

On top of that, note that Denmark is ranked #1 for social mobility in the WEF study. The relevant topic to this thread is pre-transfer social mobility (ie before taxes/welfare), where the US and Denmark look almost identical![2]

That doesn't suggest that Denmark's policies are useless: transfers are an effective poverty-fighting tool, and I have no doubt that the economic floor in Denmark is a much more comfortable one. I'm all for a stronger welfare state due to the human costs of poverty.

But this is all irrelevant to the topic at hand, and the false claim all over this thread that the US is uniquely bad at providing opportunity and mobility to those without it. We're better than the majority of the developed world at this, partially due to the productivity incentives created by how much more precarious poverty here is compared to OECD countries with the strongest safety nets. I should be clear: I don't think we're at an optimal point on the spectrum, and I think sacrificing some economic dynamism to palliate the human costs of poverty is worthwhile. But the claim that we're uniquely socially immobile by global or even OECD standards is a flat lie, propagated by people too simple-minded to understand the concept of a trade-off.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index...

[2] When looking exclusively at wages (before taxes and transfers), Danish and American social mobility are very similar. It is only after taxes and transfers are taken into account that Danish social mobility improves, indicating that Danish economic redistribution policies are the key drivers of greater mobility. Additionally, Denmark's greater investment in public education did not improve educational mobility significantly, meaning children of non-college educated parents are still unlikely to receive college education, although this public investment did result in improved cognitive skills amongst poor Danish children compared to their American peers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

I’m going to ignore your insults and escalatory language and just point out the fact that the WEF’s definition of social mobility is vastly different than the one I mentioned. You’re conflating two completely different metrics. I’m happy to learn new things, have a constructive discussion, and to admit I’m wrong if that’s the case, but not interested in engaging in mud-slinging based on things my college teacher said twenty years ago.

A sibling comment to yours explains succinctly why your comment misunderstands mine: standard of living in the US is higher than India. The WEF’s metric is based on ranking the standard of living of each country against each other. It can be simultaneously true that the US standard of living is higher than India, and also that people born lower class in the US improve their lot at the same rate as people in India.

>social mobility in the US was the same as in India. The surprise, of course, was that India has a caste system, while the US narrative is freedom; if you work hard, you’ll get ahead.

The difference is that the average standard of living ins the US far exceeds India's standard.

Yes you may not make your way to billionaire high class status from the lower class but you certainly can drastically improve your circumstances by working hard. The alternative is not to work hard which definitely isn't going to make your life better.

Additionally, I'd like to know how you think society should be shaped? It seems the other option would be to follow a more socialist or communist route where "equity" is the ultimate utopia... and that typically just brings everyone down to a lower status instead of raising everyone to a higher one.

A milion of immigrants that come to US every year disagree with your "fact".

So do hundreds of millions of Americans, which is why the statistics are surprising. But having hope doesn’t make it happen. This is partly why it’s important to understand the reality of US social mobility.

US immigrants are, statistically speaking, at an even worse disadvantage than the American born lower class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

And yet they come and succeed. Their educated children move up to the middle class. The article you linked is an opinion piece of a single economist, who is critical of immigration.

If human ability follows normal distribution, there is a hard physical limit of how many people can move up the ladder each year. It physically impossible for every one to be at the same highest level. The good news is all level are getting higher year by year. The pie is growing for everybody.

That’s what 20% social mobility means: that one in five actually move classes. The majority of immigrants do not change classes, just like the majority of Americans do not change classes. It’s still possible, it’s just not the average outcome.

> The article you linked in an opinion pieces of a single economist, who is critical of immigration.

What article? I linked to a section of Wikipedia, and that section alone has 9 different citations by as many authors.

> The good news is all level are getting higher year by year. The pie is growing for everybody.

Others in this thread have misunderstood my remarks as you have. The metric of moving from one class quintile to another during your lifetime is relative. It does not depend on standard of living at all. The pie can grow, and social mobility (as defined by changing class quintiles) can be stagnant, at the same time.