Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by refurb on Thursday March 09, 2023 @06:14AM
(#35080186)
The problem with those social mobility scores is they rank it by “chance of going from lowest quintile to highest quintile”.
But the quintiles aren't the same.
A good example is Canada vs the US vs the UK.
The top US income quintile is 153,000 USD.
Canada is 131,000 CAD (98,000 USD).
The UK is 87,000 GBP (105,000 USD).
So you could have less social mobility in the US (going from 1st to 4th quintile) than Canada (1st to 5th), but end up better off financially.
Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by hagbarth on Thursday March 09, 2023 @07:20AM
(#35080491)
I think the reasoning is that you likely won't get out of 1st at all.
Re:Stripe Faces $3.5B Tax Bill as Employees' Shares Expire
by refurb on Thursday March 09, 2023 @08:32AM
(#35080968)
But that's not how economic mobility is generally measured. It's usually movement from bottom to top quintile. The measure is relative mobility within a society, not absolute mobility.
But the WEF reference for the grandparent uses a "social mobility index" which includes such factors as: "Adolescent birth rate per 1,000 women", "Pupils per teacher in pre-primary education (%)", "Extent of staff training (1–7 best)", "Internet users (%)", "Meritocracy at work (1–7 best)", so it's clearly quite subjective when it comes to "social mobility".
True, but there's no stress due to possible crazy variations in prices, "in network" - "out of network" garbage, etc. When people talk about "free healthcare", what they're really saying is: "out of pocket healthcare expenses are very small and always capped at a decent level, and I have access to healthcare even without a job".
> At least there is a chance in the US to make generational wealth for a middle class, but no way in hell in Europe.
https://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/49849281.pdf
TL;DR: The US has worse social mobility that many equivalent Western European countries.
What the US does is amazing marketing for their big outliers (and amazing marketing for everything, even piles of rocks in a desert, for that matter). I.e. 1 person in 100 million becomes a billionaire and suddenly you'd think 1 in 10 000 people did it :-)
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
The US is in 27th spot, after 21 (!) European countries.