> If you penalize the rich, they just move, and then the new system will stop class mobility.

This is a myth created by the rich so that you won't tax them.

It's pretty observable and part of the reason many microstates are extremely wealthy.

Also keep in mind the US is a winner here. The UK loses the most millionaires and it's had an observable impact on their economy.

No, Bob is right and you are wrong.

Nah… UK’s economy is broken due to the fact we’ve never recovered from the financial crisis

It’s also due to the lack of investment in heathcare, education and other public services over the last 14yrs

Britain still has very many extremely rich people - London has more billionaires than NY - Serious Money by Caroline Knowles is an interesting exploration of the subject

Just one more follow up, the US is 27th on social mobility, behind most EU countries, Australia, New Zealand and most other countries which are consider "western"

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

  the US has the highest class mobility among western nations

Source? The rankings I see have the US behind most of Europe.

You are thinking of “social mobility”, which is a term of art that doesn’t mean what people assume it means. It is essentially a zero-sum rank of your income compare to your neighbor. You can become poorer and still be “socially mobile” or much richer and not be “socially mobile”.

Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.

Economic, class, social mobility classically means ability for an individual to attain significantly more wealth than they were born with and ability to change their and their family's lifestyle. In which case it's not zero sum.

But yeah, some statistics indeed are just likelihood that the ranking order changes, or even self-reported...

It's like the definition of "middle class". Everyone thinks they're middle class. The OECD calls anyone with 75% to 200% of the average income "middle class". Classically the term means you are above the labour class but not noble.

AFAIK the stats do show Europe passing the US in class mobility as of about 20 years ago. It is notable as Europe of course had low class mobility and the US just dominated class mobility.

AFAIK class mobility is measured by class at birth compared to adulthood (i believe as measured by net household wealth)

Beware of rankings that rate perception.

Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries.

This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizens.

A top 10% earner in the US would be in the top 1% in Canada. An AVERAGE earner in the US is about top 10-15% in Canada.

Class mobility (or social mobility) indicates ability to go from lower to middle class, working class to generational wealth, etc... All income statistics show the US as having a particularly large amount of high income earners, self made millionaires (and billionaires), etc...

It’s not even worth arguing. Anyone in the real world knows the US is where everyone with any ambition whatsoever wants to be, in any industry except nepotism and government-connections. HN is beyond absurd

Hi, I live here

My priorities do not align with your postulating

> It’s not even worth arguing.

Fine, then we can safely ignore anything you write.

> HN is beyond absurd

Because not everyone agrees with you.

Certainly from an entrepreneurial stand point it's beneficial. On the other side, it's current decent in to an authoritarian police state is kinda hard to ignore.

Anyone who took macroeconomics knows that stratifying an economy of ~370 million people by ambition ends with the most ambitious employees working the behind-the-counter at McDonalds. None of them ever end up at the fed, or filling white-collar corporate seats, that's been an open secret since the '80s. By the sound of it, you're just regurgitating Tweets you read in 202X while VCs were insecure about China whooping their ass in natsec, AI and robotics.

Support ambition all you want - just don't come crying to us when the B2C market dries up entirely.

The average European is poorer than the average person from Mississippi, the US’ poorest state. It isn’t even comparable

> The average European is poorer than the average person from Mississippi, the US’ poorest state

Mississippi has a GDP per capita of $53k.

11% of Mississippi's population has no health insurance.

Mississippi is one of the highest inequality states in the US. Its median income is $30k. It's Gini Index is 49%.

It has poor physical and social infrastructure by advanced country standards.

Spain has a GDP per capita of $35k. Its median income is $20k.

Everyone in Spain is covered with modern healthcare.

Spain has a nationwide high speed rail network. A lot of its infrastructure is top-notch compared to Mississippi and even wealthy parts of the US.

This is despite Spain having some of the highest inequality in Europe, and undoubtedly a host of other problems, including decreasing affordability for average people. Yet it's inequality is far lower than Mississippi, with a 31% Gini Index.

So perhaps GDP per capita doesn't tell the full story. Also, I'm being fair by comparing Mississippi to one of the poorer countries in Europe, not one of the middle or wealthier countries.

I know several Spaniards who emigrated to the US, including my sister-in-law. The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality

Why does your anecdotal evidence trump math, exactly?

Beyond "Statistics and anecdotes are different", there's probably some heavy selection bias presented in "Spaniards that had the wealth to emmigrate"

Undoubtedly, but the corollary 'statistics is not reality' doesn't really hold. I'm sure people here would know many Americans who moved to Spain.

Statistics might not be ideal, but making policy decisions based on anecdotes is far, far worse.

> I know several Spaniards who emigrated to the US,

As do I. They all seem to have moved to cosmopolitan places with advanced economies, not Mississippi. I also have friends and relatives that have migrated to Spain. Overall, there is no mass migration in either direction.

> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality

A high speed rail network and universal healthcare are not statistics, they are as real as it gets.

But I definitely agree that Spain is probably not a good place if you want to make an absolute shitload of money.

> The situation you describe is… one of statistics and not reality

So you reject mathematics in favor of a few cherry-picked experiences.

I'm Spanish. I make about 40k/yr. I wouldn't move to the US for, say, 200k.

I have excellent 0€ out of pocket 0 paperwork healthcare. I walk to my 35 hours per week job. I have about 50 days of vacation each year. I have a small second home down in the beach to enjoy them. In my 150k people hometown some years there is a murder or two, and most years there isn't one. When people rob a business they might threaten with a tiny Swiss Army knife, or maybe just yell very hard.

I'll stay thanks.

Indeed.

The nation V. nation median ranking of class mobility is hardly the Nation V. {many nations} average of wealth.

This is an incredibly naive take in trying to postulate the US as a better place to live, and genuinely makes me curious how much you’ve actually seen of EU.

Quality of life, by a number of metrics like HDI, is higher in (Western) European countries compared to the US. And even while total salaries might be lower, healthcare infrastructure, life expectancy, food quality etc are better.

Pure take-home money doesn’t tell you the entire picture.

And for pure anecdata, I have friends who migrated to the States and then moved back to EU when they had kids because EU seemed like the safer and better place to raise them.

You can find anecdata to tell pretty much any story you want to tell though.

"Poorer" in what aspect(s), exactly? Because not everything is about gross monetary amounts when it comes to a good life. Even the poorest of the European nations (never mind that EU !== Europe, and that by invoking Europe you're also talking about the countries with the highest QoLs in the entire world like the Scandinavians) still have superior worker protections & medical infrastructure that doesn't leave the poor in generational debt than the US, which for me both rank infinitely higher than earning more money. I'm sure the poor Mississippians wouldn't mind some of those 30+ paid vacation days my Spanish friends get in exchange for earning a bit less.

Cite your sources. That may have been true 30 years ago.

What is the incremental value of having a rich person around? Increased yacht sales?

The US used to have to class mobility. The completely disproportionate wealth of the current crop of billionaires is evidence instead that that mobility has disappeared, and that the accrual of wealth by the already wealthy is the dominant class "mobility" pattern today.

The globe can collaborate to make sure capital has nowhere to fly to. Form the USSA and get china onboard and let the USSR come back (they’re still the loyal opposition in today’s Russia) and capital will just fucking take it like they deserve to. What, you gonna go to the moon now?

> The globe can collaborate to make sure capital has nowhere to fly to

<meme>hahahaha no</meme>

There are countless places that are more than happy to accept capital with few questions asked. Including, funnily enough, the US itself.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-becomin...

The globe is way too disorganized and corrupt to have a chance. Sit down, dork.

You think I’d be caught dead using a standing desk? That’s the real insult.

Ok that’s fair.

I don't know how you came up with that statement. It certainly does not reflect reality unless you don't count Sweden, Germany, Canada as part of the western world.

>Individual studies have estimated absolute mobility rates for recent cohorts of roughly 50% in the US (Chetty et al. 2017), 53% in Canada (Ostrovsky 2017), 70% in Germany (Bönke, Harnack, and Luthen 2019; Stockhausen 2018), and 77% in Sweden (Liss, Korpi, and Wennberg 2019).

From https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2020/wp-2020-11-tren...

> It certainly does not reflect reality unless you don't count Sweden, Germany, Canada as part of the western world.

Look at this chart: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

Look at the divergence from the US.

Canada's GDP per capita is barely above 2013 levels (~4%), meanwhile the US' is 60% higher. Wages in Canada have been stagnant, there is NO social mobility at all, it's completely fucked.

Where I came up with this statement? Actually knowing things about economics and following the CURRENT numbers. Not a 2017 study (which probably took a couple years and using data from 2015 or earlier) which is completely worthless in 2025.