Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to Price Anything

Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by jandrewrogers on Saturday August 30, 2025 @10:29PM (#45079813)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by dismalaf on Saturday August 30, 2025 @11:28PM (#45080117)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by seadan83 on Sunday August 31, 2025 @12:50AM (#45080467)

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)

[ Parent | on HN ]