garfaagelSocial Mobility in Europe
serIt is sad that it takes so many generations.
I’m interested in why it takes any at all in Scandinavia, since the bottom 10% in Scandinavian countries have the same education and equal opportunity as the top 10%, and social welfare is enough to live on, so kids aren’t forced to work part-time either. School materials and university is free too, so it is not like the bottom 10% cannot afford or don’t have time for education.
It’s time to mean income, not stable living wage.
Coming from a poor background shouldn’t hinder you from reaching mean any more than anyone else though. Does it have to do with then being less inclined to ask for a raise then? Or is it perhaps an issue with poor parenting, causing less willingness to work hard in school?
Incomes don’t follow a bell curve, so the choice of mean income is a red flag to me. Imagine you had 9 citizens making 100k and one billionaire, the mean is now 100,090k.
Relatedly, being in the bottom 10% doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing in these different countries, in some of them that might not be below the poverty line so it’s comparing apples and oranges.