The Economist sums it up, “Back in its Horatio Alger days, America was more fluid than Europe. Now it is not. Using one-generation measures of social mobility—how much a father’s relative income influences that of his adult son—America does half as well as Nordic countries, and about the same as Britain and Italy, Europe’s least-mobile places.”11 So the spread is not only large, but also self-perpetuating. Too often, people at the bottom and middle stay where they are over their careers, and families stay locked in across generations. This is not healthy for an economy or society.
