Many Americans believe that they still live in the land of opportunity—the country that offers the greatest chance of economic advancement. But this is no longer the case. As 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
