Social mobility

Time for reading people This is how your parents affect your social mobility A society with high (relative) intergenerational mobility is one where an individual’s wellbeing, relative to others of his or her generation, is less dependent on the socioeconomic status of his or her parents There are two main reasons why higher relative mobility in a society should be a goal for public policy: fairness economic efficiency When mobility is low, one’s chances of success are largely pre-ordained by the accident of birth, which goes against a basic notion of fairness in most societies. Also, low mobility leads to unrealised human potential and misallocation of resources, as talented individuals from disadvantaged families are excluded from opportunities that favour those born in greater privilege rather than those with the greatest potential.  Reducing such inefficiency is likely to be good for economic growth. And since the waste of human potential is more likely at the bottom of the income distribution, policies promoting higher relative mobility are likely to promote growth that is more inclusive in nature. What would a global map of mobility look like? If the geographic patterns observed in the US are also observed across countries, then the least mobile countries are more likely to be found in the developing world. If there is indeed an equality of opportunity gap between the developing world and the developed world, has that gap been closing over time? The Global Database on Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM), compiled for this study, provides estimates of intergenerational mobility – both relative and absolute – for 148 economies representing around 96% of the world’s population born in the 1980s. For 111 economies, or 87% of the world’s population, estimates of mobility span five decades, from those born in the 1940s to those born in the 1980s. The 1980s cohort represent the youngest generation of adults to have completed their education at the time of data collection. We focus primarily on mobility in education, since education is a key aspect of economic wellbeing and educational mobility has a strong association with income mobility. And crucially, intergenerational data on education is much more widely available than that on income. We also compile estimates of relative income mobility – complementing comparable estimates from other sources with our own estimates – for 75 economies, to provide a partial picture of income mobility globally and examine the relationship between education and income mobility. Figure 1 Relative mobility in education around the world (1980s cohort)  Note: darker colour indicates higher mobility. We find that for large parts of the world’s population born in the 1980s, an individual’s education is still too closely tied to the education of one’s parents. For many countries in Figure 1, the regression coefficient ranges between 0.53 and 0.84, indicated by the lightest shade of blue . Among developing economies, East Asia and Pacific and Middle East and North Africa are the regions with the highest average relative mobility in education, which are still well below the average for high-income economies. Figure 2 Intergenerational persistence in education from the 1940s to the 1980s cohort  Trends vary quite a lot across regions within the developing world. Between the 1950s and 1980s generations, large improvements in average relative mobility occurred in the East Asia and Pacific, Latin America and Caribbean, and Middle East and North Africa regions. In contrast, relative mobility in education has stagnated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia 🤸‍♂️🤸‍♀️🤸‍♂️🤸‍♀️,