> Gareth Gaston wrote:
>
> >What strikes me about these statistics is the degree to which they
> >confirm income mobility (in both directions).
<snip>
>
> >It seems odd that the article doesn't mention the equivalent
> >figures in Europe or the UK considering it was published in the F.T.
> >I would be that they are a lot lower.
>
> No, they're not. What comparative evidence there is is that U.S.
> income mobility isn't that different from Western Europe's.
>
I dredged this up from a FAIR report on some Stossel report a few years ago (http://www.fair.org/activism/stossel-america.html):
--------- In fact, a 1996 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compared earnings mobility in eight countries. Measuring mobility by how often workers in the bottom fifth of earnings ended up in the upper three-fifths, the United States came in last. The country that came in first was Denmark, a nation with an elaborate social welfare system. ---------
I don't know what those 8 countries are besides Denmark.
-david