Statistically speaking, you're wrong; class mobility in Western Europe is equal to or better than in the US.

Good thing you found a country where the culture might have helped you do things you didn't feel like doing back home, but don talk about it as though your personal experience is universal to all, because the numbers tell otherwise.

The issue with most of the studies that say this is how they measure mobility. If the focus is on the ability to move up in income percentiles, then it's an unfair comparison.

Why? Because while it sounds nice to say "avg german child moves from top 50% to top 65% while avg american only moves from top 50% to top 55%", American salaries are much higher, and cost of housing is on par or lower than Europe, so top 55% is a much higher financial increase for the American.

Huh, I'd actually never noticed this.

Now that you say it, I see a lot of these comparisons talking about odds of a person born in one quartile/quintile ending up in a different bucket as an adult. Often, it's specifically cited as the chance of a person moving between the highest and lowest buckets. Which on reflection is actually a composite measure of income variability, inequality, and societal wealth.

Running those stats alongside a Gini coefficient would help somewhat, since lower coefficients imply more similar gaps between adjacent buckets. But even that's not enough on several levels. It wouldn't distinguish where inequality falls, particularly patterns like the US and Singapore with large variation inside the outer buckets, so a Lorenz curve would be more useful. It also doesn't clarify the raw size of the changes - position in society matters, but it also matters whether a ten-percentile jump is a 10% gain in purchasing power or a 100% gain.

I'm a bit embarrassed, really. That's a massive gap in the utility of those stats, and I never even considered how many different things the same numbers could mean.

It's something I didn't realize until recently myself. There are several things Europe does better than the US in, but earning power is not one of them.

I am aware of the numbers...but I don’t think they paint the whole picture.

But that’s besides the point, the point I was trying to make is that America worked much better for a person like me.

Likewise I can imagine a place like Europe working better for some folks.

If only people had free mobility...maybe everybody could just love in a place that works for them

If you are so inclined, can you explain what the whole picture shows?

You always need to augment your quantitative data with qualitative data.

I intended to provide more of the later

> If only people had free mobility...maybe everybody could just love in a place that works for them

It would be nice to have free mobility + something like a low-level UBI, for people who really need to be helped and not fall through the cracks. A rather low UBI that focused on just ensuring the basic necessities of life would most likely be quite affordable (e.g. in terms of overall tax burden, or fraction of GDP), and probably wouldn't even be perceived as "socialism". Then we'd probably see places like Europe lose a lot of their former attractiveness as they'd be left trying to manage their unwieldly, dinosaur-socialist states, as anyone with even the tiniest shred of ambition and initiative left would immediately flee for the more open parts of the world.

I know HN loves politics but I made my original post in the spirit of seeing replies like yours where it's less about ascertaining which side is "best" and more speaking about your lived experience and things you liked and didn't. It's great that you've been there so long and are defending the values the US has because (I suppose) they match those that have always been yours.

I think that's exactly the discussion we should have re: this tech/non-tech divide. Whether what we want is to help our neighbors, or live near only people who can (and choose to) help themselves. And there's definitely people in both camps and you know where you are because you live through both, like you and I did, and get an uncomfortable or bleak feeling at some point, not because of watching election talk or economic lectures.

Also I'm actually Canadian so I don't know where the thread's obsession with communism and Sweden or wherever has come from. The poor people on the bus from my OP see the same sky you guys do ;-)

How is this wholesome content even getting downvoted?

I don't know, I upvoted it... I think it's good other immigrants are giving their perspective. Personally I was a cultural mismatch and that's why I left... that doesn't mean nobody has these particular values or that everybody shares mine.

Probably due to the strong political and moral statement in the middle. "in Europe, the socialism makes people dead on the inside" definitely requires some justification. Without that digression it's a great comment about the potential upside that exists in America.

Thanks for the feedback...let me elaborate on that a bit more then:

I was born and raised in Europe and lived there 30 years.

What I will share here is from personal expierence and will be a generalization (because there is of course always exceptions).

What I meant by dead inside is that people there don’t do anything with the safety and freedom socialism provides. They don’t spend more time with their kids or follow the arts. People had no dreams or ambitions :(

There first thing that struck me coming to America was that not only did everyone have a dream, but they were actively pursuing it.

Examples: 1. the barber where I got my first haircut was playing in a rock band and about to head out for a 4 month tour.

2. A friends girlfriend went from being waitress to becoming CEO of a organization everybody here knows

3. Lots of friend of mine are active as mentor for local underprivileged kids on the weekends

I come from a small town where you’d think there is a community and people support each other...but socialism erodes those ties. I have never seen anyone do something good for their neighbors in Europe...it’s the governments job to do so...which leads to nobody lifting a finger.

In Europe people actively try to prevent you from raising from the middle class by talking you down and being unsupportive. Additionally the government doesn’t waste a day to put another bump on the road to keep you where you are.

But to their defense they do a decent job of helping people at the bottom to get closer to the middle class

It sounds like you are assuming that your situation applies everywhere in Europe, which seems unlikely to me.

Like I disclosed upfront: I am generalizing based on my personal expierence

Please share you personal story too though so we get a better picture

Nah I'm from the US. I would just expect European culture to be at least as varied as US culture.

In some ways it is, in others it’s not. Much like the US really.

Because it sounds like anti-socialist pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps propaganda. It's not wholesome because it's not how things work for most people. The commenter could be very lucky or (more likely) very blind to real privileges they benefited from in their story. But their story fits a narrative that allows people to feel comfortable with their wealth while poverty is rampant around them, so such people find it "wholesome".

That seems like an extreme reaction. I don't think you're supposed to downvote someone's lived experience just because it doesn't apply to everyone. (Those few personal stories that do apply to everyone are pretty boring, usually involving bodily functions.)

It would be nice if more people could experience such things. That makes the story good, not bad. It is something we want to maximize, not minimize.

The US of A actually has the worst social mobility of OECD countries.

https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...