The Canadian Dream

And so you can basically ask, taking say, all of the kids born in America in the 1980s, “What fraction of the kids born to low-income families actually make it to the top of the income distribution? How much intergenerational mobility is there in America?” In the U.S., if you take, say, the set of children who are born to families in the bottom quintile of the income distribution, in the bottom fifth, about seven-and-a-half percent of those kids make it to the top fifth of the income distribution... it’s useful to start first by thinking about comparisons across countries. So if you look at that number in other countries where we have comparable data, like the United Kingdom, for instance. In the U.K., that number is nine percent. A little bit higher, but not all that much higher. If you go to a place like Canada or Denmark, the number is 13 percent, or 13 and a half percent. That’s quite a bit higher. And it’s useful, in thinking about these numbers, is 13 percent a big number? Well, you have to remember, of course, that no matter what you do, you can’t have more than 20 percent of people in the top 20 percent, right? So the maximum value this statistic can take, I think, is plausibly 20 percent. To put it more precisely, if you lived in a society where your parents played no role at all in determining your outcomes, we’d expect one-fifth of kids to rise from the bottom 20 percent to the top 20 percent. And so relative to that benchmark, that upper bound, if you will, the 13 and a half percent rate in Canada and the seven-and-a-half percent rate in the U.S., that’s a really big difference. It’s almost like you’re twice as likely to realize the American dream of moving up if you’re growing up in Canada rather than the U.S, right?
...Or perhaps more precisely, we should just call it the Canadian Dream instead of the American Dream, if they’re twice as good.