((^+^)) SG said:
Of course it's not. How could the experience of a single person be expected to be a scientific sampling that would be representative of the entire nation. There is quite a bit of data out there though if you want to form a scientific opinion instead of one based on a handful of people you know personally. You can find detailed comparisons of the rates in the US with other countries. A lot of people have studied the problem in detail.
But the studies you reference miss the central point. The question is not how many people move from one economic class to another but how many people CAN. These are not even close to being the same thing. And studying one tells you nothing of the other. The central assumption in all of these studies is that "everyone wants to be rich." Well that's true if we're talking about the lottery - but we're not. The more relevant question is how upwardly mobile is society for those who are willing to sacrifice to be rich (insert successful if you want). And by sacrifice I mean not only working inhuman hours but also engaging in less satisfying work. There are plenty of people who "want" to be rich but would die before they ever worked a 100 hour week - or moved to an urban location with greater job opportunities. I would posit that every person on this board is going to die less wealthy than they could because they would rather do something else than accumulate money - how does that show up in these studies?
A middle class kid of reasonable intelligence who makes it his singular goal to have a six figure income probably has a better than 75% chance of success. The formula is simple - study hard for good grades, go to college and study hard for good grades, take internships in law, medicine, investment finance, or other high paying fields, work your ass off after graduation, avoid pissing people off, work your ass off some more, and in 10-years or so collect your $100,000+ salary.
Again, the studies that say "the son of a fireman is more likely to be a fireman himself" is completely irrelevant. The important question for society is whether that son of a fireman has the opportunity to be something different and whether he has the ability to move up the economic ladder if he is willing to make the request sacrifices. Your studies say nothing of this but my experience says unequivocally yes!
J.B. - son of a Brooklyn police officer, from a family of police officers and firemen. Recently promoted to Managing Director at Lehman, estimated salary ~$2 MM
I got a dozen more just like that. Do you want to hear the one about the guy from a low income family in rural Tennessee who is now a sell side research analyst making about $700,000? Or maybe the one about the daughter of an electrician who now owns 10's of millions of dollars in rental apartments in Albany New York. Or the correctional officer who, through working nights and weekends, has built his construction business into a $300,000 / year plus franchise? Or . . .
The point of those income mobility studies is to demoralize people by saying the "American Dream" is dead. The point of my examples is to say that conclusion is just plain wrong!