American Upward Mobility Is Better Than You Think

 One basic way of measuring social mobility is whether kids earn more than their parents. Pretty intuitive. And by that measure, US social mobility doesn't look too good, at least according to research released last year by economists and sociologists from Stanford, Harvard, and the University of California. That team, including superstar economist Raj Chetty, used tax and census data to compare the incomes of 30-year-olds starting in 1970 with the earnings of their parents at the same age. And here was the headline finding you might have heard about, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal: “In 1970, 92% of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did at a similar age, they found. In 2014, that number fell to 51%.”