Right, wealthy parents are able to provide more opportunities for their offspring. But hasn't that always been true? I imagine the education available to the least fortunate today is much better than the education available to someone in the lower class from 100 years ago. Capitalism has allowed for better high end services, like better teachers and tutors, but overall information and knowledge has been democratized. There is no secret math or science you learn for the right price.
The problem I see is that when we talk about social mobility, we always talk about relative classes, in which case there will always be 1/5th of the population in the bottom fifth. In terms of absolute wealth, my experience is that everyone, more or less, is better off from generation to generation, at least in material terms.
> my experience is that everyone, more or less, is better off from generation to generation, at least in material terms.
That is correct. Even when people make claims like "middle class income hasn't grown in the last xyz years" they're basing it on statistical sleights of hand, see [1].
> The problem I see is that when we talk about social mobility, we always talk about relative classes, in which case there will always be 1/5th of the population in the bottom fifth.
Right, but the question is more about opportunity. Like if you created a Markov transition model, what are the probabilities of going [1/5]->[2/5] (or [3/5], etc.)
> Right, wealthy parents are able to provide more opportunities for their offspring. But hasn't that always been true?
Sure. But the point is that we aspire for our society to be meritocratic. That is we'd like it to be better to be born smart than rich. Of course that's never been the case, but we want to isolate the "why".
It's not necessarily even about opportunities. If you make college free, for example, it ends up being a subsidy on the children of the tiers [4/5] and [5/5] (playing loose with facts here) because, even if you isolate parent's wealth they __still__ end up in college more often.
Things that are difficult to measure (like motivation and noncognitive skills) are built at a young age, and a good environment is needed to foster that.
> I imagine the education available to the least fortunate today is much better than the education available to someone in the lower class from 100 years ago
I know it's been the case in Canada [2], I've been told it's not in the US, but I'm unsure it's really the case (turns out you need fairly sophisticated statistical models to measure it properly).
The problem I see is that when we talk about social mobility, we always talk about relative classes, in which case there will always be 1/5th of the population in the bottom fifth. In terms of absolute wealth, my experience is that everyone, more or less, is better off from generation to generation, at least in material terms.