Obama's Claim of ‘Economic Immobility’ Called a Myth

via:Newsmax

President Barack Obama delivered a speech in December decrying what he called the nation's "diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years."
And a Gallup poll late last year found that just 52 percent of Americans believe there is "plenty of opportunity" to get ahead, down from 81 percent in 1998.
But an article on the Reason Foundation's website headlined "The Myth of Economic Immobility" points to a recent report from five economists, published via the National Bureau of Economic Research, that failed to find decreasing economic mobility.
"Contrary to the popular perception," they wrote, "intergenerational mobility" has remained "extremely stable" for Americans born between 1971 and 1993.
Their research indicates that a child born into the bottom quintile of income distribution in 1971 had an 8.4 percent chance to reach the top quintile as an adult. For a child born in 1986, that chance had risen to 9 percent.

So "mobility may have increased slightly" a recent years, they conclude, adding: "We find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s."
Support for this view comes from the Pew Charitable Trust's Economic Mobility Project, which reported in 2012: "Eighty-four percent of Americans have higher family incomes than their parents had at the same age, and across all levels of income distribution, this generation is doing better than the one that came before it."
Reason observes: "Obama's widely shared misconception also misses the greater cultural context. Economic mobility is not the sole measure of national well-being or progress."

The nation has seen massive increases in cultural, social, and physical mobility in recent decades, and Americans' access to all sort of goods, services, institutions, and transportation has vastly improved, Reason asserts.
The website adds: "Today, most Americans have access to resources that were once inconceivable, and that access lets us cover more cultural and social ground than humans had ever previously been able to manage."