Income Mobility

An article on Yahoo written around a piece from the Brookings Institute on the topic of "income mobility"--the ability of someone in a lower economic quintile to move to a higher quintile--had this summation:

Not only was there less "income mobility " in the U.S. than in most of Europe but
"the American dream is less likely to come true in the USA than in any other major economy except the United Kingdom's.
A generation ago, an American family did not need to "climb the ladder" to become better off. If a family started in the dead middle of the income distribution in 1947and ended in the dead middle of the distribution in 1973, it still saw its standard of living approximately double. By contrast, middle-class incomes barely budged in the quarter century leading up to 2007."

While the Brookings Institute has its own ax to grind this, if true, is most disturbing. Income mobility is a harsh way of judging an economy; it is a zero sum game. If someone advances, someone is overcome and regresses. But capitalism's major claim is not the individual wealth of all, it is the wealth of some and the standard of living of all.

This would be a serious worry.