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>America is the best country in the world for growing something new

The 27th best, if that new thing is supposed to lift your social/economic status upwards: "The US ranked 27th in the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index".

But it might well be the best for people to build new businesses of scale (especially already well off people).



That's because making it easy to start your own company will only provide upwards mobility to <1% of the population.

My grandpa worked in agriculture, my dad in a factory, and I'm a software engineer. The only reason I became the first in my family to go to university is that in my country as long as I passed all my classes I was pretty much guaranteed to not pay a euro for attending university. I even went to one of the top 5 universities for CS in Spain, which might be crap compared to US ones, but economically I'm much better off than my parents.

Affordable university education can provide upwards mobility to a lot more people.


In most of the US, as long as you are sufficiently academically qualified, you can go to a public university for free or nearly so. The exact standards vary by state, but they are not all that rigorous. The federal government on top of this provides means-tested grants to anyone regardless of academic qualifications that for poor people is likely to amount to 50-75% of public university or 100% of a two-year college.

Where the US differs from a lot of European countries is a) a lot of people chase after their "dream" university, which may be private/more selective/out of state/etc and b) almost anyone can go to A university in the US, no matter how poor their grades. It just won't be free.


As someone pointed out, education is not clearly a moral good of itself. The median Nazi was highly educated.

https://youtu.be/aazlO39MPMg?si=12GOHejB6Tjt5_BA


Going from most countries to the US lifts your economic status upwards by a lot.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book) for intergenerational social mobility.


From Oz to the US knocks 5 years off life expectancy, knocks a whole 1 point (out of 10) from your democracy index, reduces your human freedom rating, increases your health care spending, increases your 10 year cost of living, etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?tab=t...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...

etc.


I'm talking about economic mobility, not social mobility.


That's what social mobility means here too.

We're not talking about someone moving up the ranks in a caste system.


The report you cited was about social mobility, specifically excluding economic mobility.

Per your citation, fewer welders go to the ballet, but they are richer, across generations.




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