“Among the developed nations, we are the least economically and socially mobile country in the world.”
— Jeb Bush on Monday, October 27th, 2014 in a fundraising letter
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush may or may not run for president in 2016.
But he was certainly active in the 2014 elections. Not only did he campaign for other candidates, but he was doing fundraising for his Foundation for Excellence in Education.
An October mailer he signed focused on the economy, a top concern for voters.
“Americans could always count on hard work leading to higher incomes and improved lives.” Bush said in the letter. “But today, among the developed nations, we are the least economically and socially mobile country in the world.”
Bush goes on to say fixing an ailing education system is key to turning things around for children and the country.
Is the American dream really that unattainable these days? We decided to find the answer.
First of all, we should point out that while social mobility and economic mobility are technically two different things, Bush is looking at them under the same umbrella — a person’s ability to better their circumstances as measured by income.
His foundation sent us several articles and reports that researchers said informed the claim, so we examined those.
A 2006 study led by a Swedish economist compared earning potential across generations among the United States, the United Kingdom and Nordic countries. It determined that American men raised in the bottom fifth of family incomes had a 42 percent chance of staying there, considerably higher than the other countries (Britain was next at 30 percent). Only 8 percent rose to the top fifth in the U.S., the lowest in the study. In countries like Finland, Denmark and Sweden, that number is closer to 15 percent, almost twice as much as in America.
University of Ottawa economist Miles Corak in 2006 reviewed several studies about generational income mobility — that is, whether you will make more or less money depending on how much your parents made. Again, the United States came up last.
A Brookings Institution study from 2007 found that only 6 percent of American children born at the bottom of the income ladder moved to the top. Almost half of kids born in the bottom fifth of family income didn’t move up, while 39 percent in the top fifth stayed at the top. A third of kids moved up in brackets, sure, but another third moved down.
Essentially, if you were born to a richer family, you had a good chance of staying there. If you were born into a poorer family, good luck. That trend is much more defined in America than it is in other countries.
Now let’s remember Bush wrote “among the developed nations.” All the things we’ve looked at so far have stuck to European countries and Canada.
University of Wisconsin economist Timothy Smeeding told us we can say plenty more countries beat us, too.
He pointed us to the Great Gatsby Curve, a concept championed in 2012 by former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton. The curve, named after the 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald novel about class-hopping romantic Jay Gatsby, used data from Canadian economist Corak to determine mobility in terms of “intergenerational income elasticity” against several nations’ inequality by income distribution, called the Gini coefficient.
The curve usually includes 23 countries, most of which are Western, and shows the United States lags behind other developed countries like Italy, Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand. Countries considered even less mobile than America include China, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.
“Amongst the rich countries, Bush is right,” Smeeding told PolitiFact Florida. “There are no rich countries, save tiny Singapore, whom lie to the right of the USA.”
With that data in mind, it’s hard to find fault with Bush’s argument, according to Isabel Sawhill, co-director of the Center on Children and Families and the Budgeting for National Priorities Project at Brookings.
“It’s a bit over the top but consistent with much of the evidence,” she said.
Our ruling
Bush said “among the developed nations, we are the least economically and socially mobile country in the world.”
His Foundation for Excellence in Education sent us a few stories backing up the claim on a broad level. We found even more data suggesting that yes, America does lag behind most every developed country in terms of being able to move from the bottom rungs of the income ladder to the top.
Experts we talked to said it was a fair claim, although we must note there is some disagreement on how mobility is measured and minor differences among studies.
We rate the statement True.
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