Income growth alone won’t sustain social mobility in Singapore
Modest wealth increasingly determines whether mobility endures across life’s shocks.
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The occasional paper released by the Finance Ministry raises a pertinent question: can social mobility be sustained over time?
PHOTO: ST FILE
Mathew Mathews
Across many developed societies, social mobility is harder to sustain. Children’s prospects remain strongly shaped by family background, even as educational levels have risen.
In the US, a highly cited study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and colleagues found that absolute income mobility – defined as the share of children earning more than their parents – fell from about 90 per cent for those born in 1940 to around 50 per cent for those born in the 1980s.
