Income mobility and social mobility
Bob Zadek framed the topic by asking F.H. Buckley whether he meant income mobility or class mobility, describing the latter as the ability, not interfered with by society, of moving from one class to another, and noting that moving down has always been easy while moving up has been the trick. Buckley agreed, saying he talks numbers and income mobility but that social mobility—moving from one class to another—is also part of it. Buckley described a new class of aristocrats at the top of the heap, and said that if you are in the top 50%, your kids have about a 50% chance of being in the top 10 or 20%, a pattern he said does not hold in most other first-world countries. He placed the United States alongside places like Britain in terms of aristocracy, and said the country of promise turns out to be Denmark or Canada instead, betraying Lincoln’s promise of an America where we can all get ahead. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_way_back__restoring_the_promi|F.H. Buckley on The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016)]]
Zadek offered a methodological framing: statisticians and economists generally measure income mobility by comparing the income class of the child to the class of the parent, usually by percentile. Buckley distinguished income inequality, which is how we are divided up in the present generation, from mobility, which compares parents and children, and said he is more interested in mobility because most Americans would agree it is mostly about the kids. He added that when polled, Americans for the first time say they do not expect their kids to do as well as they did. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_way_back__restoring_the_promi|F.H. Buckley on The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016)]]
Ed Conard, asked by Zadek to explain mobility, defined it as the probability that someone born in the bottom 20% can get to the top 20%, or that someone born in the 80th percentile will go downward to the 20th. He said there is some genetic component, since successful parents may pass on talent, so one should not expect 100% mobility between top and bottom, and that complete mobility is not desirable either because you want people to work hard and be able to move from one level to the other. The question, he said, is whether socioeconomic upbringing is becoming more and more of a problem over time, and he said we do not see that. Debunking Inequality Myths with Ed Conard (2017)
The structural-causes debate
Zadek put it to Buckley that income immobility is the result of policies rather than a policy in itself, and asked him to focus on structural causes. Buckley said the explanation that a high-tech information age economy gives disproportionate rewards to the really smart and highly educated—the new class—and leaves the middle class in the dust is inadequate, because other countries that beat the United States hands down in mobility live in the same information age. He pointed to Canada, which he called precisely Lincoln’s country, and said the American Dream lives on, just not in this country. His own explanation, he said, is differences in the legal regime of countries: legal barriers to getting ahead in the United States which do not exist in other countries. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_way_back__restoring_the_promi|F.H. Buckley on The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016)]]
Buckley also named immigration as a cause, saying the country imports immobility, that immigrants will not do as well as Americans on average and their kids will not do as well as the kids of native-born Americans, with the effect continuing to the third generation. He said this is a disservice to native Americans, particularly African Americans, whose jobs are being taken away. Zadek pushed back at length, arguing that nobody owns a job and that a job is an agreement in which an employer looks for the person who will do the best job for the least amount of money; if an immigrant will work for $7 an hour and a native-born worker wants $10, the native-born worker does not lose his job but simply wants more than the job is worth. Buckley replied that he completely agreed, and that if an employer decides between a native-born American and an illegal at much less money, the employer might rationally give the job to the illegal—but that the illegals should not be there in the first place. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_way_back__restoring_the_promi|F.H. Buckley on The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016)]]
Conard’s account of the same terrain is a debunking one. He said information technology has made it easier for a talented group of successful entrepreneurs to scale to economy-wide success, including a Taylor Swift, and that the most successful companies and entrepreneurs should be expected to get bigger and bigger relative to the median. On the median, he said growth can manifest as employment growth or wage growth, that the United States has had twice as much employment growth as Germany and France and three times as much as Japan since the 1980s, and that there are 60 million foreign-born adults and their native-born adult children in the economy. He said the median income has grown about 40% since the 1980s when calculated properly to include economic value such as healthcare advances, which he called a consensus view. Debunking Inequality Myths with Ed Conard (2017)
On mobility specifically, Conard said that if you think mobility is declining, it has been virtually the same for the last 50 years, and that the United States has almost the same mobility as Scandinavian countries, which are thought to have the best mobility in the world, for all but the poorest Americans. He also said that for students from low socioeconomic families who went to college, outcomes are very similar to those of richer kids at the same college when adjusted for college quality, despite affirmative action helping the poorest students get into better colleges for the same set of credentials. Debunking Inequality Myths with Ed Conard (2017)
Mobility as the American founding principle
Bradford R. Kane, in a discussion of populism, traced the country’s origins to a caste society in Europe of serfs and lords and ladies, in which there was no social mobility for those not on the good side of the equation. Those who came to the United States came for social mobility, he said, and that is where liberty and equality combined, forming what he called the national split personality and the root of libertarianism. He called the essence of the United States a populist country with a premium placed on power to the people. Populism 201: Advanced Topics in American Democracy (2020)
Zadek supplemented this, saying the draw in the founding era was social and perhaps even more importantly economic mobility: in Western Europe, where you were economically was determined the moment you were born and was immutable except in the rarest of circumstances, whereas America offered and still offers economic mobility, with no built-in structural barriers to being the best you can economically. Populism 201: Advanced Topics in American Democracy (2020)
Geographic mobility and jurisdictional competition
Buckley, in a later appearance, argued that American history should be seen in terms of East versus West rather than North versus South, paying tribute to Frederick Jackson Turner, whose Frontier Thesis he called the greatest analysis of American history. Buckley said Turner invented jurisdictional competition, the idea that states compete for people, and cited a competition between Texas and California in which Texas is winning big time and California is losing, which he called a penalty California is paying for being ultra-woke. In Turner’s time, in 1890, Buckley said, the West was democratic and egalitarian and the East aristocratic; the West was the home of Republican virtue and the East of corruption; the West was the home of nationalism and the East of cosmopolitan types who suffered from a bit of cultural cringe with respect to England and Europe. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Buckley said that because the country has become so immobile, there has never been a greater need for a desire for mobility as opposed to aristocracy, and that when he moved from Canada he was immediately struck at how this is a class society where people do not move up the ranks as in other countries. He said the data show the United States is less than mobile and as aristocratic pretty much as England, and way behind countries like Denmark and Canada in the mobility sweepstakes. He attributed the American Dream to Abraham Lincoln: wherever you are, wherever you come from, whoever you are, you can get ahead and your kids will have it better off than you did. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Zadek responded in passionate support of what he called geographic mobility, recalling that he had hosted Ilya Somin, who has written extensively on what he called foot voting, which Zadek described as far more democratic than ballot box voting, where people vote for a system of government by leaving one and joining another. Zadek said immigrants voted with their feet in the millions and that this is as American as pizza. Buckley said Somin channeled what people like Tiebout said about how people sort themselves out by their jurisdictional and geographical choices, and returned to Turner, who said states compete and the West offers free institutions and mobility as opposed to an aristocratic East. Buckley said Turner added that the East, realizing it was losing people, found it had to democratize as well, and that the trend carried back to Europe, which had to democratize because people were moving to North America—in short, a history of the triumph of Western ideas. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Across episodes
The topic recurs across four episodes, and the excerpts show a genuine disagreement rather than a development. Buckley, in 2016, 2022 and again in a 2022 episode on Trumpism, holds that American mobility has declined and that the country has become aristocratic, blaming legal barriers and immigration; Conard, in 2017, holds that mobility has been virtually unchanged for fifty years and that the United States compares well with Scandinavia. Kane and Zadek, in 2020, treat mobility as the founding-era draw that brought immigrants to America. The 2022 Trumpism episode repeats Buckley’s Frontier Thesis and foot-voting material in nearly identical terms to the Progressive Conservatism episode, with Zadek again invoking Somin’s foot voting. Trumpism After Trump (2022)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state how any of the mobility statistics were compiled, nor do they name the datasets or studies behind the competing figures. They do not resolve the disagreement between Buckley and Conard, and no guest responds directly to the other’s numbers. The excerpts also do not describe any policy enacted or proposed to change mobility, beyond Buckley’s general reference to legal barriers and immigration. Where an excerpt ends mid-sentence, the thought is left where it stopped.