Perceptions of Rising Opportunity Across Rich Nations and Over Time

Introduction

Recent research by Raj Chetty and his colleagues finds a long-term decline in the United States in absolute mobility—being better off in terms of inflation-adjusted family income than one’s parents at the same age. Very little is known about absolute mobility levels or trends in other countries, largely due to insufÏcient data. To fill this gap, the Archbridge Institute recently commissioned polling across 60 nations around the world, assessing men’s perceptions of absolute mobility.

The Archbridge polling focused on men for two reasons. First, variation in women’s labor force participation around the world—and variation in the change in participation over the past generation—makes cross-national comparisons of women’s absolute mobility difficult to assess. Second, a goal of the polling was to produce results for the United States that could be compared with previous polls conducted as early as 1939, which did not always ask absolute mobility questions consistently among women.

The polling included questions asking men to compare their “opportunities to succeed” with those they believed their own fathers had and with those they thought their sons would have. I restricted the analyses to men surveyed during their prime working years (age 25–54 in the cross-national analyses, age 26–40 in the US trend analyses) in order to reduce the impact of differences in the age distribution across countries. Of the 60 nations included in the polling, I designated 17 of them as “rich,” and I focus on them in this analysis. These nations include several English-speaking countries that emerged from the British Empire; several countries in Northern, Western, and Southern Europe; and a few industrialized Asian countries and city-states.

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Download the Perceptions of Opportunity survey results.