Social mobility is an issue about which politicians love to pontificate but about which we actually know surprisingly little. Economists have generally tracked mobility by looking at surveys on wealth, jobs and educational attainment over two or three generations. This has typically shown that mobility is highest in the Scandinavian countries and lowest in places such as Latin America, with the US and UK lying halfway in between.

社会流动性是政治人士喜欢夸夸其谈的一个问题，但实际上我们对它的了解出奇地少。经济学家一般通过考察两、三代人的财富、就业和教育程度来追踪社会流动性。这些研究一般表明，斯堪的纳维亚国家的社会流动性最高，拉美等国最低，美国和英国介于二者之间。

Interestingly, these surveys tend to show that more mobile societies such as Sweden are also more equal, as determined by the Gini coefficient, the most commonly used measure of inequality, and vice versa. The idea that you can justify high levels of inequality in some nations because there is plenty of mobility – as US politicians are apt to do – does not ring entirely true, based on the economic numbers.

有趣的是，这些调查往往表明，瑞典等社会流动性较大的国家也更为平等，与基尼系数（Gini coefficient，最为常见的衡量不平等程度的指标）所显示的一样，反之亦然。有人认为，可以把一些国家的高度不平等说成合理的，因为它们的社会流动性很大——美国政客就经常这么说。但根据经济数据，这种看法并不完全正确。

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