The question of opportunity
In a February 2015 episode, Bob Zadek framed economic mobility as a question about opportunity: whether people born in the lowest economic quintile, the lowest 20%, have less opportunity than others. Zadek asked whether, in a relatively classless society, everyone is born with the same political opportunity, and whether, so far as government is concerned, everybody has the same opportunity. He acknowledged that pure identity of opportunity is unattainable, noting that some poor people work their way out of poverty and some wealthy people work their way into it. Inclusive Capitalism: Economic Savior or Socialism in Disguise? (2015)
Guest Sean McElwee answered that there is relatively good data on the question, pointing to a report from Pew and a recent report by Raj Chetty, whom he described as at Harvard and as having just received the John Bates Clark Medal. McElwee said the findings show that where a person is born in the income distribution does not determine where that person ends up, but does strongly predict it. He said many people born at the bottom make it to the top, which he called something to encourage, but that many people born at the bottom stay there for their entire lives. Inclusive Capitalism: Economic Savior or Socialism in Disguise? (2015)
McElwee described his own path as one of privilege: he did not have to work during college, could dedicate his time to internships that were low-paid or unpaid, and did not do really hard work while in high school, which gave him the opportunity to travel the country doing academic debate. He contrasted this with friends who lived in public housing and who had, in his account, very little opportunity, perhaps a chance at community college while accumulating debt and working minimum wage jobs. He said his goal was to make it so that more people have the type of opportunities he had. Inclusive Capitalism: Economic Savior or Socialism in Disguise? (2015)
Mobility as the American founding promise
In an October 2020 episode on populism, Bradford R. Kane described the original settlers of what became the colonies as fleeing oppression in Europe and trapped in a caste society of serfs and lords and ladies, in which a person not on the good side of the equation had no social mobility. Kane said they came to the United States for social mobility, which he described as a combination of liberty and equality, and as the root of libertarianism as well. 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 that account, saying that what drew immigrants in the founding era was both social and, perhaps more importantly, economic mobility. He said that in societies in Western Europe, where most early immigrants came from, 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)
Aristocracy and the decline of mobility
In a July 2022 episode, F.H. Buckley said he worked on the Trump campaign and pitched to Jared Kushner the idea that the big issue was the rise of aristocracy and the decline of economic mobility, which he said became a great theme of the campaign. Buckley described the pre-Trump Republican Party as socially conservative and economically middle-of-the-road, nationalist, and as having always lost against a Democratic Party that was left on both counts. He said Trump discovered the sweet spot in American politics, which Buckley called progressive conservatism, a middle-of-the-road movement last best expressed by Dwight Eisenhower. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Buckley also said that Trump went nowhere with the issues he was pushing, that Trump disgraced himself on January 6th, and that even before then he was a failure as a president by virtue of his inability to cut deals. Buckley said domestic policy in the first two years was basically run by the Paul Ryans, and that the Republican Party had better cut its ties with Trump as an individual while still attracting the 74 million people who voted for him, many of them new GOP voters. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Buckley traced a history of progressivism in the GOP to Lincoln’s internal policies, to Teddy Roosevelt, and to Eisenhower, who he said called himself a progressive and said at one point that the Republican Party must become progressive or it is going to die. Buckley said the word progressive has been adopted by the left, and that the people who now call themselves progressives are anti-moderns who want to turn politics into a battle of race against race and ethnic group against ethnic group. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022)
Across episodes
The topic recurs across four episodes, with the treatment shifting from data to history to party politics. McElwee in 2015 argued from Pew and Chetty that birth position strongly predicts adult position; Kane and Zadek in 2020 located mobility in the founding-era flight from a caste society; Buckley in 2022 made the decline of economic mobility and the rise of aristocracy a campaign theme and a component of progressive conservatism. The excerpts show no single argument carried forward by the same participant across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the specific findings, magnitudes or years of the Pew and Chetty reports McElwee cites, nor the measures of mobility they use. They do not describe the baby bond proposal beyond McElwee’s statement that he likes the idea and would like everyone included in it. They do not give the content of Buckley’s book beyond the themes named, and they do not say what policies, if any, any speaker proposed for increasing mobility.