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income mobility
More and more, what your parents make determines what you will make.
In Ontario, home of Canada's worst wage growth, it's getting harder for the poor to move up, and easier for the rich to stay rich.
Albertans are twice as likely as Quebecers to live the “rags to riches” dream.
"... the playing field is a good deal stickier than it appears."
Large jumps from rich to poor, or vice versa, are becoming less common.
Headlines in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and CBC all trotted out the cliché that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, giving the impression of a doomsday-like wealth inequality gap. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Fraser Institute's recent study on income mobility claims it is turning conventional wisdom on its head. In a nutshell, they say income inequality in Canada is not a problem because more people have incomes that have been going up than down, particularly among the poorest earners.This reasoning, if it were conceptually and empirically correct, would certainly provide an important caution to the Occupy Wall Street concerns about the dramatic growth in incomes of the top one per cent. Unfortunately, its results are misleading.
