> My college US history course ~20 years ago very much drove home the fact that (at least at the time) social mobility in the US was the same as in India.
This is flatly false, and to be honest it's a little embarrassing that you would parrot it without Googling it (which you were happy to do to pull up a tangential stat that didn't contradict the dishonest narrative you're pushing). The US is ranked 27th out of the 82 countries the World Economic Forum studied in 2020, and India is ranked _76th_.[1]
On top of that, note that Denmark is ranked #1 for social mobility in the WEF study. The relevant topic to this thread is pre-transfer social mobility (ie before taxes/welfare), where the US and Denmark look almost identical![2]
That doesn't suggest that Denmark's policies are useless: transfers are an effective poverty-fighting tool, and I have no doubt that the economic floor in Denmark is a much more comfortable one. I'm all for a stronger welfare state due to the human costs of poverty.
But this is all irrelevant to the topic at hand, and the false claim all over this thread that the US is uniquely bad at providing opportunity and mobility to those without it. We're better than the majority of the developed world at this, partially due to the productivity incentives created by how much more precarious poverty here is compared to OECD countries with the strongest safety nets. I should be clear: I don't think we're at an optimal point on the spectrum, and I think sacrificing some economic dynamism to palliate the human costs of poverty is worthwhile. But the claim that we're uniquely socially immobile by global or even OECD standards is a flat lie, propagated by people too simple-minded to understand the concept of a trade-off.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index...
[2] When looking exclusively at wages (before taxes and transfers), Danish and American social mobility are very similar. It is only after taxes and transfers are taken into account that Danish social mobility improves, indicating that Danish economic redistribution policies are the key drivers of greater mobility. Additionally, Denmark's greater investment in public education did not improve educational mobility significantly, meaning children of non-college educated parents are still unlikely to receive college education, although this public investment did result in improved cognitive skills amongst poor Danish children compared to their American peers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model