Every time this study or one like it is trotted out, it drives me nuts. What a society should be looking for is
freedom of mobility, not arbitrary mobility.
According to an article on NPR that was linked but then deleted here a minute ago, 80% of Americans think that one can still pull oneself up by their bootstraps. In the article, the subtext was that this mobility study proved that Americans were morons and don't realize how stuck they are.
What hogwash. If we think about what Americans and immigrants are actually seeing that makes them feel so hopeful, it's the opportunity of mobility through one's own efforts.
What opportunity of mobility does not imply is the greatest statistical father-son mobility. That would only be the case if each person born were randomly allotted IQ or EQ or whatever your favored intellectual attribute is for being more likely to succeed. But that's not how genetics work.
Not only that, but each person would have to be born into families with precisely the same quality of upbringing. But neither is that the case. In fact, on average, successful parents have successful habits that they pass on to their children.
The upshot is, the method of this study is absurd. The correlation between your dad's income and your income does not represent freedom of mobility, it's just a lot easier to measure.
One can easily imagine societies arranged with more arbitrary success paths that lead to greater father-son mobility than a meritocratic society organized by families of natural born children.
No money needs to be involved for the preceding to be case.
Now, I actually favor an even greater level of meritocracy. I would be interested in something like a 90% death tax, to be put in a pool and distributed proportionally to children upon a certain birthday. I can see all sorts of problems with the naive version of that idea, but something in that spirit would be fantastic. Let's get rid of family money dynasties.