Oh Canada

Boy, if you listened to Conservatives, you'd despair for this country. Big socialist government, taking all our money in taxes, forcing you to get high-quality medical care ON WAITING LISTS!!! Of all the indignities!!! Imagine, having to wait for medical attention you otherwise wouldn't be able to afford at all. Damn big guvmint!

Well, you wouldn't know it, but not only is Canada a better place for your children to grow up in than the libertarian paradise to the south, but - and this was news to me - Canadians have greater class mobility. That's right, the home of Horatio Alger is a bit colder than you might have thought. A New York Times article about class in the United States:

One surprising finding about mobility is that it is not higher in the United States than in Britain or France. It is lower here than in Canada and some Scandinavian countries but not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place.

Those comparisons may seem hard to believe. Britain and France had hereditary nobilities; Britain still has a queen. The founding document of the United States proclaims all men to be created equal. The American economy has also grown more quickly than Europe's in recent decades, leaving an impression of boundless opportunity.

But the United States differs from Europe in ways that can gum up the mobility machine. Because income inequality is greater here, there is a wider disparity between what rich and poor parents can invest in their children. Perhaps as a result, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance in the United States than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France, one recent study found.

"Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced," Professor Levine said. "Being born poor in the U.S. gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada."

How odd. You might almost think that a strong government could play a role in the proper functioning of the free market. Of course, this makes us all Stalinists.