Rachelle's Reading List: Thursday, January 5th, 2012

2. Conventional Wisdom turned on head regarding Americans economic mobility. The Good News: We are seeing a continued drop in the number of people seeking unemployment benefits in the U.S. suggesting that the job market is on the rise:

A continued drop in the number of people seeking new unemployment benefits in the U.S. last week and a large gain in private sector employment reported by payroll giant Automatic Data Processing offered fresh signals that the labor market began to stabilize as 2011 drew to a close. [WSJ]

The Bad News: many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. This report from the Times today was a big shock to me: [NYT]

The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage. Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for president, warned this fall that movement “up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America.” National Review, a conservative thought leader, wrote that “most Western European and English-speaking nations have higher rates of mobility.” Even Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who argues that overall mobility remains high, recently wrote that “mobility from the very bottom up” is “where the United States lags behind.”