> think the world needs a nation that continues to put personal freedom above everything else.
And you think that the US does that?
Exercising personal freedom necessitates having the material and mental resources to buy stuff, to be able to move from place to place, to change jobs, etc. It seems to me that a plausible proxy measure for personal freedom is social mobility, the likelihood that you will be better off than your parents. As far as I remember the country with highest social mobility is Denmark.
The US has pretty good Social Mobility as well, it is complete myth that the "rich" in the US is stagnate, most of the Billionaires in the US are 1st Generation Billionaires, this highlights there are income and social mobility.
As a personal anecdote, I am many times better of income and wealth wise than my parents even though we have the same education level and seemingly the same income opportunities, yet I have made better choices with my finances (learning from their [bad] example). My sibling is the same. One of my parents has zero retirement savings and will live off SocSec (likely with the assistance of me and my sibling). My other parent has slightly more savings but not by much and has lots of debt, both are within 5 years of SocSec retirement Age
> The US has pretty good Social Mobility as well, it is complete myth that the "rich" in the US is stagnate, most of the Billionaires in the US are 1st Generation Billionaires, this highlights there are income and social mobility.
Most economists of inequality dispute this. As measured by the likelihood that you'll earn more than your parents [1], or that you'll move up the income or wealth distribution compared to where you were born [2], the United States lags significantly behind most other developed nations. Social mobility in the United States is also lower than it has almost ever been.
[1] Chetty et al., The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940
> As a personal anecdote, I am many times better of income and wealth wise than my parents even though we have the same education level and seemingly the same income opportunities
Slightly off topic - I'd wager the overwhelming majority of the HN posters are signficantly better-off than their parents, solely by virtue of being tech-workers. We tend to forget, but at no point in capitalism's history has such a numerous caste of white-collar knowledge workers been so well compensated as we are now
In your case it may well be mostly because of better financial decisions (especially if you are orders of magnitude better off, which is hard to do without consistent investment in any case), but for most of us this is also true just by 'placement luck'
And you think that the US does that?
Exercising personal freedom necessitates having the material and mental resources to buy stuff, to be able to move from place to place, to change jobs, etc. It seems to me that a plausible proxy measure for personal freedom is social mobility, the likelihood that you will be better off than your parents. As far as I remember the country with highest social mobility is Denmark.