Breibart Business Digest: Chutes and Ladders in the American Economy

How It Got Harder for Americans to Climb Toward Prosperity

A new economics paper puts its finger on something that American workers have felt for years, even though economists keep describing it too abstractly: it has become much harder to use one job as a springboard to a better one.

The paper is very good at establishing the decline of upward job mobility. But it misses the major causes: deindustrialization and mass immigration.

Let’s start with what they get right. For most workers, the biggest raises don’t come from annual reviews, cost-of-living adjustments, or even internal promotions. They come from getting a better offer somewhere else. When those offers stop coming, wages stagnate even if the economy is still cranking out jobs.

That is the big insight from the new paper by Niklas Engbom of New York University, Aniket Baksy of the University of Melbourne, and private-sector economist Daniele