Perhaps I I didn’t make my point clear by providing distinction for the datasets, so I’ll just eliminate that- In the US, your odds of dying within the same social class to which you were born are roughly 90%. The numbers improve mildly if you have the good sense to be born in, say, Norway. They get worse if your are foolish enough to be born in Haiti.
The remaining ~10% you have to work with to escape your class is highly confounded, so determining which factors most greatly affect it is extremely difficult. My suspicion is that random encounters have a significant role in moving that needle, at least as great as anything else you might ‘intentionally’ act on.
As an aside, this is partly why I believe that attempts to “level the playing field” within a capitalist system produce minuscule/temporary beneficial results- the rungs of the ladder may inch closer here or there, but if your arms can only reach three feet does it really matter if the next rung is 4’6” or 5’? Either way it’s out of reach.
