By another measure, “intergenerational income elasticity,” social mobility is twice as great for Canada as for the United States.

Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, has noted that in the United States, parents’ incomes correlate to their adult children’s incomes roughly as heights do. “The chance of a person who was born to a family in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution rising to the top 10 percent as an adult is about the same as the chance that a dad who is 5 feet 6 inches tall having a son who grows up to be over 6 feet 1 inch tall,” Krueger observed in a speech. “It happens, but not often.”

I’ve been reflecting on this because of a friend in my hometown, Yamhill, Ore. Rick Goff was smart, talented and hard working, but he faced an uphill struggle from birth; I wrote about him last year as an example of the aphorism that “talent is universal, but opportunity is not.”

And now Rick is dead. He died of heart disease last month in his home in Yamhill at age 65.

I visited him the day before he died, as he was pained and struggling to walk, and I keep thinking of his prodigious talents that were never fully deployed because, in the United States, too often the best predictor of where we end up is where we start.

Rick, who thought he was one-eighth American Indian, pretty much raised himself, along with his brother and two sisters. His mom died when he was 5, and his dad — “a professional drunk,” Rick once told me — abandoned the family. A grandmother presided, and the kids hunted and fished to put food on the table.