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For instance, if you yourself are in the top fifth of the distribution, what are the chances your kids end up there, too? For the birth-years studied by Corak, Connolly and Haeck, the odds are 29.5 per cent in Canada and 36.5 per cent in the U.S. If the distribution were completely random, the answer would be 20 per cent. Your kids would be equally likely to end up in any of the five quintiles. So 29.5 per cent and 36.5 per cent aren’t random. And the Canadian number is less than the U.S. number, giving us more intergenerational “income mobility.” But if you’re like me, your reaction may be that just under one in three (the Canadian probability) and just over one in three (the U.S. probability) isn’t all that far from the random probability. Staying at the top certainly isn’t guaranteed.

How about rags to riches? That is, kids from bottom-quintile parents ending up in the top quintile? The chance of that is just 7.2 per cent in the U.S. — one in 14 basically, which isn’t very good. By contrast, in Canada it’s 11.2 per cent — one in nine, so: better, but not really great, either.

And riches to rags? Cases where kids with top-quintile parents end up in the bottom quintile? Just a 10.9-per-cent chance of that in the U.S. (so maybe those parents who bribed their children’s way into Yale and Stanford needn’t have bothered). In Canada, on the other hand, the odds of going from top to bottom were 15.5 per cent, not that far from the 20 per cent that a random distribution would produce.

I’ve focused on the top and bottom quintiles but the study actually concludes that when you concentrate on the middle three quintiles — the middle-class quintiles? — “there is a good deal of intergenerational mobility for a large segment of the population in these two countries.”

The bottom line: We’re poorer than Americans but we have a better chance of moving up. Or down. I wonder how many Canadians, if presented with the true numbers, would vote for that trade-off.