This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, May 31st,

2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Social mobility means helping people improve their prospects for creating and

building long-term wealth. So what hinders American's social mobility?

Gonzalo Schwartz is president of the Archbridge Institute.

We discussed his work on how states fare on social mobility

and how social scientists understand what affects

Americans' ability to move up economically.

You've done a lot of work on social mobility and when we think about what contributes to or detract from social mobility, how do you folks at the

Archbridge Institute get at that question?

Yeah, so what we've tried to do and we put it out in a report at the end of last year called the social mobility in the 50 states, trying to analyze social mobility from different perspectives and focusing on four main pillars on entrepreneurship and growth.

The impact that that has on mobility, social mobility,

they impact the rule of law and institutions, education and skills development and

social capital.

So I can go into each of those areas, but the idea is each of those

affect individuals or people are affected by them either through barriers or through their own lives, just more natural barriers

intrinsic to the individual at different times during their life. So we take a life cycle approach

where some things are going to affect them before they enter the labor market as they're

developing their skills when they're young even from age zero up until then when they enter the

labor market and that's where more than entrepreneurship and growth affects the labor opportunities, the markets.

So in terms of policy to address some of those problems, what are some of the elements that you see broadly as either hindering or contributing

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