Fwiw, I feel that income amount is much more important than whether the amount is more or less than parents' income, even though that too affects one's feelings. So the apparent fact that the high incomes of today's parents are harder to beat than their grandparents' lower incomes is very much a sign of progress.
You are comparing material consumption across decades and axiomatically declaring that to be more important than one's share in the "present day" economy.
I had thought you asked for opinions. I gave mine because you asked, and labeled it as such ("I feel..."). Not sure it should be taken as an axiom! :)
You're certainly free to have a different opinion. Your opinions are often among the most informative on the board, I appreciate them.
I appreciate your opinions too.
Having been a avid computer coder by choice since my teens, I have an innate habit of reducing logical propositions to axioms and rules of inferences. I was simply attempting to do that with your position with an aim to understand it more fully and respond to it. I have been told by many people that my attempts to reduce human interaction to such stark mathematical/logical terms often distills out nuance and puts words in people's mouth. If I did so here and caused offence then I did not intend that.
Ah, that makes more sense! I couldn't understand why you were pursuing the line you did, and the axiomatic part was confusing to me - first time experiencing it. Color me not offended.
That said, viewing it axiomatically doesn't capture the nuance that I intended to convey. I'll explain a bit more in case it's helpful.
1. I am sharing with you a mental model that leads me to some conclusions about upward mobility, and its relation to general well being of Americans.
2. My model is my best guess about how things work for most people, but it could be wrong and I'm fine if people feel that it's wrong. In the sense that I personally think it's correct based on what I've seen so far, it's my opinion.
3. My model posits that more than one factor affects well being as detailed below.
4. Two of the model's factors are income (as measured by inflation-adjusted dollars) and upward mobility. Other factors can be ignored for now.
5. Upward mobility means a person's rise from their parents' relative rank in the nation's income distribution during their childhood (say, 10th percentile if they're a poor kid) to a higher one (say, 90th percentile if they become an engineer, perhaps). Measuring this requires actual results comparing a beginning time in childhood and a later time during adulthood. Changes over time are an essential element of the definition. My understanding from sociology classes and general reading is that this definition of upward mobility is fairly common, and it appears to be the one which the posted article uses. Therefore I (and the charts in the article you posted) compare across decades.
6. Income has a profound effect on well-being, at least up to a fairly high level. Most posters in MMM seem to agree agree this is true up to $75,000/year or so for most people. I personally think - it's a part of my model - that for representative members of the general population, the positive effect of more income is roughly logarithmic, which implies there's no ceiling. It also implies that increases from 10k to 25k are more important than 25k to 50k, from 50k to 75k are more important than 75k to 100k, and so on.
7. Rank in the income distribution affects well being by affecting self-esteem. Low rank makes you feel bad, high rank makes you feel good. I posit this is a real part of well being. Upward mobility, meaning upward change in rank over time, therefore has a positive effect too.
8. At lower income levels, the material aspect of income is most important. At higher levels, the esteem aspect of rank rises in importance relative to material income, perhaps overshadowing it. I'm not clear on the exact relation but I feel that for most people, the material aspect is predominant. Roughly, I'd guess that at 75k, the factors have equal influence. I'm open to feedback on this relation but it's the guess in my head, thus is the model I'm sharing. For this thread, the key part is that I'm assuming that for most people, income is more important than rank even though rank is important. (This is based on a mixture of personal feeling, observation of others, listening to others and reading. Obviously it's something that others may have different data or opinions about.)
Based on this model, plus the data in the article, my conclusions follow automatically (as far as I can see). Let me know if that's helpful or not! :)