Origin is destination

Let's imagine a five-step ladder to represent social mobility in Mexico, that is, the possibility of improving your economic position compared to that of your parents and grandparents.

In the first step, people with less economic resources are born and in the fifth those with more material advantages.

What are the possibility of scaling from the first to the last step? What determines - or condemnation - that social mobility?

How do they influence the rise or descent of those steps who are your parents, your birthplace, skin color and sex?

The Espinosa Yglesias Study Center (CEEY) uses the metaphor of a ladder to answer some of these questions in the study "Social Mobility in Mexico 2025. The Persistence of Inequality of Opportunity."

It should be noted that these are the most recent available data and with greater rigor in the matter at the country level. The figures are brutal.

Of every 100 people born into the first and second tier, i.e., the households with the fewest economic resources, 78 will never escape poverty. And only two of those 100 will reach the fifth tier, where the wealthiest households are located.

Now let's go to the educational plane because we have the illusion that it helps to match the court.

Only 9 out of every 100 children whose parents completed primary school will earn a college degree. That figure rises to 63 out of every 100 who will go on to college when their parents have professional degrees.

It implies that people whose parents have a high educational level have a 7 -time probability of achieving professional studies.

The study also found that skin color influences social mobility, just as much as gender. If your skin tone is lighter, you're more likely to move up the ladder. This isn't the case for darker skin tones.

The document adds: "For people with origins in the highest group, those with light skin have a longer tenure in that position (54%), in contrast to people with dark skin tones who remain in that group (42%)."

Do not choose who your parents are, or the place where you are born, or your skin color, or your sex, but all that - that you do not choose - determine your position in the social scale and income level.

This inequality of results is conditioned by an inequality of opportunities, not by the inequality of effort.

Yes, in Mexico, origin is destination.