Certainly too much social mobility would mean a constant social flux with no chance to build traditions and social institutions. Too little mobility leads to social stagnation with little opportunity for innovation and, often, to entire classes of persons who feel disenfranchised from the benefit of social participation. In a study for which the results were first published in 2009, Wilkinson and Pickett conduct an exhaustive analysis of social mobility in developed countries. In addition to other correlations with negative social outcomes for societies having high inequality, they found a relationship between high social inequality and low social mobility. Of the eight countries studied — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the UK and the USA, the USA had both the highest economic inequality and lowest economic mobility.…