How social mobility and income inequality affect health in Canada

People who live in countries with low inequality (where the gap between the rich and the poor is small) tend to be healthier on average. Countries with low inequality (like Finland and Denmark) also tend to have a lot of social mobility across generations. In other words, people’s chances of success don’t depend on how well off their parents were. But this isn’t always the case. For example, Canada has high social mobility, but also high inequality. We don’t know much about how these two factors work together to affect health: Does Canada’s high social mobility compensate for the negative impact of high inequality? To help understand this, I will compare parts of Canada, and look at whether inequality seems to matter less when there is a lot of social mobility. To do this, I will first need to calculate the amount of social mobility in different metropolitan areas. To make studies like this easier in the future, I will make the social mobility data available to other researchers.

Faculty Supervisor:

Jim Dunn

Student:

Partner:

University of Glasgow

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

McMaster University

Program: