Uneven elevators

Researchers from some Brazilian universities and other institutions around the world scrutinized the current literature and based on it, prepared the Atlas of Social Mobility — a platform that calculates the percentage chances of ascension based on income strata. “It’s a gigantic work of data management,” says Leandro Rocha, a researcher at the Institute for Mobility and Social Development (IMDS), responsible for the publication. “We gathered information from people from the 1980s to 2019, using data from the Federal Revenue Service, the Unified Registry (CadÚnico) and the Annual Report of Social Information (Rais), to make these connections between families and observe the chances of a child being in a higher social percentile than their parents when they are in adulthood. Therefore, it is intergenerational mobility – and it is very low”, he announces.

Article in Issue #491 (March 2026) – page 18