Want to Climb the Social Ladder

In her recent article “I want to climb the social ladder” for the newspaper Publico, Susana Peralta discusses the results of a recent study about social mobility in Portugal. She argues that we need to go further and understand the causes of the relatively low social mobility in the country. This will only be made possible if the information collected by the education system (and, to a lesser extent, the health and judicial systems) in Portugal is released for research purposes. Susana Peralta gives the example of the North American research project equality of opportunity as the type of applied research that can be done with the appropriate data.