French Perceptions Skew Social Policy Toward a Dead End

France redistributes. Massively, structurally, for decades. And yet the social elevator does not function any better than in the United States—that country which Europeans regard with condescension as the symbol of frozen inequality.

Americans are more optimistic than Europeans about intergenerational mobility, and too optimistic relative to reality. But the paradox, highlighted by Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso in the American Economic Review in 2018, is that the French do the opposite: they tend to underestimate their society’s intergenerational mobility, unlike Americans, even though they are in a more favorable situation, particularly for the mobility of children from the lowest income quintile.

This double gap between belief and reality—Americans overconfident, the French too pessimistic—is not incidental. What individuals feel, their perception of their situation and of the society they live in, determines how they position themselves on questions like taxation, social justice, redistribution. In other words: French social policy is built on a distorted mental map.

When perception twists political demand

Median voter theory predicts that greater inequality should lead to increased demand for redistribution. But data collected by the Social Economics Lab suggests that the mere existence of inequality does not really lead people to support redistribution. It is perceptions that shape their support for policies.

The mechanism is precise. A randomized experiment showing survey respondents pessimistic information about mobility increases support for redistribution, especially for equal opportunity policies. Strong political polarization is found. But (and this is the crux of the problem) left-leaning respondents are pessimistic about social mobility, and the more pessimistic they are, the more they see a role for the state in equal opportunity policies, such as spending more on public health and education. By contrast, right-leaning respondents seem to view government as the problem rather than the solution, and even those pessimistic about social mobility do not want more public spending.

The consequence is brutal: the French, across all sides, chiefly demand income redistribution and little targeted investment in the mechanisms that actually open up the social elevator.

What the data say about the real elevator

Mobility in France is poor. Not imaginary: documented and measured. France is characterized by strong income persistence between generations compared to other developed countries. Only 9.7% of children from the 20% of families with the lowest incomes end up among the 20% of most affluent households as adults. This statistic places France among OECD countries with the lowest intergenerational mobility, ahead only of the United States and Italy.

Four times lower than children from affluent families. That is the figure from Gustave Kenedi and Louis Sirugue, published in the Journal of Public Economics in 2023 based on French administrative tax data—the most rigorous measurement available to date.

An OECD study shows that in France, it takes six generations for a family from the bottom 10% to reach the country’s average income level. It takes four and a half generations on average across the OECD, and only two in Denmark.

France already redistributes more than 30% of its GDP. It redistributes, and the elevator remains stuck. French pessimism about mobility is therefore justified in substance: but it points toward the wrong answer.

The lock that policies do not touch

Admission to higher education is the decisive lock. Higher education plays a central role in this social reproduction. Only 30% of young people whose parents are among the 20% least favored in terms of income obtain a higher education diploma, compared to 80% of those whose parents are most favored.

This gap does not come from intellectual capacity, but from information and confidence. Focus 123 from the Council of Economic Analysis (Kenedi, November 2025) establishes this with precision: post-secondary orientation choices are influenced by alumni of the same high school. The results show that the barely-passing admission of an alumnus significantly increases the probability that a high school student from the same school will apply to and be admitted to the same program the following year. These effects persist across multiple cohorts and extend to related programs. Homeroom teachers play a role in this information transmission.

In other words: access to selective programs depends structurally on the informal network of the school attended. A downtown high school with alumni at elite schools produces candidates; a rural or suburban school without these connections does not—regardless of students’ academic level.

Some regions combine high unemployment, low qualification levels, and strong intergenerational income persistence. Geography aggravates the mechanism: children who make wrong orientation choices are not making mistakes—they are choosing within what they know.

What Stantcheva forces us to change

Stantcheva explains why younger generations increasingly see their lives as a zero-sum game. This reflex—if the other wins, I lose—is precisely what her laboratory has been measuring since 2024: zero-sum thinking refers to the belief that one individual’s or group’s gains tend to come at others’ expense. From a representative sample of 20,400 American residents, the authors find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with greater support for government redistribution.

This logic blocks political debate. When the French believe the elevator is broken and the rich have taken the place of the poor, they demand to tax the rich and pay out more to the poor. This is not illegitimate.

But it does not repair the mechanism. Left-leaning respondents who are more pessimistic about mobility want more redistribution, but also more equal opportunity policies, notably spending on education and health. This second component (equal opportunity) systematically disappears from French debate, absorbed by the first.

The causal chain that Stantcheva’s research forces us to trace is thus this: biased perceptions generate demand for urgent redistribution, and this demand absorbs political resources that could go to investment in the mechanisms that produce real mobility—orientation, access to major degree programs, information available at the right time in the right school.

Changing who guides, not who redistributes

The architectural choice for 2027 does not concern tax rates. It concerns who holds the information that opens or closes trajectories.

Today, information about selective programs circulates through networks: educated parents, teachers aware of entrance exams, visible alumni on Parcoursup. These networks are invisible in official data, but they structure choices. The right to guidance support exists on paper; it is not an enforceable right, it is not distributed according to schools that need it most, and it lacks the data to measure who under-applies.

The break that Kenedi’s work at the Council of Economic Analysis (Focus 123, 2025) concretely instructs: make enforceable a right to guidance support in schools with documented low mobility (identified by administrative data that already exist) and transfer to these schools the orientation resources currently scattered across the national level. It is no longer the student who bears the burden of informing and aspiring themselves: it is the system that targets schools where under-application is documented.

This change shifts competency and resources from the national level to high schools with measured low mobility, and it makes orientation inequality visible in public data instead of leaving it in the informality of networks. After this shift, who applies to which programs no longer depends solely on the informal network of the school attended.

The cost is that of any targeted investment in primary and secondary school in the affected territories: additional guidance counselors, school-level data made public, an enforceable right to support. It is lower than the amounts spent each year on income redistribution that leaves closure mechanisms intact. The budget constraint is real (France already devotes 197 billion euros to education in 2024), but it is also an argument for better targeting what exists, not for abandoning it.

French policy has chosen to redistribute the fruit of an elevator it has not repaired. Stantcheva’s research shows that citizens themselves, in their structural pessimism about mobility, have internalized this surrender—and are asking for more of it.

Sources

[1] Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso, “Intergenerational Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution,” American Economic Review, vol. 108, no. 2, February 2018, p. 521–554, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20162015 (accessed 10/10/2026).

[2] Stefanie Stantcheva, “Perceptions and Preferences for Redistribution,” NBER Working Paper no. 29370, October 2021, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29370/w29370.pdf (accessed 10/10/2026).

[3] Gustave Kenedi and Louis Sirugue, “Intergenerational Income Mobility in France: A Comparative and Geographic Analysis,” IPP Notes no. 95, Institute for Public Policies, October 2023, https://www.ipp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/NoteIPP_mobilite_interg_revenus-3.pdf (accessed 10/10/2026).

[4] Gustave Kenedi and Louis Sirugue, “Intergenerational Income Mobility in France: A Comparative and Geographic Analysis,” Journal of Public Economics, vol. 226, 2023, https://www.ipp.eu/en/publication/intergenerational-income-mobility-in-france-a-comparative-and-geographical-analysis/ (accessed 10/10/2026).

[5] Gustave Kenedi, “Intergenerational Mobility in France: The Role of Post-Secondary Orientation and Peer Effects,” CAE Focus no. 123, Council of Economic Analysis, November 2025, https://cae-eco.fr/mobilite-intergenerationnelle-en-france-le-role-de-lorientation-post-bac-et-des-effets-de-pairs (accessed 10/10/2026).

[6] Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides,” CEPR Discussion Paper no. 19297, May 2024, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantcheva/files/zero_sum_political_divides.pdf (accessed 10/10/2026).

[7] Philippe Aghion, Vlad Ciornohuz, Maxime Gravoueille, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Anatomy of Inequality and Income Dynamics in France,” mimeo, Collège de France, May 2023, https://www.college-de-france.fr/sites/default/files/media/document/2023-05/Anatomy%20of%20Inequality%20and%20Income%20Dynamics%20in%20France%20Philippe%20Aghion.pdf (accessed 10/10/2026).

[8] OECD, “Is the Social Elevator Broken? How to Promote Social Mobility,” 2018, https://ocde.delegfrance.org/L-ascenseur-social-est-il-en-panne-au-sein-de-l-OCDE (accessed 10/10/2026).

[9] CEPREMAP, “Social Mobility as Perceived by the French,” Wellbeing Observatory Note no. 2022-11, September 2022, https://www.cepremap.fr/2022/09/note-de-lobservatoire-du-bien-etre-n2022-11-la-mobilite-sociale-percue-par-les-francais/ (accessed 10/10/2026).

[10] DEPP, “National Education Expenditure Reaches 197.1 Billion in 2024,” Information Note, September 2025, https://www.ekole.fr/blog/la-depense-nationale-deducation-atteint-197-1-milliards-en-2024 (accessed 10/10/2026).

[11] OECD, “Does Inequality Matter? How People Perceive Economic Disparities and Social Mobility,” OECD, 2022, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/fr/publications/reports/2021/11/does-inequality-matter_4cba8d03/0fa43215-fr.pdf (accessed 10/10/2026).

[12] Nagui Bechichi and Gustave Kenedi, IPP Notes no. 119, “Post-Secondary Orientation: Do the Choices of Former High School Students Influence Those of Following Generations?”, Institute for Public Policies, December 2025, https://www.ipp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Note_IPP_119_orientation_post_bac.pdf (accessed 10/10/2026).