Given all of this, how can rising levels of inequality be tolerated, or even considered a good thing? One argument that is frequently advanced in favour of inequality is that it serves as an incentive to achievement, and wide inequalities can be tolerated when social mobility is correspondingly high. On this view, the wealthy and successful serve as a sort of motivational lodestar, pointing the direction toward which all of us can strive. And in some countries, this argument holds. Australia, Canada, and the Scandinavian countries all have very high levels of social mobility, measured as the absence of a strong link between individual and parental earnings.