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Title: Social Mobility in a High Inequality Regime

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2013

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Abstract: At several critical junctures in U.S. history, scholars and other commentators have become concerned that opportunities to get ahead may be growing more unequal, a hypothesis that was prominent during the Depression years, the postwar period, and then again in the 1950s (Hertzler 1952; Sibley 1942). Although these concerns have never been borne out, the recent takeoff in income inequality has revived them yet again (e.g., DeParle 2012; Foorohar 2001; Franke-Ruta 2012; The Economist 2010). We have strikingly little evidence on whether such concerns are finally warranted.The main goal of this paper is to eke out as much evidence on these concerns as the available data will allow. This descriptive objective might at first blush seem easily achieved. To the contrary, a host of methodological problems immediately emerge in attempting to establish recent trends in social mobility, not least of which is that the takeoff in income inequality has not been in play long enough to affect the upbringing of all that many current workers. It is equally problematic that the available survey samples are too small to reliably detect anything but the broadest trends. We overcome these obstacles in this paper by searching for trend among those age groups and social classes that are most likely to evince trend.

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Authors: Cumberworth, Erin; Grusky, David B.; Mitnik, Pablo A.

Publisher: The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

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