Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s

Abstract

We make use of newly available data that include roughly 5 million linked household and population records from 1850 to 2015 to document long-term trends in intergenerational social mobility in the United States. Intergenerational mobility declined substantially over the past 150 y, but more slowly than previously thought. Intergenerational occupational rank–rank correlations increased from less than 0.17 to as high as 0.32, but most of this change occurred to Americans born before 1900. After controlling for the relatively high mobility of persons from farm origins, we find that intergenerational social mobility has been remarkably stable. In contrast with relative stability in rank-based measures of mobility, absolute mobility for the nonfarm population—the fraction of offspring whose occupational ranks are higher than those of their parents—increased for birth cohorts born prior to 1900 and has fallen for those born after 1940.

Rising inequality is not balanced by intergenerational mobility

“…In an era of rising income and wealth inequality in the United States since the 1970s, that balance of inequality and mobility grows in salience. Enter Song et al's paper, "Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s" (1), which uses linked household and population records on the occupations of generations of US-born white men, along with data from several representative surveys, to describe how social mobility in the United States has changed since before the Civil War and before industrialization transformed economic production. Comparing the occupations of sons to the occupations of their fathers, Song et al (1) paint a troubling picture of rising intergenerational persistence in occupational status.…”

“…Song et al (1) unpack this inherent complexity by differentiating between relative mobility and absolute mobility. This is a key contribution of their paper compared to previous work on mobility that cannot distinguish structural from exchange mobility in estimating, for instance, the association between father's income quintile and son's income quintile.…”

“…This is a key contribution of their paper compared to previous work on mobility that cannot distinguish structural from exchange mobility in estimating, for instance, the association between father's income quintile and son's income quintile. Song et al (1) instead measure relative mobility as the association between son's percentile rank and father's percentile rank, to capture the fact that the son of a farmer who becomes a salesman is relatively more upwardly mobile in the distribution of occupations if that distribution is not already top heavy with many occupations that outrank salesmen. Conversely, that same salesman son of a farmer is less upwardly mobile, by this measure, if salesmen have been bumped down the status ladder by higher-status occupations.…”

“…Conversely, that same salesman son of a farmer is less upwardly mobile, by this measure, if salesmen have been bumped down the status ladder by higher-status occupations. Song 1 absolute mobility matter because both opportunities and outcomes matter: Sons doing better than their fathers is part of the American Dream, but so is the continuous upgrading of destination occupations (Table 1). If fathers in top-ranking occupations are increasingly likely to monopolize opportunities for their sons, then high-ranking occupations would continue to displace lower ones, such that "moving on up" is not really moving up at all and can even mean moving downward in terms of status-based standards of living or social honor.…”

“…This makes the reduction in social mobility observed among the post-1940 birth cohorts all of the more troubling. Additionally, because of the scale and resolution of the data, Song et al (1) are able to show that mobility-in contrast to inequality, as shown by Piketty (4)-was impervious to 2 world wars and the Great Depression. Finally, long-run historical comparison helps to anchor the estimates in a way that addresses Swift's (5) valuable critique of "perfect mobility" as an inappropriate baseline for comparison in modeling mobility; seeing the historical comparison helps to evaluate the level of mobility in an historically comparative way, rather than in a normative way relative to some artificial referent.…”