Trends and Disparities in Subjective Upward Mobility since 1940

Abstract

Concerns that prospects for upward mobility are fading are common in popular and scientific discourse. The fact that fewer Americans today surpass their parents’ economic status than in the past has been invoked to explain trends ranging from the recent spike in drug and alcohol poisonings to the growing appeal of right-wing populism. Using General Social Survey data, the authors ask whether people actually feel that their standard of living is falling short of that of previous generations. In contrast to data on income, education, or occupation, a majority still perceive that they have attained a higher standard of living than their parents. At the same time, mobility experiences are becoming increasingly polarized: subjective upward mobility is rising among highly educated, minority, and urban populations and declining among less educated and rural populations.

What are the Trends and Explanations of Perceived Social Mobility in Poland?

“…Duru-Bellat & Kieffer (2008), using data from the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, report that in 2003 about a third of respondents thought their occupational position was not as high as their father's, while another 30% reported being occupationally immobile. Using the General Social Survey data from the United States for 1994-2018, Berger & Engzell (2020 show that, contrary to the marked decline in objective indicators of mobility (Chetty et al, 2017), the majority of Americans still feel that they are doing better when compared to their parents. In terms of birth cohorts that participated in the survey, starting with respondents born in the 1940s and ending with those born in the 1980s, the share of those who feel they are doing worse, compared to their parents, did not exceed 20% for each given cohort.…”

“…Furthermore, subjective social mobility is an important predictor of individuals' perceptions of own places in a social hierarchy, potentially affecting their sense of accomplishment and happiness, life satisfaction, and health and wellbeing (Berger & Engzell, 2020;Gugushvili 2021a;Kelley & Kelley 2009;Präg and Gugushvili 2020). Some recent evidence indicates that subjective social mobility may be a better predictor of various life outcomes in adult life than objective mobility trajectories operationalized through individuals' educational, occupational, or income attainment in comparison with those of their parents Präg and Gugushvili 2021;Gugushvili 2016).…”

“…It has been also argued that the perception of one's own mobility in relation to the position of one's parents becomes particularly important during radical systemic changes when political and economic turbulence leads to major shifts in socioeconomic structure (Janicka, 2020). At the same time, we know relatively little about the factors that determine self-perception of social mobility at the individual (Berger & Engzell, 2020;Gugushvili, 2019) and national levels (Kelley & Kelley, 2009), let alone how a sudden change in external conditions, e.g. major socioeconomic transformation, affects perception of social mobility.…”

Information About Inequality of Opportunity Increases Downward Mobility Perceptions: A Population-Wide Randomized Survey Experiment

“…An emerging area of scholarship has begun to explore the trends, causes, and consequences of social mobility perceptions, but so far there are only a few sources of data on this aspect of social stratification research. In the United States, where appropriate data are available, about 20% of individuals born since the 1960s have reported being downwardly mobile when asked to compare their own standard of living to their parents’ standard of living ( Berger and Engzell, 2020 ). The latter is puzzling considering that time-adjusted per capita national income in the United States in the same period more than tripled ( World Bank, 2020 ).…”

“…There are only a handful of studies which investigate what determines individuals’ perceptions of social mobility ( Kelley and Kelley, 2009 ; Berger and Engzell, 2020 ; Gugushvili, 2021b ). The main finding from this research is that both individual and contextual explanations matter for perceptions of social mobility.…”