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Emily Beller and Michael Hout examine trends in U.S. social mobility, especially as it relates to the degree to which a person's income or occupation depends on his or her parents' background and to the independent contribution of economic growth. They also compare U.S. social mobility with that in other countries. They conclude that slower economic growth since 1975 and the concentration of that growth among the wealthy have slowed the pace of U.S. social mobility.


In measuring mobility, economists tend to look at income and sociologists, occupation. The consensus among those measuring occupational mobility is that the average correlation between the occupations of fathers and sons today ranges from 0.30 to 0.40, meaning that most variation in the ranking of occupations is independent of social origins. Those measuring income mobility tend to agree that the elasticity between fathers' and sons' earnings in the United States today is about 0.4, meaning that 40 percent of the difference in incomes between families in the parents' generation also shows up in differences in incomes in the sons' generation.


Beller and Hout show that occupational mobility increased during the 1970s, compared with the 1940s–1960s, but there is some evidence to suggest that by the 1980s and 1990s it had declined to past levels. Existing data on income mobility show no clear trends over time, but increases in economic inequality during the 1980s made mobility more consequential by making economic differences between families persist for a longer time.

In international comparisons, the United States occupies a middle ground in occupational mobility but ranks lower in income mobility. Researchers have used the variation in mobility to study whether aspects of a country's policy regime, such as the educational or social welfare systems, might be driving these results. There is as yet, however, no scholarly consensus about the sources of cross-national differences in mobility.

The relationship of age to voting turnout over a 20-year period was analyzed using data from 6 presidential election surveys conducted by the Survey Research Center. A multivariate analysis was employed in which period & cohort, as well as 6 causal covariates (sex, occupation, region, race, SC, education, & religion) were entered into a regression equation predicting self-reported voting in the election. The linear dependency among age, period, & cohort was avoided by constraining some of the category effects to be equal. The observed curvilinear pattern of voting turnout to age (low turnout among the youngest & oldest voters, highest turnout among the middle-aged) persisted after the other effects were held constant. But an observed curvilinear pattern for birth cohorts (low turnout among those born before 1888 & after 1928) disappeared when the other variables were controlled. Persons born before the turn of the century were shown to have high levels of voting, possibly reflecting persistent differences in the socialization of voting obligations between the 19th & 20th centuries. 3 Tables. AA.

We reanalyze Long and Ferrie's data. We find that the association of occupational status across generations was quite similar over time and place. Two significant differences were: (i) American farms in 1880 were far more open to men who had nonfarm backgrounds than were American farms in 1973 or British farms in either century; (ii) of the four cases, the intergenerational correlation was strongest in Britain in 1881. Structural mobility related to, among other things, economic growth and occupational differentiation, affected mobility most in 1970s America. (JEL J62, N31, N32, N33, N34)