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.
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Reference57 articles.
1. Top Incomes in the Long Run of History
2. Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998
3. D. Grusky , “American occupational mobility in the 19th and 20th centuries,” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI (1987).
4. S. Thernstrom , The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1973).
5. Multiple measures of historical intergenerational mobility: Iowa 1915 to 1940;Feigenbaum;Econ. J.,2018
Cited by
97 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献