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US Socioeconomic Status Now Harder to Change

In the first long-term assessment of social mobility in the US, Xi Song, associate professor in the department of sociology in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences and an affiliate of the Population Studies Center, and colleagues from University of Nebraska Omaha, Northwestern University and the US Census Bureau discovered that socioeconomic mobility has substantially declined during the past 150 years, particularly for those born in the 1940s and later. They also found that the well-documented rise in economic inequality of the past four decades has not affected intergenerational mobility in the ways many expected it would. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

“Most work in this area has focused on more recent decades,” said Dr. Song. “Ours looks back to 1850.” Dr. Song and her collaborators could go that far back thanks to newly available Census data. They examined information from approximately five million people. For consistency, the analysis included mostly white males, with a small number of males from other racial groups. In the mid-1800s, most females didn’t have jobs outside the home—the gauge the researchers used to measure socioeconomic status—or they changed their names after marriage, making them harder to track over time. Other races were underrepresented due to a low rate of linking across years in the dataset.  

The researchers’ analysis showed that for the study population, sons born before 1900 experienced significant upward mobility compared to their fathers. Around that time, the country was moving from agriculture to industry. But then, as the prestige of certain occupations diminished, such as cashiers, typists and elevator operators, this trajectory slowly began to change. 

The effect becomes even more pronounced starting with the baby boomer generation and continuing through today. According to Dr. Song, children today resemble their parents more in terms of socioeconomic status than in any previous generation. The researchers found that although income inequality has risen sharply since the 1970s, the relative trend in social mobility has stayed largely stable.

One major limitation to the work was the lack of diverse demographic information within the dataset, Dr. Song conceded. In the future, she said she hopes to find other datasets that might paint a truer picture of how non-white groups in the US have fared in terms of social mobility. Read the full story at https://tinyurl.com/pennsociostatusstudy

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