Everyone loves a good rags to riches story.
Books and movies and music are full of this
idea.
Whether it’s Gatsby turning himself from a nobody
to a somebody, or Drake starting from the bottom,
there’s something appealing about the idea that
anyone can make it, if they try hard enough.
And more than maybe anywhere else, that idea is
embraced in the United States, where the mythos of the
land of opportunity is practically part of our foundation.
But is the US a land of opportunity?
Can anyone move up the rungs of the social
ladder?
Or is the American Dream just that: a dream?
To get a handle on the answer, we have to
understand changes in social position – or
what sociologists call social mobility.
[Theme Music]
There are a few different types of social mobility,
so let’s get some definitions straight first.
Intragenerational mobility is how a person
moves up or down the social ladder during
their lifetime.
Intergenerational mobility, however, is about
movement in social position across generations.
Are you doing better or worse than your parents
were when they were your age?
There’s also absolute versus relative mobility.
Absolute mobility is when you move up or
down in absolute terms – are you better or
worse than before?
Like, if you make $50,000 a year now and made
$40,000 10 years ago, you experienced upward
mobility in an absolute sense.
But what if all your peers who were
making the same amount ten years ago are now
making $65,000 a year?
Yes, you’re still better off than you were
10 years ago, but you’re doing worse relative
to your peers.
Relative mobility is how you move up or down
in social position compared to the rest of society.
We can measure social mobility quantitatively,
using measures of economic mobility, like by comparing
your income to your parent’s income at the same age.
Or we can look at mobility using qualitative
measures.
A common measure used by sociologists
is occupational status.
If your father worked in a blue collar job,
what’s the likelihood that you will too?
A recent study of absolute intergenerational
mobility found that about one-third of US men will
end up in the same type of job as their fathers,
compared to about 37% who are upwardly
mobile, and 32% who are downwardly mobile.
It’s pretty common to remain within the
same class group as your parents.
About 80 percent of children experience what’s
called horizontal social mobility,
where they work in a different occupation than their
parents, but remain in a similar social position.
So, how much social mobility is there in the
US?
Well, there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that if we zoom out and look
at absolute mobility across the years, the long
term trend in social mobility is upwards.
Partially because of industrialization, median annual
family income rose steadily throughout the 20th century,
going from around $34,000 in 1955 to $70,000 in 2015.
Standards of living now are much better than
they were 60 years ago.
Unfortunately, more recent trends in social
mobility have been less rosy.
Since the 1970s, much of the economic growth in
income has been at the top of the income distribution.
Meanwhile, family incomes have been pretty
flat for the rest of the population.
This unequal growth in incomes has meant less
absolute mobility for Americans.
A recent analysis of tax data by a group of
economists and sociologists found that absolute
mobility has declined over the last half century.
While 90% of children born in the 1940s
earned more than their parents as adults, only
50% of children born in the 1980s did.
The other bad news is that within a single
generation social mobility is stagnant.
While people generally improve their income
over time by gaining education and skills,
most people stay on the same rung of the social
ladder that they started on.
Of those born in the bottom income quintile,
36% remain in the bottom quintile as adults.
Only 10% of those born at the bottom end up
in the top quintile as adults.
Started at the bottom, now we’re probably
still at the bottom, statistically speaking.
And socioeconomic status is sticky at the
top, too.
Researchers at the Brookings Institution, including
Crash Course Sociology writer Joanna Venator,
found that 30% of those born in the
top quintile stay in the top quintile as adults.
Plus, social mobility differs by race/ethnicity,
gender, and education.
White Americans see more upward
mobility than Black Americans:
half of Black Americans that are born at
the bottom of the income distribution are still
in the bottom quintile at age 40.
Black Americans also face higher rates of
downward mobility, being more likely to move out
of the middle class than White Americans:
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble to take a look
at research on race and social mobility in action.
In 1982, American sociologists Karl Alexander
and Doris Entwisle began following the lives
of a random sample of 800 first grade students
growing up in a variety of neighborhoods in
the Baltimore area.
What began as a study meant to last only three
years eventually ended up lasting 30 years,
as the researchers followed up with the kids
throughout their lives, to see the paths that
their early circumstances put them on.
Alexander and Entwisle collected data on everything
imaginable, interviewing the kids yearly about
who they lived with, where they lived, work
history, education, drug use, marriage, childbearing,
you name it.
And what they found was that poverty cast a long
shadow over the course of these kids’ lives.
45% of kids with higher socioeconomic status,
or SES, had gotten a college degree by age 28 –
only 4% of low SES kids had.
Those born better off were also more likely
to be middle class at age 28.
And these unequal outcomes were heightened
for African American kids.
Low SES white kids ended up better off than
low SES Black kids.
89% of white high school dropouts were
working at age 22 compared to only 40% of black
high school dropouts.
And contrary to what The Wire might have made
you think about inner-city Baltimore lifestyles
– these differences can’t be explained away
by differences in criminal behavior or drug use.
Low SES White men were more likely to use
hard drugs, smoke, and binge drink than low
SES Black men.
And holding all else constant, a police record
was more of an impediment to getting a job
for African American men than White men.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
So, the impacts of where you’re born on the
social ladder can have far reaching consequences.
And in addition to race, social mobility can
also vary by gender.
Over the last half century, women as a whole
have experienced absolute mobility –
85% of women earn higher wages than
their mothers did.
And the income gap between men and women has
narrowed significantly.
In 1980, the average income for a woman was
60% that of men, whereas by 2015 that gap was 8%.
But despite the great strides over the last half
century, there are still gaps in opportunity for women.
Women born at the bottom of the social class
ladder are more likely to remain there than men –
about half of women born in the bottom
quintile are still there at age 40 compared
to only about one-third of men.
Also, women born at the bottom experience
more downward mobility than men,
with more women than men having family
incomes lower than that of their parents.
Some of these differences by gender may be
because women are much more likely to head
up single parent homes than men are.
Being married is a huge plus for social mobility,
because two incomes are better than one.
People who marry tend to accumulate wealth
much faster than those who are single, making
it easier to ascend the social ladder.
Modern-day Cinderella doesn’t just move
up the social ladder by marrying the prince,
she’s also more likely to build a solid 401K
and stock portfolio, key sources of wealth.
As we’ve seen, social class mobility depends
on where you start and who you are.
So let’s go back to the question we asked
at the beginning is America the land of opportunity?
If you’re a glass half full kind of person,
you might think so based on some of what
we’ve talked about today.
After all, most people are better off than
past generations were.
Accounting for inflation, about three times
as many Americans make incomes above
$100,000 now than did in 1967.
But not all groups have benefitted equally
from this economic growth –
your chance at upward mobility can vary a
lot by education or race or gender, or where
you start on the income distribution.
For those in the middle of the income distribution,
earnings growth has stalled for many workers,
but the costs of necessities like healthcare
or housing have climbed ever higher.
Manufacturing, an industry that historically provided
stable jobs and decent pay to less-educated workers,
has been declining for a while now and was particularly
hard hit by the recession from 2007 to 2009.
In the wake of this decline, most of the jobs
available for less-educated workers tend to be
low-paying service industry jobs,
contributing to lower absolute mobility
than we’ve seen in the past.
All of these patterns, plus the growing income
inequality we talked about a couple episodes ago,
mean that the rungs of the social mobility
ladder in the United States seem to be getting
harder to climb.
Today, we talked about intergenerational and
intragenerational mobility and the difference
between absolute and relative mobility.
We talked about the long run upward social
mobility trends in the United States as well as the
recent declines in absolute social mobility.
Then, we touched on how opportunities for
social mobility differ by your class, race, and gender.
Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr.
Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it's
made with the help of all these nice people.
Our Animation Team is Thought Cafe and Crash
Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud.
If you'd like to keep Crash Course free for everyone,
forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a
crowdfunding platform that allows you to support
the content you love.
Speaking of Patreon, we'd like to thank all of our
patrons in general, and we'd like to specifically thank
our Headmaster of Learning Ben Holden-Crowther.
Thank you so much for your support.
