Timothy Noah — Sorry conservatives — America’s mobility problem is real

Some conservatives, though, have lately determined to challenge the evidence on social mobility and reassert that the U.S. really is an example for the world when it comes to racing up the income scale. Writing in the April 14 New York Times, Mark R. Rank, professor of social welfare at Washington University, claims to have evidence that “casts serious doubt on the notion of a rigid class structure in the United States based upon income.” Mark J. Perry of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institutereports, based on Rank’s piece and something that the conservative economist Thomas Sowell wrote 14 years ago, that “there is dynamic movement up and down the income quintiles throughout most Americans’ lifetimes.” And Benjamin Domenech, publisher of The Federalist and a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, writes in The Wall Street Journal’s new “Think Tank” blog that “U.S. economic mobility is very good.” (Full disclosure: I contribute to the same blog.)

So, does the U.S. have lots of social mobility, or very little? Alas, the conservative revisionists have it wrong. Social mobility in the U.S. is stagnant, and has been for some time....

The only meaningful way to measure mobility, economists tend to agree, is to look at intergenerational changes. You take a snapshot of where a person fits in the income distribution and then you compare it to where that person’s parents, at a comparable stage in life, fit in the income distribution of their era. Such intergenerational mobility is what an impoverished immigrant means when she says she’d like to see her children live a better life. She doesn’t mean merely that she wishes they make more money. They probably will! She means that she wishes they occupy a higher station—that instead of being a shopkeeper, for instance, they become doctors or lawyers.

Intergenerational mobility is the metric by which the United States lags most comparable nations. This is a relatively recent discovery. Previously, economists believed that mobility in the U.S. was fairly robust...

Although the discovery of America’s low mobility, compared to similar countries, is relatively new, it turns out that mobility’s been low for some time. A January study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that people who entered the workforce in the 1970s had about as much chance of moving up as people entering the workforce today. There was more mobility for people entering the workforce in the 1950s, and a lot more for people entering the workforce at the turn of the 20th century.

MSNBC
Sorry conservatives — America’s mobility problem is real
Timothy Noah