PATHWAYS | THE POVERTY AND INEQUALITY REPORT 2019
29
STATE OF TH E UNION
Americans have been worried about social
mobility for a long time. In 1982, Billy
Joel nostalgically sang, “Every child had
a pretty good shot, to get at least as far as their
old man got.” This was a reference to changes in
Allentown, Pennsylvania, a rust belt manufactur-
ing city, but of course that city stood in for all of
blue-collar America.
The early 1980s were a transitional time for
the U.S. economy. The month when Joel’s record
came out, the United States had its highest
unemployment rate since the Great Depression.1
Services had become the largest sector in the labor
market, as manufacturing depended ever more on
robots and computers.2 Inequalities in pay, fam-
ily income, and wealth had increased. Ordinary
people felt that the chance to move up the eco-
nomic ladder had passed them by; experts expected
mobility to slow.3
The purpose of this chapter is to examine
whether those born during this period—the
so-called millennials—indeed experienced less
mobility than prior generations. Although esti-
mates of trends in absolute economic mobility
have been recently reported, trends in absolute
occupational mobility—the focus of this chapter—
have not been widely reported.4
Trends in mobility
Estimates of upward mobility can be calculated by
comparing people’s current occupations with their
parents’ occupations when they were growing up.
These comparisons are based on socioeconomic
scores of occupations that measure the general
social standing of occupations. If both parents
were present and employed, mobility is the differ-
ence between the person’s current occupational
score and the weighted average of their parents’
occupational scores.5 If the father was a sole
breadwinner or the only parent in the household,
mobility is the difference between the person’s
occupational score and his score; if the mother was
a sole breadwinner or the only parent in the house-
hold, it is the difference between the person’s
occupational score and her score.6
The resulting estimates confirm that the
opportunity to move up declined across cohorts,
beginning with the earliest cohorts for which we
have full data, those born in the 1930s (Figure 1).
The decline occurred slowly and steadily through
the most recent data; for men it was nearly linear
across cohorts.
Millennials might be the first American genera-
tion to experience as much downward mobility
as upward mobility, though they are still young
enough to make up lost ground. Among Ameri-
cans born in the late 1980s, 44 percent were in
jobs with higher socioeconomic status than their
parents, and 49 percent were in jobs with lower
socioeconomic status than their parents (5%
matched their parents’ status).
Although millennials are distinctive in the
KEY FINDINGS
• American men and women born since 1980—the millennials—have been less upwardly mobile than
previous generations of Americans.
• The growth of white-collar and professional employment resulted in relatively high occupational status
for the parents of millennials. Because that transition raised parents’ status, it set a higher target for
millennials to hit.
• This target is not frequently hit, in part because the economy is not providing enough opportunities for
millennials in the white-collar and professional sectors.
SOCIAL MOBILITY
Michael Hout
