Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States Since 1850: Comment

2003 Social scientists in general, and sociologists in particular, have long been interested in intergenerational occupational mobility. Indeed, among sociologists the interest is so common that they often refer to intergenerational occupational mobility simply as “social mobility.” Most notable among innumerable contributions to the large literature on social mobility are the landmark studies by Blau and Duncan (1967) and Featherman and Hauser (1978) for the United States and by Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) for Europe. In these studies, social mobility is taken to measure a society’s openness. A widely accepted view rooted in neoclassical liberalism is that more social mobility, i.e., more openness, is good for a society, as it encourages placement of individuals in social positions according to competence rather than social origin (Hout 1988). Adding to this large literature on social mobility is now a well-researched study by economists Long and Ferrie (2013). Using historical census data and survey data, the Long-Ferrie study compares the United States and Britain both around 1880 and around 1973. A key finding of the study is that the United States was much more socially mobile than Britain in the period around 1880, but that the two countries had similar levels of social mobility around 1973. The authors supplemented the core comparison of the four (2x2) datasets with the analysis of four additional datasets for the United States, demonstrating a sharp decline in social mobility in the United States over its history of rapid industrialization and economic expansion from the post-Civil War era to the post-World War II era. Thus, the Long-Ferrie study supports the popular conception of America as an exceptional land of opportunity for all, but only prior to 1900. The findings of the Long-Ferrie study are bound to shock the community of scholars who have been studying social mobility. Beginning with Lipset and Bendix (1964), if not earlier, the sociological literature on comparative social mobility now dates back more than 50 years (Ganzeboom, Treiman, and Ultee 1991). The dominant view in the literature is that relative social mobility, or social fluidity (to be defined below), is either constant or trendless and patternless in all industrialized nations (Featherman, Jones, and Hauser 1975; Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992; Guest, Landale, and McCann 1989; Grusky and Hauser 1984; Hauser et al. 1975). Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States Since 1850: Comment