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Edited by Susan Hanson, Clark University, Worcester, MA, and approved October 13, 2020 (received for review May 20, 2020)
Significance
Intergenerational social mobility in the United States has declined over the last century, sparking a national debate about how to improve equality of opportunity. By analyzing data spanning the 20th century, we demonstrate strong temporal patterns operating across regions. Some areas of the United States have witnessed significant declines in social mobility, while others have had persistent low levels all along. Thus, the contemporary national picture is shaped by both powerful forces of change that reduce intergenerational mobility in some regions and deeply entrenched long-term forces generating persistence in others. It follows that improving social mobility will be challenging, as policy would need to respond to both forces and do so according to their varying mixture across different regions.
Abstract
New evidence shows that intergenerational social mobility—the rate at which children born into poverty climb the income ladder—varies considerably across the United States. Is this current geography of opportunity something new or does it reflect a continuation of long-term trends? We answer this question by constructing data on the levels and determinants of social mobility across American regions over the 20th century. We find that the changing geography of opportunity-generating economic activity restructures the landscape of intergenerational mobility, but factors associated with specific regional structures of interpersonal and racial inequality that have “deep roots” generate persistence. This is evident in the sharp decline in social mobility in the Midwest as economic activity has shifted away from it and the consistently low levels of opportunity in the South even as economic activity has shifted toward it. We conclude that the long-term geography of social mobility can be understood through the deep roots and changing economic fortunes of places.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: dsconnor{at}asu.edu.
Author contributions: D.S.C. and M.S. designed research; D.S.C. and M.S. performed research; D.S.C. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; D.S.C. analyzed data; and D.S.C. and M.S. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.2010222117/-/DCSupplemental.
Data Availability.
Geographical estimates of intergenerational mobility data and replication files have been deposited in the repository of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), available at https://doi.org/10.3886/E125701V1.
Published under the PNAS license.
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The changing geography of social mobility in the United States
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