The End of American Exceptionalism: Occupational and Geographic Mobility in the U.S

The U.S. has been willing to tolerate greater levels of inequality than similarly developed economies throughout its history. This willingness follows at least in part from a pervasive belief that mobility within the distribution of economic outcomes (income, wealth, occupation) has also ben more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere, and this benefit has been worth the cost of higher inequality. It is now possible to assess whether Americans’ belief in their prospects for mobility are justified. Recent work on income mobility and inter-generational occupational mobility finds that the modern U.S. is quite unexceptional compared to Europe in economic mobility, leaving some puzzled as to the continued reliance of the U.S. on a low-tax/low-transfer welfare state predicated on a high mobility economy.

It is now possible to trace the history of mobility in the U.S. back into the middle of the nineteenth century using new nationally- representative longitudinal data on more than 75,000 fathers and sons that are consistent in quality and structure with data from the 1930s through the 1990s. This essay compares mobility in these two eras and finds a significant decline in mobility after 1910. This change resulted not just from change over time in the structure of the economy (what sociologists call "structural mobility") but also from deeper changes in the underlying patterns of mobility that transcend differences over time in simple marginal frequencies (what sociologists call "circulation mobility" or "exchange mobility"). Mobility in occupational status across generations declined just as geographic mobility rates were falling and as education was increasing in importance as a route to upward occupational mobility. These results support the view that the U.S. experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was indeed exceptional, but suggest the need for further analysis of the causes of the sharp decline in mobility by the 1930s.