Intergenerational Mobility in the United States

Young men today have lower incomes than their fathers' generation did at a similar age. 1 Further, many measures of income inequality in the United States have been growing for over twenty years. Both of these phenomena raise significant questions about a broader issue: the extent of social and economic opportunities available in today's society. Generational income comparisons or statistics on the extent of income inequality, however, do not provide sufficient evidence to make an accurate judgment on the crucial question of how much opportunity exists for an individual growing up in the United States. These aggregate data must be complemented by an understanding of the extent to which a child in today's society is able to do better than his or her parents, and whether this is related to a more open structure in which class matters less than it used to or simply to an expansion of the total opportunities available to each generation as the result of economic growth. This paper examines the relationship between an individual's socioeconomic status and the status of his or her parents (or intergenerational mobility) and the reasons for any change in this relationship over time.