Inequality of Conditions and Intergenerational Mobility: Changing Patterns of Educational Attainment in the United States

In the 1980s and 1990s, most advanced industrialized countries experienced substantial increases in inequality, as measured by labor market earnings, total family income, and wealth (see Blau and Kahn 2002; Freeman and Katz 1995). In some countries, such as the United States, absolute levels of labor market inequality are now as high as they were prior to World War II (see Katz and Autor 1999). For the study of intergenerational mobility, these increases represent an unexpected reversal of the postwar trend toward greater equality of conditions. As such, they directly challenge a basic presupposition of the industrialization theories that predict a decline in inequality of conditions alongside a moderation in the total effects of social origins on occupational destinations. The presupposed causal variable – equality of conditions – has failed to exhibit its expected time trend, and as a result these theories appear less relevant as we move toward the study of social mobility in ostensibly postindustrial societies.1 Somewhat ironically, these increases in inequality of conditions evolved just as sociologists were developing their strongest case yet for the invariance of core social mobility patterns over time and across industrialized countries. At the conclusion of their definitive cross-national study, Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992:367) wrote: “Over the years covered by our data, total