In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama observed that those at the top of the income distribution were doing better than ever before. But at the same time, he said, “average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened [and] upward mobility has stalled.” And in the land of opportunity, that is unconscionable.
One often hears British politicians, of all stripes, saying the same thing: that social mobility has slowed, if it hasn’t stalled completely, and that policymakers (especially those designing education and training policy) ought to be doing something about it. If there’s a political consensus here, it’s not one that is replicated among those academics who study patterns of mobility and inequality. One notable dissident from this consensus is the British sociologist John Goldthorpe, who I interviewed for Prospect last year. In Goldthorpe’s view, when politicians refer to a “Golden Age” of social mobility in the decades following the Second World War, what they’re actually referring to are structural changes in the labour market which saw a massive expansion of professional and managerial employment. It’s not that intergenerational mobility has slowed; it never grew in the first place.

Roger McKinney
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Ray Kohn
Jose Carlos Peliano
Bo Lundahl
Luke Lea
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