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2 Social and Economic Mobility: State of the Field
Pages 5-18

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From page 5...
... provided an introduction to the topic of social and economic mobility. She began with a definition: "social and economic mobility capture the distance people move between their position in an origin resource distribution and a destination resource distribution, to help us understand society's openness." For example, she said, if affluent children become affluent adults, and poor children become poor adults, then income mobility across generations is low.
From page 6...
... On the societal level, she stated, more mobility can: increase economic efficiency, innovation, and growth; shift who has power in society and reduce abuses of power; and increase the likelihood that people have the same prospects regardless of whether they were born rich or poor. Bloome walked workshop participants through the concepts in her definition of social and economic mobility.
From page 7...
... The second is relative mobility, in which the destination resource level is compared with the origin resource rank; these ranks depend on whether and in which direction a person's peers are moving. For example, Bloome said, a person could experience upward absolute mobility and downward relative mobility if their income rose more slowly than the income of their peers.
From page 8...
... Bloome closed by suggesting that empirical work "must not shy away" from relative mobility, where movement up the ladder requires some privileged people to move down. Furthermore, she emphasized, empirical work must focus "with absolute vigilance" on providing accurate descriptive representations of the mobility experiences of all population members, including the most underprivileged members of society, who are often missing or underrepresented in survey and administrative data.
From page 9...
... Grusky gave several examples of sociological research that demonstrates this expanded outlook. Paying more attention to absolute mobility than they did in the past, researchers have found a dramatic decline in absolute socioeconomic mobility, driven by declines in middle-status production occupations and an increase in low-status service occupations.1 Sociological researchers have begun studying educational mobility in its own right, said Grusky, and found a U-turn in educational mobility that mimics the U-turn in income inequality.2 While income and earnings mobility have long been treated as the "province of economists," sociologists have recently conducted research on topics such as earnings elasticity3 and building a measurement infrastructure for wealth mobility.4 The second development in sociology, said Grusky, is a return to the field's attention to the demographic foundations of mobility.
From page 10...
... Grusky shared a qualitative study on nutritional disparities in early childhood9 that found that "low-income parents resort to unnourishing food because it is the main affordable treat at their disposal; in effect, it is an attractive way to treat their kids within the context of their budget constraints." He said that this work is a classic example of unpacking the social, psychological, and familial dynamics behind nutritional outcomes, which are critical for mobility. As further examples of the role of qualitative approaches in social mobility research, Grusky pointed to studies showing that that higher-income "helicopter parents" find ways to ensure that their children are evaluated well during primary and secondary school,10 and that low-income students who attended elite secondary schools are substantially more at home at elite colleges than the low-income students who attended public schools11 and "are left to flounder on their own" at elite colleges.
From page 11...
... Grusky emphasized that the integrated model should do many things at once: model all types of intergenerational reproduction (e.g., education, occupation, class, earnings, income, neighborhood) , integrate intergenerational and intragenerational mobility, include multiple generations, measure marital mobility and individual mobility, and represent assortative mating for origin and destination families.
From page 12...
... More recent developments in economics mobility research include reducing noise in the data by using multiple years of parent and child earnings, conducting analyses across multiple countries, and working with larger datasets. The early datasets that were used -- such as the National Longitudinal Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics -- were often too small to answer some of the most important questions, especially with regard to mechanisms.
From page 13...
... Ferrie noted that early work by economists on mechanisms focused on twin studies and comparing outcomes for monozygotic and dizygotic twins, and that some emerging research is being conducted using new tools such as genome-wide association studies, which allow researchers to look for genetic associations across generations in order to explain some of the correlations. This type of research has a number of downsides, said Ferrie: it requires enormous amounts of data, does not answer the question of mechanisms, and "basically has no policy implications." However, he said, it may help to narrow down the range of areas in which mobility really does change.
From page 14...
... Ferrie agreed that this is a promising area for future research, noting that it has been rare to have a way of observing a set of different outcomes within the same body of data. With new, more comprehensive data sources available, it is becoming feasible to examine multiple factors at once and to "feel confident that we're actually looking at different dimensions of the same problem." Coile asked Grusky to comment further on his suggestion that researchers need to prepare for the "big data storm" that is coming.
From page 15...
... From a predictive modeling perspective, she said, this means that models of both the variation and the mean, along with uncertainty in the prediction, are needed. For example, while on average affluent children become affluent adults, adult outcomes vary widely depending on factors such as job openings and labor regulations.
From page 16...
... Regarding the question about single-parent families, Bloome said that rather than attempting to use policy to change family structure itself, policies should focus on supporting families with resources that will help children have the best opportunities. Family structures are changing dramatically and very quickly, she said, and it is unlikely that this trend will reverse; "people are making different choices and we have to respect those choices," she said.
From page 17...
... Help from parents or grandparents at these stages "allows people to take a step up the economic ladder." It is essential, he said, to learn more about how both parental and grandparental resources impact mobility. Measures of Subjective Status A workshop participant raised the topic of subjective mobility, asking whether it was important to measure people's perceptions of their own mobility and social status.
From page 18...
... Impact also depends on other characteristics, such as being poor or rich, and it is important for research to collect multiple measures across time and space in order to fully capture the impact of these events.


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