Despite a number of attempts to bolster social mobility around the world, the evidence suggests a limited amount of improvement has been achieved.  The possibility of progressing is a big part of the fabled American dream, so does the United States do any better?

That was the question posed by a recent study by New York University, and the results suggest that the American dream may be more of a mirage, and the occupational status of American workers reflects that of their parents far more than believed.

“A lot of Americans think the U.S. has more social mobility than other western industrialized countries,” the researchers explain. “This makes it abundantly clear that we have less.”

Upwardly mobile

Previous research into social mobility has largely relied upon averages to assess the social status of people across different generations.  This so called ‘intergenerational persistence’ measures the level of which one generation’s success is dependent upon the resources of their parents.

Most of the studies into social mobility have highlighted the strong connection between these parental resources, and the occupation of the parents, and the levels of intergenerational persistence, but the new study suggests that even that may have been underestimated.

The new study uses medians as opposed to means in terms of socioeconomic status to try and have a more realistic way of gauging occupations.  The findings take into account the pay and education levels of given occupations based upon General Social Survey (GSS) data between 1994 and 2016.

Measuring occupations

The GSS charts the occupation of each respondent, together with their father and mother’s occupation when they were growing up.  The results were then coded according to 539 occupational categories and given a socioeconomic score.

“The underlying idea is that some occupations are desirable and others less so,” the researchers explain.

The data shows the the sons and daughters of high-status parents have many more advantages in the labor market than previous work believed.  For instance, roughly 50% of children of workers in top tier occupations now work in occupations of a similar stature.  Alternatively, half of the children of parents in bottom tier work also work in occupations of a similar stature.

The team believe that previous studies have underestimated the size of this impact because they used averages rather than medians, which resulted in a lower gap between top and bottom tier occupations.

“Your circumstances at birth — specifically, what your parents do for a living — are an even bigger factor in how far you get in life than we had previously realized,” the authors conclude. “Generations of Americans considered the United States to be a land of opportunity. This research raises some sobering questions about that image.”