Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States Since 1850: Comment (original) (raw)
2013, The American Economic Review
In "Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Britain and the United States Since 1850," Jason Long and Joseph P. Ferrie (2013) introduce valuable data on men's intergenerational occupational mobility in the United States and Britain for men employed in 1880 or 1881 and compare patterns with those for the same countries for men employed in the early 1970s. Long and Ferrie advance three major substantive conclusions: (i) Occupational mobility was greater in the United States than in Britain in the 1880s. This result is consistent, as they note, with contemporary and current images of an expanding, open America and a rigid, class-conscious Victorian England. Their study is the first to address this issue with such broadly representative data. (ii) The United States became increasingly stratified over the ensuing 90 years, decreasing social mobility. This contradicts previous research that concluded that the strength of the intergenerational correlation in the United States either remained constant (Hauser et al. 1975; Guest, Landale, and McCann 1989) or fluctuated without a consistent trend upward or downward (Grusky and Fukumoto 1989) at least until the 1960s. Other research indicated a significant decline in American stratification from 1962 to 1985 (Featherman and Hauser 1978; Hout 1984, 1988; DiPrete and Grusky 1990). (iii) Britain and the United States were similarly stratified in the 1970s. This accords with previous research that used the same original data sources but a broader age range, encompassing all men 25-64 years old (Kerckhoff, Campbell, and
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