Economic Mobility, Inequality, and Opportunity in the US: Public Perceptions and Preferences

• In Event: 589 - Regular Session. The Experience of Social Mobility

Abstract

Historically, equalizing opportunities has been seen as the American alternative to equalizing outcomes. Today, however --- after almost four decades of rising economic inequality in the U.S. --- scholars and policymakers question the extent to which we can neatly exchange the two. Does rising inequality undermine opportunity, since parents' rewards shape children's life chances? To address this question, social scientists typically study intergenerational mobility as a proxy for opportunity, since mobility quantifies the strength of the relationship between parents' and children's economic statuses. However, mobility describes achieved outcomes while opportunities describe potential outcomes. Researchers have not bridged the divide between their theoretical interest in opportunity and their empirical focus on mobility. This paper takes a first step toward assessing the extent to which traditional mobility measures capture Americans' understandings of economic opportunity, asking two questions: first, how do Americans’ mobility preferences vary with different levels of economic inequality and mobility and different causes of mobility? Second, are Americans differentially likely to support low mobility when faced with different putative causes of mobility or different circumstances within which mobility occurs? Using new randomized online survey experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk), I examine Americans' mobility preferences and how these preferences vary. Low mobility does not always correspond to blocked opportunities; this project takes a first step toward understanding the circumstances that determine the degree to which people believe economic mobility and opportunity correspond.

Author

• Deirdre Bloome, Harvard University