The OED “Cocktail”: Popular Perceptions of Mobility Determinants in the United States

• In Event: 40826 - Knowledge #2: Scientific and Social Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

Even as intergenerational social mobility has declined in the United States over the past few decades, Americans stand out for resilient and seemingly unwarranted optimism about mobility prospects. This “perception gap” is often explained by the US public’s adherence to a meritocratic perspective encapsulated in the “American Dream,” which suggests social mobility is uniquely attainable through personal effort in the United States. Yet it is unclear to what extent this dominant ideology can accommodate variations within US beliefs about this issue. Liberals are especially likely to be pessimistic about mobility and even underestimate rates of mobility, even though many are white, college-educated, and relatively wealthy. Have liberals simply rejected meritocratic ideology, while most others are misled by it? Drawing on 78 phone interviews and 12 focus groups involving Americans with varying backgrounds and political persuasions, I show that merit plays an important causal role in widely varying beliefs about social mobility, and that public understandings capture both the broad contours of research on determinants of mobility – particularly the mechanisms expressed in the OED triangle, which relates class Origins and class Destinations through Education – as well as the significant ambiguities in this research. Across all responses, whether participants believed mobility was falling or rising over time, the overall picture is significantly more complex than would be suggested by a focus on partisan or other demographic differences in adherence to meritocratic ideology. I demonstrate first that the influence of meritocratic ideology is observable in beliefs about mobility mechanisms, even when it is not observable in beliefs about broader trends. Second, I show that mistaken belief in rising mobility can be based on substantially correct knowledge about the influence of structural factors. To a large extent, these views are a reasonable interpretation of the ambiguous “cocktail” of mobility mechanisms.

Author

• Ken Cai Kowalski, Marquette University