Social mobility

Social mobility is the degree to which, in a given society, an individual's social status can change throughout the course of his or her life (known as intragenerational mobility), or the degree to which that individual's offspring and subsequent generations move up and down the class system (intergenerational mobility).

Social system

One example of a society without social mobility has been Hindu society under the caste system. Only with rare exceptions could individuals leave the caste into which they were born, regardless of wealth or merit. Societies which use slavery are an example of low social mobility because, for the enslaved individuals, upward mobility is practically nonexistent, and for their owners, downward mobility is practically outlawed.

Social mobility is normally discussed as "upward only", but it is a two-sided phenomenon - where there is upward mobility, there can also be relative downward mobility. If merit and fortune play a larger role in life chances than the luck of birth, and some people can manage a relative upward shift in their social status, then some people can also move downward relative to others. This is the risk that motivates people in power to increasingly devise and commission political, legal, education, and economic mechanisms that permit them to fortify their advantages. However, by controlling that inclination, it is possible in a growing economy for there to be greater upward mobility than downward - as has been the case in Western Europe.

Official or legally recognized class designations do not exist in modern western democracies and it is considered possible for individuals to move from poverty to wealth or political prominence within one generation. Despite this formal opportunity for social mobility, recent research suggests that Britain and particularly the United States have less social mobility than the Nordic countries and Canada.^[1][2]

Not only does social mobility vary across types of countries, it can also change over time. Comparing the United States to the United Kingdom, there was social mobility of different degrees existing between the two countries during different historical periods. In the United States in the mid-19th century inequality was low and social mobility was high. In the late 19th century, the U.S. had much higher social mobility than in the UK, due to the common school movement and open public school system, a larger farmer sector, as well as higher geographic mobility in the United States. However, during the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the difference between the social mobilities of the two countries has declined, as social inequality has grown in both countries, but particularly in the United States. In other words, the individual's family background is more predictive of social position today than it was in 1850.

In market societies like the modern United States, class and economic wealth are strongly correlated. However, in some societies, such as feudal societies transitioning to market societies, there is a reduced probability that class status and wealth overlap. Usually, though, membership in a high social class provides more opportunities for wealth and political power, and therefore economic fortune is often a lagging indicator of social class. In newly-formed societies with little or no established tradition (such as the American West in the 19th century) the reverse is true: Made wealth precipitates the elite of future generations.

Examples

Popular examples of upward social mobility from America include Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton, who were born into working-class families yet achieved high political office in adult life, and Andrew Carnegie, who arrived in the U.S. as a poor immigrant and later became a steel tycoon. Examples from other countries include Pierre Bérégovoy who started working at the age of 16 as a metal worker and later became Prime Minister of France and Sir Joseph Cook, an Englishman who had no schooling and worked as a coal miner at the age of nine and went on to become Prime Minister of Australia.

Social Mobility v. Economic Mobility

The ability for an individual to become wealthy out of poverty, does not necessarily indicate that there is social mobility in his or her society. Some societies with low or nonexistent social mobility afford free individuals opportunities to initiate enterprise and amass wealth, but wealth fails to "buy" entry into a higher social class. In feudal Japan and Confucianist China, wealthy merchants occupied the lowest ranks in society (at least in theory). In pre-revolutionary France, a nobleman, however poor, was from the "second estate" of society and thus superior, at least in theory, to a wealthy merchant (from the "third estate").

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