The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

Chapter 7: Origins to Destinations Across Generations

121 Chapter 7 Origins to Destinations Across Generations S O, HOW far from the tree does the apple fall? In stratification terms, the question becomes how much social mobility there is across generations. In popular thought, the United States stands apart as the land of opportunity where, through hard work and perhaps a bit of good fortune, anyone can rise to the top. As Joseph Stiglitz points out in the New York Times Opinionator blog, however, the truth is rather different (“Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth,” February 16, 2013). National comparisons of intergenerational mobility centered on occupation, income, and wealth find that socioeconomic well-being in adulthood depends more on family circumstances in the United States than in many other mature economies (see, for example, Isaacs 2008), for example, “42 percent of Americans born to parents at the bottom rung of the income ladder . . . remain at the bottom as adults,” nearly twice that of many European and Asian countries (Economic Mobility Project 2009, 2). Where one lives also matters—“place” counts. In their Equality of Opportunity Project, Raj Chetty and his colleagues (www.equality-ofopportunity .org 2013) calculate parent-to-child income mobility for the hundred largest U.S. cities, concluding that “some areas [of the country] have rates of upward mobility comparable to the most mobile countries in the world, while others have lower rates of mobility than any developing country for which data are currently available.” The latter puts us in poor company indeed. Their analyses compare the incomes of children born in 1980 and 1981 (close to the Youth Panel generation) at roughly age thirty against their parents’ household incomes between 1996 and 2000 (their children’s teenage years), an origins to destinations exercise much like the present volume. One of their measures, referred to as absolute income mobility, locates in the national income distribution children whose parents were in the 25th income percentile (approximately $30,000). Higher scores indicate better mobility prospects, and Baltimore, with a value of 39.2, ranks seventy-third of 122 The Long Shadow a hundred cities. For perspective, Salt Lake City (Utah) and Scranton (Pennsylvania) register the highest mobility chances (46.4 and 46.3), and Memphis (Tennessee) and Fayetteville (North Carolina) the lowest (34.4 and 35.2). Movement from low origins to high destinations is reflected in the percentage of children reaching the top 20 percent of the income distribution whose parents were in the bottom 20 percent. Baltimore, at 6.5, is roughly midpoint, the range nationally being 12.4 (Bakersfield, California) to 2.6 (Memphis, Tennessee). The characteristics of place that distinguish cities with more favorable mobility prospects from those with less favorable prospects (potential explanatory factors in the authors’ terms) include: the size of the middle-class population (larger is better); the extent of residential segregation by income (less is better); schoolqualityK–12—achievementtestscores(higherisbetter),spending per pupil (higher is better), and the dropout rate (lower is better); and the number of children raised by single parents (fewer is better). Against such a risk factor profile, places like Baltimore do not fare well. These data are uncommon, and even if they are limited, to know such large regional differences exist in the opportunity for upward mobility is informative.1 Status Mobility and Immobility Across Generations From a stratification perspective, we want to understand both immobility and mobility. For immobility, the issue is how status is inherited across generations. Not inheritance in the sense of offices or titles passing directly from parent to offspring, because that kind of inheritance is largely a thing of the past. Rather, it is how privilege in one generation passes through to the next, such that, on average, children born into higher-SES families manage to complete higher levels of schooling, get higher status jobs, and earn more than children from disadvantaged families. The mobility issue asks why some children advance and some fall back. Two approaches are used to inform these questions. The first, mobility table analysis, interrogates the cross-classification of parents’ status origins and children’s status destinations; the second interrogates the correlation between parents’ status levels and their children’s attained status as adults by way of multivariate statistical analyses. The time frame of both is generational—parent to offspring. We begin with the tradition of mobility table analysis. Origins to Destinations Across Generations 123 Origins to Destinations Mobility tables locate persons in socioeconomic space using...