Has Class Mobility in America Really Changed? New Research Finds a Complicated Answer

For decades, Americans have worried that rising inequality is making it harder for children to move beyond the economic circumstances they were born into. A new BFI working paper by University of Chicago researchers suggests the story is more nuanced—and more revealing—than the usual headlines suggest.

The paper was authored by Steven N. Durlauf, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, and coauthors Geoffrey Wodtke, professor in the Department of Sociology; Weiqi Wang, a predoctoral research assistant at Harris; and Kristina Butaeva, a postdoctoral scholar at Harris. Together, they examine how occupational class mobility has changed for Americans born between 1945 and 1990. Their conclusion: overall mobility has remained surprisingly stable. But beneath that surface stability, important differences have emerged depending on where families start in the class structure, with the most disruption in the middle class.

“On average, the amount of movement between classes hasn’t changed very much,” said Durlauf, who is also the director of Harris’ Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility. “But when you look more closely, you see growing stickiness at the top and bottom—and more churn in the middle.”

The study introduces a new way of thinking about mobility that looks beyond a single parent–child comparison: Instead, the researchers ask what happens to families over multiple generations if current patterns continue.

Rather than tracing actual family trees—which data rarely allow—the team uses large national survey data to simulate what they call “synthetic dynasties.” This approach allows them to examine not just whether children end up in different occupational classes than their parents, but also how long the influence of class origins would persist across generations.

“What we’re really trying to capture is how durable advantage and disadvantage are,” said Wodtke, who is associate director of the Stone Center. “Do family backgrounds fade quickly, or do they cast a long shadow?”

Using data from the General Social Survey, the researchers track occupational class outcomes for Americans who came of age (born between 1945 and 1990) during a period of sharply rising income and wealth inequality. At first glance, the results appear reassuring: the share of people who end up in a different occupational class than their parents has not declined.

But that headline masks offsetting trends.

Structural changes in the economy, such as the long-running shift away from manufacturing and toward professional and service jobs, have slowed in recent decades. As a result, there is less automatic “upward movement” driven simply by economic transformation. At the same time, class movement driven by competition within the existing occupational structure has increased.

These two forces largely cancel each other out, producing the appearance of stability.

“When people say mobility hasn’t changed, that’s true in a narrow sense,” said Wang. “But the underlying reasons why people move or don’t are changing in important ways.”

More persistence at the top and bottom

The most striking findings emerge when the researchers break the results down by class background.

Children from professional and managerial families appear increasingly likely to remain there. Likewise, children from working-class backgrounds seem to face growing difficulty moving out. In both cases, there is some evidence that class origins exert a stronger and more lasting influence than they did for earlier cohorts.

By contrast, Americans from middle-class backgrounds are experiencing more movement—and less long-term attachment to their parents’ class position—than in the past.

“This isn’t a story of uniform decline,” said Butaeva. “It’s a story of polarization. Advantage and disadvantage are becoming more entrenched at the extremes, even as the middle becomes more fluid.”

These patterns help explain why debates over mobility often seem stuck. Depending on which group one focuses on, the conclusions can look very different.

Rethinking how mobility is measured

Beyond its findings, the study makes a methodological contribution to how scholars and policymakers think about mobility. Most prior research focuses on a single link between parents and children, often using income rather than occupation. That approach can miss longer-run dynamics and obscure differences across social groups.

By examining how class advantages would persist or fade across multiple generations, the authors offer a clearer picture of how inequality and opportunity interact over time.

“Our goal was to develop measures that are intuitive and transparent,” said Durlauf. “You don’t need to be a technical specialist to understand the core question: how long does family background continue to matter?”

Implications for policy

The findings suggest that rising inequality has not produced a simple collapse of opportunity—but it has reshaped how opportunity is distributed. Policies aimed at expanding mobility may need to be more targeted than in the past, with particular attention to reinforcing pathways out of disadvantage while preventing excessive entrenchment at the top.

“Stability can be misleading,” added Durlauf. “If we care about equality of opportunity, we need to look not just at averages, but at how different groups are experiencing the economy.”