The myth of economic immobility: Americans are actually more mobile than we've ever been.

AuthorBeato, Greg

In early December, President Barack Obama delivered a major speech at a packed $27 million arts-and-culture complex in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the nation's capital. His subject? The American Dream, whose future, to hear the president tell it, was even more uncertain than that of Popcorn and Caramel, the two Thanksgiving turkeys he'd pardoned six days earlier.

Addressing an audience that included members of Congress, the mayor of D.C., and various other Beltway bigwigs, Obama decried the nation's "diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years." As the president continued--the speech lasted 49 minutes--he used a wide variety of adjectives to illustrate the problem. Mobility was "decreasing," "reduced," and "declining." For the wonks in the audience, "less mobility between generations" got a shout-out as well.

The president is hardly alone in considering this an urgent American problem. In November 2013, Gallup found that only 52 percent of the 1,000 adults it surveyed believed that there is "plenty of opportunity" to get ahead in today's United States. In 2011, that number was 77 percent; in 1998, it was a whopping 81 percent. "Many political leaders and other observers believe economic mobility in the United States is declining," the Gallup researchers noted. "It would appear that a significant portion of the population agrees."

Yet a month after Obama's speech, two Harvard economists, two Berkeley economists, and one U.S. Treasury economist failed to find decreasing economic mobility in a working paper they jointly published via the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research.

"Contrary to the popular perception," the authors wrote, "we find that percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971-1993 birth cohorts." According to their research, a child born into the bottom quintile of income distribution in 1971 had an 8.4 percent chance to reach the top quintile as an adult. For a child born in 1986, that chance had risen to 9 percent. If anything, they concluded, "mobility may have increased slightly in recent cohorts."

To anyone who has been following the work of the Pew Charitable Trust's Economic Mobility Project (EMP), this conventional wisdom-shattering conclusion wasn't particularly surprising. "The evidence shows that patterns in Americans' income changes have been similar [from 1967 through 2004] and that the economy propelled most Americans upward...

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