![]() ![]() Some of these studies tell us that overall mobility has not declined in recent decades, which is not surprising for an economy where income gains were widespread across the population and living standards rose across the distribution up until the 1980s. In other words, they ask how the relative economic status of grown children (ages thirty-five to forty) compares with their parents’ status when they were young (between 19). ![]() Most scholarly discussions focus on the inheritance of income mobility in past decades. The traditional literature on the study of IGM does not help us much in creating such a framework. Social scientists therefore need a framework to trace out progress against reducing barriers that inhibit increases in opportunity and IGM, especially for groups who have multiple disadvantages. Not everyone takes advantage of opportunities and often personal agency leads to less mobility, even when better opportunities are available, for example, when young, unmarried partners have a baby (see Sawhill 2014). Policymakers concerned about these issues should be thinking both about how to overcome barriers to create more opportunity for those left behind, and about how to overcome barriers to make greater opportunity translate into more mobility. But without more opportunity, we are unlikely to see a systematic increase in social and economic intergenerational mobility (IGM) (see Jencks and Tach 2006 Smeeding 2014). ![]() ![]() Economic opportunity and mobility are not the same thing. ![]()
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