A land of opportunity no more: poor intergenerational mobility in the US is a feature of both the past and present.

In the past, concerns about inequality were tempered by the perception that people had a high degree of economic mobility. But how has intergenerational mobility changed in the US? In new research which uses census data on names and occupational income to examine social mobility between 1850 and 1940, Claudia Olivetti and Daniele Paserman find that intergenerational mobility was high in the 19th Century, then fell sharply between 1900 and 1920, and began to improve somewhat after that. They argue that these changes in economic mobility were influenced by regional differences in economic development and fluctuations in income and wealth inequality