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This chapter presents a cross-national comparison of income inequality and economic mobility in the United States and eleven (Western) European Union (EU) member states. Using panel data on income dynamics among prime-age workers in the mid-1990s, it demonstrates that standard inequality indices show surprisingly little cross-country variation in the degree to which income mobility, the market, does erode inequality over time. That is, the neoclassical assertion about the redistributive element inherent in market competition is clearly correct insofar as markets generate mobility over time as economic opportunity gets reshuffled across individuals. Applied to the specific sample of advanced Western economies, however, the assertion that more generous welfare states would stifle economic dynamics seems largely unsupported by the data. By implication then, the redistributive effort exerted by European welfare states seems relatively well-directed in genuinely addressing market failures and ameliorating permanent economic inequality without evidence of major distortions of economic dynamics.

This chapter shows how economic growth over the last two business cycles has been distributed in the United States, and compares those changes with changes in two EU countries with quite different social Institutions: Great Britain and Germany. While income inequality is consistently highest in the United States over the past two decades, followed by Great Britain and Germany, income inequality in the United States changed little in the 1990s, fell in Great Britain, and rose in Germany. Outcomes in Great Britain over the 1990s business cycle are much closer to those in the United States than they are to Germany.

This chapter advances the argument that there was an important fiscal element to federation in ancient Greece. The production of cooperative coinage in Boiotia prior to the emergence of the formal institutions of the koinon suggests that facilitating regional exchange was already desired. As soon as koina emerge in other regions, they likewise produce a joint coinage and extend legal rights that promote economic mobility within the region. The result is a pooling of fragmented but complementary resources that encourages regional autarky. The economic logic behind federation appears also to have been one factor driving expansion beyond ethnic boundaries. Koina are shown to have avoided exploitative taxation practices and to have intervened to manage and ameliorate regional economic crises.

This chapter examines barriers to economic opportunity and mobility in the United States and offers near- and long-term policies to reduce these barriers. These barriers include high levels of income inequality, unequal access to educational opportunities, residential segregation by income, inadequate investments in children and certain areas, and disparities between economic conditions in rural relative to metro areas. In the near-term, running tight labor markets, infrastructure investment, direct job creation, healthcare and other work supports, and apprenticeships could reduce these barriers. Longer term solutions invoke policy interventions targeting inequality, inadequate housing, income and wage stagnation, nutritional and health support, the criminal justice system, and educational access. It is also crucial to avoid policies that keep opportunity barriers in place, such as reducing the provision of public healthcare, regressive tax cuts, and budget cuts to programs that help low- and moderate-income families.

Chapter 16 explores the extent of economic mobility in the United States compared with other industrialized countries. The amount of relative intergenerational mobility as measured by the intergenerational elasticity statistic is lower in the United States than in most other OECD countries. Furthermore, the extent to which adult children are earning more than their parents has been declining over the past 50 years. The American dream of each generation doing economically better than the previous generation is becoming harder to achieve. We are a society in which the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown further apart, resulting in greater numbers of Americans struggling and falling further behind.

This chapter serves as a continuation of the analysis of the ethnic niche, but instead focuses on the immigrants. It shows that ethnic niches stand out as a characteristic of nearly every immigrant group in all five locales, with concentration persisting even as immigrant cohorts settle down. The chapter takes the discussion of niches in a new direction by looking into the noneconomic characteristics of ethnic niches, while emphasizing the cognitive skills that are required by niche jobs. It shows that although skill sorts immigrants into “good” and “bad” niches, ethnicity still works as a basic structuring factor. The chapter concludes that concentration, and not dispersion, is the way to economic mobility, and that the search for advancement takes a collective instead of an individual form.

The eighth chapter looks at the challenges that the inner city and working poor have in terms of economic mobility based on a lack of economic or financial resources. This is especially true for the servant class economy, as not only are the structures of opportunity limited, but also the barriers to movement are increasingly severe, making the relative probability of escaping the bottom of the urban-class strata far less likely.

This chapter examines international migration in the South. It focuses on the ways that the traditional low-wage labor force of African Americans deals with the influx of a new low-wage labor force — Latin American migrants. One would assume that because African Americans and Latin American migrants experience limited social and economic mobility in the region that a natural alliance would be created between these groups. But evidence points to hostility between the two groups, not collaboration.

This chapter argues that while the ‘Indian trader’ is ubiquitous in Africa, it was not due to the trading class but that the most significant change in the class patterns and mobility of Indians has been due to the rise of the professional class. Sparked in the 1960s with the expansion of educational opportunities, by the first half of the 1970s Indian men and women were earning degrees in considerable numbers. This chapter discusses the economic impact of this development, especially in the context of the perception that affirmative action measures in the post-apartheid period are strangling this class’s opportunities, both at educational institutions and in the workplace.

Who should pay higher taxes and receive fewer benefits? What’s fair? As explored in Chapter 5, debt, taxes, and spending redistribute resources within and across generations. Addressing the debt problem would help future generations – the nation’s children and grandchildren. It is no longer clear that each generation will be better off than the one before it. This makes it all the more important that each generation controls the debt it leaves to the next generation. The United States used to have high income inequality and significant economic mobility: people who worked hard could ascend the income ladder. In recent years, though, the gap between rich and poor has grown dramatically while rates of mobility haven’t improved. Policymakers should narrow inequalityin ways that are productive and fair, investing more in education, healthcare, nutrition, neighborhoods, and employment programs, and judiciously raising taxes on high-income households.

Our stories serve to illustrate that divergent experiences are not primarily the result of different choices or preferences. Willie’s route to and through higher education was often perilous and frustrating because he lacked the resources with which to maneuver and bend institutions in order to meet his needs. In contrast, Melinda’s college aspirations were encouraged and rewarded by the same institutions because she had the resources to make them work for her. As stark as these different routes were, if the gap in our families’ wealth had ceased to matter once we got our degrees, some might still argue that higher education is “working” as a leveler. Sure, Willie had to try harder, wait longer, and forego many opportunities, but isn’t it where you end up that really matters? Our stories suggest that the answer to this question is a resounding “No.” Instead, our lives continue to be marked by the effects of wealth inequality and by the substantial differences in how the education system treats those who start with money and those working to get it. This is the thesis of this chapter: that wealth inequality is not just another manifestation of unfairness in US society but instead a primary force determining how people fare, including in the institutions that are supposed to catalyze equitable opportunities. Our lives reveal how assets chart one’s course not only at the beginning of a college career but also well into a college graduate’s future. In Willie’s case, even though it has been more than nine years since he graduated from his PhD program, student debt still compromises his ability to leverage his relatively high salary to secure sound financial footing. His lingering financial instability is rooted in the economic disadvantages of his family of origin, but, critically, it was not erased when he graduated.

This chapter expands upon the connected learning model to analyse how digital media fit within the learning ecologies for marginalized youth. It argues that after-school clubs and creative media production can potentially serve as risk intervention strategies for young people on the margins of society. However, the research also reveals that outside of traditional higher education, there remain disconnections between students’ aspirations and economic opportunities. Through an in-depth analysis of four immigrant students, the chapter identifies the key connections that help students learn and leverage their passions and creativity for future success. Students’ learning and goals need to be supported and connected via their peers, academics, adults, their home life, personal interests, and extracurricular activities. Although after-school clubs can fill in gaps in learning, it remains imperative that formal education incorporates students’ creativity and interest-based learning, and contributes to the creation of alternative pathways for economic mobility.

Although sex work remains highly stigmatized, it allows sex workers to attain some level of economic, if not social, mobility. This chapter challenges the idea that sex work is always about mere subsistence. Instead, it suggests that sex tourism workers work to survive, but they also demonstrate significant personal ambition and aim not only to increase their own consumption levels, but to get ahead. Women are clear about what sex work enables for their families and themselves: a level of consumption otherwise unavailable to them as low-income and poor women. Sex work offers an opportunity to consume and to get ahead that these women have been unable to attain in other kinds of employment, primarily domestic and factory work. Furthermore, sex work allows women to think of themselves as particularly good mothers, able to provide for and spend important quality time with their kids. The chapter argues that survival, consumption, and motherhood are deployed, often in contradictory and conflicting ways, in order to counteract the effects that stigma has on sex workers. It also suggests that sex workers may very well be the quintessential subjects of neo-liberalism in Latin America, in their embrace of entrepreneurial work and consumption.

This chapter discusses American Jews' growing presence in the alcohol industry during the nineteenth century. For American Jews, the alcohol business represented both a connection with their past and a means to improve their present. Their pre-migrational familiarity with the processes of production and distribution dovetailed with the structure of the American alcohol trade, creating opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs to establish themselves in their new country. The alcohol industry facilitated economic mobility and served as a force of acculturation, while creating and sustaining Jewish communities through ethnic entrepreneurial networks. The chapter also looks at anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century and the temperance and prohibition movements' participation in the campaign to “Christianize” American society and politics.

This chapter concerns two sets of Latina/o residents in public housing in Boston in 2000: residents of Maverick Gardens in East Boston, near a busy Latina/o enclave, and residents of Mary Ellen McCormack in South Boston, in an Irish American neighborhood. These public housing developments, like others in Boston, had been court-ordered to integrate in 1988. The economic fortunes of residents in the two projects depend primarily on the professionalism of the two tenant task forces: Maverick's did not show leadership in disseminating information, democratizing the board of directors, or forging ties with local service organizations, whereas McCormack's task force provided culturally responsive services that enabled many project residents to achieve economic and residential mobility.

Picking up where the last chapter left off, this conclusion argues that economic and numerical criteria provided a way for Mexican scholars to create a presumably scientific yet flexible definition of race and indigeneity that allowed for social and racial mobility. Many U.S. scholars thought that their Mexican counterparts confused race and class. More broadly, Mexicans’ attention to particularity and their attempts to reconcile indigeneity with modernity and liberalism were a creative effort to generate new forms of governance and new policies. However, Mexican experts shared with their US counterparts problematic assumptions about progress and evolution that—along with US intellectual imperialism--hampered the antiracist potential of their endeavors. This Conclusion returns to the questions of difference and modern liberal democracy. Mexican intellectuals subsumed differences into global theories of evolution or cultural diffusion, it shows. But they could apply those global theories only loosely and partially. They therefore offered a practical or tactical definition of indigeneity aimed at guiding social policies and encouraging social mobility, especially economic mobility.

This chapter considers how US free-market family policy drags children’s outcomes down in a number of different areas, including happiness, academic achievement, mental health, and economic mobility. That’s partly because few children in this system get what they need in their critical first years. And after that, in our profoundly unequal economy, almost all children must contend with the recognition that other families have far more access to material wealth and the opportunities it brings than their own. And as they mature, American youth face the stress of preparing themselves for adulthood in increasingly insecure and unequal economic circumstances. The result is that, no matter where they stand on the economic ladder, US children wind up doing considerably worse than past US children on an array of indicators, as well as far worse than children in countries with pro-family policy.