Article | Winter 2005-2006
Expanding the International Analysis of Social Mobility
The U.S. has traditionally been seen as 'the land of opportunities,' a country in which accidents of birth do not determine individual attainment, and where individuals can rise from humble origins to success. Many argue that this perception explains the high American tolerance for inequality. In fact, the U.S. is by far the most unequal country in the industrialized world, but the unequal distribution of rewards has never been a major issue in national politics and policy, and focus has instead been placed on inequality of opportunity. In other words, as long as the playing field is level, outcomes-as unequal as they might be-are seen as legitimate.
Recent empirical research has, however, questioned the generalized perception of the U.S. as the land of opportunity and has shown that intergenerational mobility is not particularly high when compared with other industrialized nations. If we rank countries in a continuum from complete immobility, in which accidents of birth fully determine individual fate, to perfect mobility, in which individual outcomes are completely independent of social origins, the U.S. would be placed somewhere in the middle, closer to England and further away from perfect mobility than Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Finland.
International comparisons not only challenge deeply-settled myths about any particular country, but they can also help us identify national characteristics that foster or hamper social mobility. Factors such as the level of economic development, economic inequality, the educational system, the extent of the welfare state, and the type of government may play key roles in opening or closing mobility opportunities. To date, however, we know very little about the association between these macro-level factors and mobility chances. For instance, researchers suspect that there is a positive association between mobility and equality-societies with a more equal distribution of income produce higher intergenerational mobility-but this association has not been empirically confirmed.
The reason is simple. To date, good mobility data exist only for a couple dozen nations, virtually all of them industrialized, including the U.S., countries of Western and Eastern Europe, and Japan. This is a good beginning, but it is not enough. Drawing meaningful conclusions from the comparative analysis of mobility requires that there is enough variation across countries, both in the outcome of interest and in the factors potentially associated with it. Even though the educational, welfare, and political systems vary significantly across industrialized nations, this variation pales if we compare this handful of nations with the roughly 200 countries that currently exist in the world. From a global perspective, these countries are indeed quite homogeneous.
This calls for an expansion of the comparative analysis of mobility, including a large, diverse set of nations. This is, of course, easier said than done. In order to collect mobility information in a country, a survey of a representative sample of the national population is needed. Ideally, one would follow families over time in order to learn about their life course, starting with the parents and tracking children as they grow up, enter the labor market, and form their own households. This longitudinal design is, however, extremely expensive and time-consuming. The second-best strategy, widely used for mobility analysis, is to ask individuals to provide information about their current circumstances, and retrospective information about their parents, their childhood, their labor market experience, etc. In other words, each respondent 'reconstructs' his or her life history-or at least key aspects from it-during the interview. The interview is therefore long and requires highly trained and experienced interviewers.
In order to be representative, the survey respondents need to be selected at random from the entire national population. In order to provide statistical power to draw conclusive inferences, the survey needs to include a large number of cases, at least a few thousand respondents. Consequently, mobility surveys are onerous, and, with a few exceptions such as Korea and Brazil, they are not available outside the industrialized world.
Therefore, the first necessary step to advance the international comparative mobility project is to collect high-quality data for the developing world. I embarked in this enterprise in 2001, conducting the first mobility survey in Chile. The survey is nationally representative, randomly drawn, and has a sample size of 3,500. What made this enterprise possible was its collaborative nature, both in terms of funding and research. Most of the funding came from a grant from the Chilean Fund for Development of Sciences and Technology, which was complemented by a grant from the Ford Foundation. The research effort involved scholars at the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality and in Columbia's sociology department, Universidad Catolica de Chile, an advisory committee formed by U.S. scholars, and the resources and support of ISERP.
An interview in session for the Chilean mobility study
The Chilean mobility survey involved many challenges. The questionnaire design had to integrate two objectives. On the one hand, it had to use a common protocol to ensure comparability of findings, and on the other hand, it had to be sensitive to particularities of this Latin American society. For instance, whereas the nuclear family is the relevant unit of analysis in the industrialized world, in Chile, the extended family plays a key role in housing arrangements, economic assistance, and household division of labor. Also, given that more than one-fifth of the Chilean population works in the informal sector, questions ascertaining the location, stability, and precariousness of jobs needed to be added.
The fieldwork also posed interesting challenges. In a country where only about half of the households have telephone lines, the only viable survey strategy is to conduct face-to-face interviews, sometimes in quite isolated rural areas, which require long journeys and in some cases, the help of the local parishes to accommodate interviewers. While interviewers were warmly welcomed in these areas, and families sometimes lined up requesting to be surveyed, the opposite was the case in upper class neighborhoods. Protected by gated communities, security guards, maids, and other shielding mechanisms, obtaining interviews in wealthy households was a major difficulty and required careful selection of interviewers, incentives, and tough monitoring. In spite of the challenges, the experience was quite fulfilling-time and again interviewers reported that, after the initial hesitancy, people were happy to discuss their life experiences, and some interviews transformed into invitations to share a meal with the whole family and to visit again for an update.
The comparative analysis based on the Chilean mobility survey produced interesting findings about the potential association between mobility and equality. Being the tenth most unequal country in the world, Chile works as an adjudicative country. If mobility and equality are in fact related, Chilean mobility should be significantly lower than in the industrialized world. Surprisingly, however, Chilean mobility was found to be quite high, higher than in most industrialized countries. The explanation for this surprising finding requires considering the pattern-and not only the overall level-of mobility and inequality. Chile is unequal because the upper class concentrates an enormous portion of the national income, but if the upper class is excluded, Chile becomes a very equal country.
The Chilean mobility pattern closely resembles the following structure of inequality. A high barrier between the upper class and the rest of Chilean society almost completely prevents mobility to and from it (a phenomenon called 'elite closure'), but mobility opportunities exist among non-elite classes. This finding suggests that mobility and equality are in fact closely related, but their association is captured when the pattern, and not only the aggregate level of these structural phenomena is considered.
The Chilean findings confirmed that there is a lot to be learned from expanding the international comparative analysis of social mobility. Our next step in this enterprise is to include Mexico in the comparative template. With funding from the Mexican Fundacion Espinosa Rugarcia, and in association with Mexican scholars, I am currently conducting the first national mobility survey in Mexico, whose fieldwork is scheduled for the spring of 2006. The complexity of this operation is significantly greater than the one in Chile. A country with more than 100 million inhabitants, some of them living in remote rural areas, and where interviews have to be conducted in several indigenous languages in addition to Spanish has posed new challenges. Again, a main objective of the survey is to ensure comparability and at the same time to capture the particularities of the Mexican society-international migration and remittances, among others, will be crucial issues in the Mexican survey. The Mexican data will provide further evidence on the potential association between equality and mobility, and, as the Chilean case, it will allow the study of how radical changes such as urbanization, demographic transition, and deep market transformation affect mobility opportunities of the population.
I am confident that other national surveys in Latin America will shortly join the Chilean and Mexican ones. In addition to learning about mobility dynamics in these countries, these surveys add to recent data collection projects in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and India, and allow researchers to start thinking systematically about sources of variation and similarity in mobility opportunities in broad international perspective. This collective effort will not only improve our understanding of the diverse economic, institutional, and cultural determinants of mobility opportunities, but it will also help us examine and refine the theories we currently use to understand inequality and its reproduction over time.
For more information about this research, contact Florencia Torche.
See Also
- Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality
- Research grant: Living Standards and Economic Well-Being in Chile
