Getting Ahead: Economic and Social Mobility in America - Urban Institute Press | Understanding US Social Progress & Economic Opportunities | Perfect for Policy Makers, Educators & Social Researchers

There is an enormous amount of easy-to-understand information on social mobility and status attainment in this brief collection of papers. The authors are established, mainstream, neoclassical economists who have a serious interest in both the academic advancement of their discipline and in public policy. The second author (Sawhill) held a high-level position in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget during part of Clinton's tenure as president.Given their backgrounds and interests, it's not surprising that McMurrer and Sawhill are politically a bit to the right of center. Furthermore, as proponents of free market capitalism, it's easy to predict that they will locate the provenance of economic difficulties, such as diminished upward mobility, declining payoffs for investments in education, and exaggerated income inequality in ineffective schools and families that provide less and less nurturing and wholesome discipline. In fact, the authors offer these explanations for sagging economic prospects as if they were truisms, subscribed to by everyone and not in need of substantiation.Nevertheless, it is a tribute to the scholarly integrity of the authors that they offer table after table and graph after graph that make the case that we live in ever-tougher economic circumstances, and that there is no reason to believe that education and the family are the institutions at fault. Instead, though the authors never say this and might well deny that it is a reasonable inference from their work, it seems clear that our economic difficulties are rooted in the organization and functioning of the economy itself.Consistent with this judgment, McMurrer and Sawhill vividly graph the expected average income for high school graduates if patterns established after World War II had continued until 1995: just over $40,000 per year! In contrast to this projection, however, the actual average in the mid-1990's was little more than $15,000 per year.In one of the most striking bar charts I've ever seen, the authors also show us that, in the aggregate, there is an astonishingly strong positive relationship between family income and SAT score. Insofar as getting into a college or university is dependent on one's SAT score, as incomes increase -- level by level by level -- one's chances of success are increased markedly.There are all sorts of ways in which McMurrer and Sawhill could have made the data they display in one figure after another more credible. Some of their graphical accounts make the reader want to cry out for introduction of controls.Nevertheless, all tolled, the evidence the authors offer in simple but visually arresting form on page after page of this slim volume make it quite clear that most of us are not Getting Ahead, nor are we likely to.