Social Mobility: How Much is Possible?

• A. The physical movement of people between countries for work
• B. The ability of individuals or families to move up or down the social and economic ladder over time ✓
• C. The number of people who own cars in a given society
• D. The speed at which new technologies spread through a population

Why: Social mobility describes changes in a person's or family's social or economic position, such as income, occupation, or class, relative to others, either upward or downward across generations or within a lifetime.

• A. Intergenerational mobility concerns changes within one person's career, while intragenerational compares parents and children
• B. Intergenerational mobility compares a person's social position to their parents', while intragenerational mobility tracks changes within a single person's life ✓
• C. Intergenerational mobility applies only to developing countries, while intragenerational applies to wealthy nations
• D. Intergenerational mobility measures education levels, while intragenerational measures income

Why: Intergenerational mobility compares children's outcomes with their parents', whereas intragenerational mobility examines how an individual's own position changes over the course of their working life.

• A. A factory worker's child becoming a doctor after earning a medical degree ✓
• B. A professional losing their job and falling into poverty
• C. A family remaining in the same middle-income bracket for three generations
• D. A business owner keeping the same income for twenty years

Why: Upward mobility occurs when someone moves to a higher social or economic position than their origins, such as a child from a working-class family entering a high-status profession like medicine.

• A. The percentage of people who never change their occupation
• B. The share of people who end up in a higher income or class than their parents, regardless of their relative rank ✓
• C. The total wealth held by the richest members of society
• D. The number of years a person spends in education

Why: Absolute mobility measures whether people attain a higher standard of living than their parents did, which can rise even when relative rankings stay the same, for example during periods of economic growth.

• A. Because individual effort has no effect on outcomes in any society
• B. Because opportunities such as access to quality schooling, family wealth, and neighborhood conditions influence what individuals can achieve ✓
• C. Because mobility is determined entirely by genetics
• D. Because governments set fixed income levels for every citizen

Why: Outcomes depend on personal choices and abilities, but also on structural conditions like education quality, family resources, and local economies, which affect how much effort translates into mobility.

• A. The movement of individuals within their own lifetime across income levels
• B. The extent to which a person's economic or social position differs from that of their parents ✓
• C. The number of people who change residence between generations
• D. The average income growth of a country over a decade

Why: Intergenerational mobility compares children's outcomes (such as income or occupation) with those of their parents, showing how much family background determines later position. Intragenerational mobility, by contrast, tracks changes within one person's career.

• A. The Gini coefficient
• B. The intergenerational elasticity of income (IGE) ✓
• C. The unemployment rate
• D. The poverty headcount ratio

Why: The intergenerational elasticity of income estimates the percentage difference in a child's income associated with a 1% difference in parental income. A higher value indicates less mobility, because parental income explains more of the child's income.

• A. Very low social mobility
• B. Very high social mobility, since children's incomes are largely unrelated to their parents' ✓
• C. High income inequality within each generation
• D. A rigid caste system

Why: An IGE near zero means parental income has little predictive power for a child's income, so children's outcomes are largely independent of their family background. Income inequality within a generation is a separate concept from mobility across generations.

• A. To reduce the effect of temporary fluctuations, such as a single bad year, that would otherwise distort the measure ✓
• B. To increase the total sample size of the population
• C. Because tax records only report income in five-year blocks
• D. To adjust for inflation across different countries

Why: Single-year income can be heavily affected by unemployment, illness, or one-time gains. Averaging over several years gives a more stable picture of a family's long-run economic position, yielding more reliable mobility estimates.

• A. The probability that children move from one income or class category to another relative to their parents' category ✓
• B. The geographic migration routes of families over time
• C. The exchange rate between currencies used in income comparisons
• D. The number of years of schooling required for each occupation

Why: A transition matrix cross-tabulates parents' categories (such as income quintiles) against children's categories, showing how likely children are to stay in or move between groups. It gives a detailed view of mobility patterns beyond a single summary number.

• A. Social stratification
• B. Social mobility ✓
• C. Social capital
• D. Social exclusion

Why: Social mobility refers to movement between social positions, such as income levels or occupational classes. Social stratification describes the structure of inequality itself, while social capital and social exclusion refer to networks and barriers rather than movement.

• A. Intragenerational mobility
• B. Structural mobility
• C. Intergenerational mobility ✓
• D. Horizontal mobility

Why: Intergenerational mobility compares the social position of children with that of their parents. Intragenerational mobility tracks changes within a single person's career or life, structural mobility refers to shifts caused by changes in the economy, and horizontal mobility means moving without changing status.

• A. It guarantees every graduate a high-paying job regardless of other factors.
• B. It provides skills and credentials that can open access to better-paying occupations. ✓
• C. It eliminates differences in family background between students.
• D. It requires students to remain in their home communities for their entire lives.

Why: Education builds human capital and provides credentials that employers value, enabling individuals to access jobs with higher pay and status. It does not guarantee outcomes or erase family background effects, which still shape results.

• A. Teaching students to memorize religious texts
• B. Relying on formal qualifications to determine hiring and advancement ✓
• C. Government funding for schools based on test scores
• D. Students choosing their own courses without guidance

Why: Credentialism is the tendency for employers to rely heavily on degrees and certificates when selecting workers. While this can open doors for some, it can also disadvantage people who lack access to costly credentials.

• A. A preference for practical rather than academic subjects
• B. Limited access to quality early childhood education, resources, and school funding ✓
• C. Lower natural intelligence compared to other children
• D. Excessive parental involvement in schoolwork

Why: Children from low-income families often attend schools with fewer resources and have less access to early learning opportunities, which can widen achievement gaps. Differences in innate ability are not supported by evidence as the main cause, and parental involvement is generally beneficial.

• A. The physical movement of people between cities or countries
• B. The ability of individuals or families to move up or down the economic and social ladder over time ✓
• C. The total amount of income a country produces each year
• D. The number of people who change jobs in a given year

Why: Social mobility describes movement between social or economic positions, such as moving from a lower income bracket to a higher one, or the reverse, across generations or within a lifetime.

• A. Comparing your income rank to your parents' income rank
• B. The share of people who never experience poverty
• C. Whether a person earns more than their parents did, regardless of their relative position in the distribution ✓
• D. The fixed amount of wealth a family inherits

Why: Absolute mobility measures whether children have higher real incomes than their parents, which can rise even when relative rankings stay the same.

• A. How quickly a person changes jobs
• B. How much a family's income rises in percentage terms
• C. How strongly a person's position in the income distribution predicts their child's position ✓
• D. The difference between urban and rural incomes

Why: Relative mobility focuses on rank: if children from the bottom of the distribution often stay at the bottom, relative mobility is low, even if everyone's incomes are rising.

• A. Unequal access to quality education in early childhood ✓
• B. Rising average life expectancy
• C. Increases in the number of public libraries
• D. Higher rates of international tourism

Why: Unequal access to high-quality early education and schooling is widely identified by researchers as a major barrier, since gaps often appear before children enter adulthood and the labor market.

• A. Because high inequality guarantees that everyone has equal chances
• B. Because in very unequal societies, the advantages of wealthy families can be passed on more easily, potentially reducing mobility ✓
• C. Because income inequality only affects people who are already rich
• D. Because opportunity is determined solely by individual effort, regardless of background

Why: When wealth and income are highly concentrated, families at the top can provide children with better schooling, networks, and resources, which can make it harder for people from lower-income families to move up.

• A. The idea that people's occupations are determined entirely by their parents' jobs
• B. The finding that where a child grows up independently influences their later economic outcomes ✓
• C. The tendency for people to move to cities to find higher-paying work
• D. The notion that housing prices are the sole cause of income inequality

Why: The place effect refers to evidence that the neighborhood, city, or region in which a child grows up has a measurable independent impact on their adult income and mobility, beyond their family's characteristics.

• A. Randomized Controlled Trials such as the Moving to Opportunity experiment ✓
• B. Cross-sectional census surveys of household income
• C. Qualitative interviews with residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods
• D. Surveys of employer hiring preferences

Why: The Moving to Opportunity experiment randomly assigned housing vouchers to families in high-poverty public housing, allowing researchers to estimate the causal effect of moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods.

• A. Children from low-income families have similar upward mobility rates in all areas
• B. Upward mobility varies substantially across counties, even for children from similar family backgrounds ✓
• C. Upward mobility is highest in rural areas with the lowest population density
• D. Mobility rates depend only on the level of local government spending on schools

Why: Chetty's Opportunity Atlas and related studies found large geographic variation in upward mobility, meaning a child from a given family income level has very different prospects depending on where they grow up.

• A. High levels of local civic engagement and social connectedness
• B. High residential segregation by income ✓
• C. Strong local employment networks across income groups
• D. A high share of two-parent households in the area

Why: Research links greater income segregation to reduced mobility, since children in isolated low-income areas have fewer exposures to cross-class networks, role models, and opportunities. The other options are generally associated with higher, not lower, mobility.

• A. Families always move to places that match their income exactly, so no variation exists
• B. Families who live in different places differ in many ways, so simple comparisons can confound location with family traits ✓
• C. Children never change neighborhoods during childhood
• D. Income data is not collected at the neighborhood level

Why: Families choose where to live based on income, preferences, and other traits, so comparing outcomes across places mixes the effect of place with the effect of who lives there. Experiments and sibling-based or movers-based designs help address this problem.

• A. The change in a person's income over their own lifetime
• B. The extent to which a child's socioeconomic outcomes differ from those of their parents ✓
• C. The movement of families between neighborhoods within a single city
• D. The number of years a person spends in formal education

Why: Intergenerational mobility measures how much a child's position in the income or class distribution differs from their parents' position. It captures how strongly outcomes are passed from one generation to the next.

• A. Higher income inequality is associated with lower intergenerational mobility ✓
• B. Higher income inequality is associated with higher intergenerational mobility
• C. Income inequality and mobility are unrelated across countries
• D. Only wealthy countries show any relationship between inequality and mobility

Why: The Great Gatsby Curve, named by economist Alan Krueger, shows a negative correlation between income inequality and intergenerational earnings mobility: countries with more unequal incomes tend to have children whose earnings are more strongly tied to their parents' earnings.

• A. The number of pets in the household
• B. The presence of stable, consistent caregiving and parental involvement ✓
• C. The exact square footage of the family home
• D. The age at which a child first watches television

Why: Studies consistently find that stable caregiving, parental responsiveness, and involvement in learning activities are strongly associated with children's cognitive and socioemotional development, which in turn affects later mobility.

• A. Children from advantaged backgrounds fall behind over time because of lack of resources
• B. Early advantages tend to compound over time, while early disadvantages can also accumulate ✓
• C. Siblings always achieve the same educational level regardless of birth order
• D. Children tend to surpass their parents' income regardless of their starting point

Why: The Matthew effect, drawn from the biblical phrase 'to those who have, more will be given,' describes how early gains in skills or resources tend to produce further gains, so early differences between children can widen rather than shrink.

• A. Because government policy has no effect on children after age five
• B. Because skill gaps present in early childhood tend to be harder and more costly to close later ✓
• C. Because children cannot learn anything before starting school
• D. Because family income is only measured when children are very young

Why: Evidence from developmental economics, such as work by James Heckman, suggests that investments in early childhood often yield high returns, since skills build on one another and gaps become more difficult and expensive to remediate as children age.

• A. The change in a person's rank within the income distribution compared to their parents
• B. The share of children who earn more than their parents in real terms ✓
• C. The gap between the highest and lowest earners in a society
• D. The proportion of people who move between social classes over a lifetime

Why: Absolute mobility measures whether children end up better off than their parents in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, regardless of where they rank in the distribution. Relative mobility, by contrast, concerns rank position.

• A. It guarantees equal adult incomes for all graduates
• B. Gains in early cognitive and social skills tend to compound over time, though effects can fade without follow-up support ✓
• C. It eliminates the influence of family background on children's outcomes
• D. It reduces the need for any later schooling investments

Why: Evidence from programs like Perry Preschool and Abecedarian suggests early investments can yield lasting benefits, but effects vary and often depend on sustained support in later schooling. Such programs do not erase family background effects or guarantee equal outcomes.

• A. It always increases unemployment for the lowest-skilled workers
• B. Its effects on employment and prices vary, and it does not directly address barriers like school quality or access to credit ✓
• C. It only affects workers in high-income countries
• D. It has no effect on the incomes of low-wage workers

Why: Minimum wage effects on employment are debated and context-dependent, and the policy targets one part of earnings without addressing other channels such as education quality, neighborhood effects, or wealth gaps that shape mobility.

• A. Reducing or taxing inherited wealth, such as through estate or inheritance taxes ✓
• B. Lowering interest rates on consumer loans
• C. Increasing spending on public parks
• D. Expanding tourism subsidies

Why: Estate and inheritance taxes, along with other measures on transfers across generations, target the passing down of wealth directly. The other options do not primarily act on intergenerational wealth transfer.

• A. Governments have no ability to influence education or taxation
• B. Family, neighborhood, and cultural factors shape outcomes in ways that policies may only partly offset ✓
• C. Mobility is determined entirely by genetics
• D. Mobility rates have never varied across countries or time periods

Why: Policies can shift opportunities, but family resources, neighborhood conditions, and social norms also shape outcomes, so even well-designed interventions typically reduce rather than eliminate gaps in mobility.