The Fantasy (and Nightmare) of Total Social Mobility
[Although written to follow Part II, this part could be read on its own]
Social mobility occurs when a person moves into a different social position in his or her maturity, relative to the social position they held at birth, which is to say, their parent’s social position.
We can leave the definition of social position vague, except to insist that it is intrinsically vertical and associated with advantage. High social position implies more of the good stuff, however defined: money, education, occupation, housing, esteem. There cannot be mobility without inequality; if all social positions were equal advantaged, no one could move up or down.
Social mobility therefore, is movement up (or down), to positions where you get more (or less) of what people in your society desire.
Under total social mobility, parent social position would give zero information about their child’s attained social position. If your parents were at the top, you may stay up or you may move down. In a three level system, odds are two out of three that you move down; in a five level system, odds are four out of five that you move down from the top.
Zero information means that each generation gets a random draw anew. As with any random variable, probability follows frequency, which is why the odds that a top-situated family will move down are greater in a five level as compared to a three level system of social positions.
By extension, if your parents were at the bottom, but this provides zero information about your fate, then odds are, you move up; the greater the number of levels, the greater the odds of moving up. And if your parents were near the middle, you may stay put or move either up or down, all with equal probability in a three level system. By contrast, in a five level system the odds of moving up or down would each be twice as great as the odds of staying in the middle, where your parents were.
What a nightmare!
The contrast term for total social mobility is zero social mobility, often termed a caste system: social position is set at birth, and never changes, not for you or for your children or for their children.
Also a nightmare.
Unfortunately, the second nightmare looms so large in the American imagination that the nightmarish possibilities, inherent when society deviates more and more toward the opposite of a caste system, get missed.
The devil you don’t know can be worse than the devil you do know.
Americans know they despise anything resembling a caste system; Americans don’t realize how dreadful the other pole of social mobility might feel.
It gets worse
On closer examination, the nightmare of total social mobility gets worse. When I calculated odds, I snuck in the assumption of a columnar model: equal numbers of occupants at each level of the social system. That’s not how social position gets realized in most societies. Traditionally, social position has been organized as a pyramid: a few people at the top, somewhat more toward the middle, and a great many at the base.
Total social mobility produces a different odds under a pyramid model. Under a simple three level pyramid model, with total social mobility, if your parents were at the top, the odds that you will move down become 90%, 95% or more. If you started in the middle, odds are that you move down; and if you started at the bottom, odds are you stay there.
Truly a nightmare! With a pyramid structure, under total mobility assumptions, most individual mobility must be downward. And most people who start down, stay there—on the probabilities.
In America, most people’s mental model of social position is quite different: call it the onion model. Pick up a sweet onion at the store. You see a squashed sphere, with most of the volume in the middle; a narrow, small protuberance at the top; and a somewhat larger or broader protuberance at the base.
With an onion model of social position, most people will start in the middle, and under total social mobility, stay in the middle. Plus, not too many people find themselves at the bottom, and most of their children move up, on the probabilities.
So far, so good: in an onion world, most people are middle class. And interestingly, in an onion world, no matter what the level of social mobility, from zero to 100%, most people will both enjoy a middle class lifestyle, and see their children enjoy a middle class lifestyle.
It’s an American dream.
Even the small worm is not a problem: for, given an onion, if your parents were at the top, odds are high that you, their child, will experience moderate downward social mobility. What the hey, says the American: from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, all’s well with the world.
The onion model is the only account of social position that I can conceive where total social mobility is not a nightmare. Alas, the onion model, applied to 21st century America, has a Panglossian feel, too ideologically neat to be true.
Do you believe it: that almost everyone in America falls in the broad middle, with few at the bottom, and even fewer at the top? The question, again: not whether you’d like to live in such a world, but whether that is the world in which you live.
The pear model of social position
Next, consider a pear resting on its base. Like the onion, it has a broad middle, albeit centered a little below the midpoint. It has a bottom, by definition; but this bottom is not markedly different from or very much lower than much of its middle.
Unlike the onion, the pear has a distinct upper bulge of reasonable volume. But like the onion, only a few people are at the top of the pear, although here that top takes the form of a stem, small in volume but lengthy in extension. With a pear, we can speak of the top, the tippety top, and the very, very top.
I propose to you that the pear provides a much better description of social position in America than does the onion. (The metaphor could be made even more aptif we let the pear be pretty ripe, and slam it hard on the table, so that the bottom, although still not distant from the middle, gets a different texture, injured and damaged.)
And if that dropped pear did give a correct model of social position in America, then many Americans, especially parents, upon reflection, would probably hope for (cheer for) less than 100% social mobility; and might not be discontent with near zero social mobility. Let me explain.
The distinguishing feature of the pear shape, relative to the pyramid or onion, is the sizable bulge below the top. Switching to contemporary and more familiar social terminology, the bulge holds the doctors, lawyers, professors, MBAs, engineers and other members of the professional-managerial class: the top 15-20%, less the top 1%. The large lower bulk of the pear holds the white collar and regularly employed blue collar and pink collar strata: the middle 70-75%. And the bruised portion at the bottom holds the victims of prejudice, the unfortunate, the unemployed, the dropouts, the broken homes, the mentally ill, the criminals.
Total social mobility, under a pear model, means:
- If you started off in the middle classes, odds are, you stay there;
- But if you started off in the upper middle classes, odds are, you drop down. The engineer’s son’s becomes an auto mechanic; the professor’s son works as a clerk, the lawyer’s son manages a small office, the MBA’s son sells used cars, the doctor’s son fixes the plumbing.
Suppose you were to survey American parents, focusing on those who now enjoy managerial and professional success. You would ask: Do you accept that your children will generally be less successful than you? And that this drop is to be expected, and the natural order outside of any caste system?
NO, the answer will be screamed back. Professional and managerial parents do not and will not accept that downward social mobility is the natural order of things for their families and those of their peers. Professional and managerial parents expect to reproduce their social position. Doctors expect their children to be lawyers and scientists; engineers expect their children to be professors and doctors, etc.
But if upper middle class families succeed in reproducing their social position, then how does the current generation of middle class parents, down there in the bulk of the pear, arrange for their children to move up? By definition, in a pear model most must fail of that goal. There’s plenty of room to stay in the white collar or blue collar zone of the middle class; but unless the pear turns into an onion, little chance to move up into doctor, lawyer, executive, professor or engineer territory, given that the children of doctors, lawyers, executives, professors and engineers are bending every effort, and their considerable family resources, towards keeping their own children there.
Interlude: Economic wealth versus social position
Economic well-being is not the same as social position. The onion model might be a good model of capitalist America, if applied to material necessities. Rich people here don’t eat that much better than people of modest means, in terms of the nutrients needed for a body to thrive. Poor people at the very bottom in America do eat worse—unless you take a planetary and macro-historical perspective, in which case, not so much. The same goes for any measure of strictly material well-being. The mansion in the Hamptons is much nicer than the tract home in Westchester, which is much nicer than the tenement in the Bronx—unless you introduce a peasant hovel from the middle ages into the comparison, in which case, all three New York residences get jammed together at the high middle of the scale.
Everyone in America can be materially well-off; but not everybody can hold a high social position. The immediate proxy for high social position in today’s America is occupation. A small circle of jobs are highly rewarding financially, and highly rewarding personally: well-paid, but also interesting and challenging, and comfortable and clean, and secure and safe, and esteemed in the eyes of others. Most jobs aren’t very well-paid, and many of the well-paid jobs fall short on one of those lifestyle metrics. An oil roughneck in North Dakota in 2014 made a lot of money, but it was hard, dangerous, dirty work, with no security, and little esteem.
The Hidden Fantasy
Once the nightmare of total social mobility is exposed, we can look more closely at the underlying fantasy, the image or myth that fuels feelings of unfairness when the necessary stickiness of social position comes into view.
In their heart of hearts, real Americans (as Sarah Palin used to say) have a vision of how social positions are supposed to be allocated. First, everybody is born nearly equal, with no great differences in natural endowment. Second, the hierarchy of social position is also relatively flat. In metaphor, some farms are bigger, while some are smaller; some have better soil, some worse; but no one owns an estate, and no one is a sharecropper. Third, given this levelling of ability combined with a flattened hierarchy, the real cause of success must be virtue, notably, the virtues of hard work, perseverance, thrift, and modesty. These rightfully determine who ends up with the larger farm on the bottomland, and who ends up with a modest but fruitful farm, versus the slackers who must scratch out a living on thin soil in the back hollow.
The fantasy just described is agrarian; Jeffersonian; and at root, Calvinist a la Max Weber. It is a fundamentally religious vision: that social position on earth will be as fairly awarded, and as keyed to virtue, as one’s fate in the after-life. All souls are equal in the eyes of the Lord; all competitors in the race for social position likewise start from the same line, goes the fantasy. Laggards fall behind because of their own lack of initiative; slackers get what little they deserve. Stay on the path of righteousness, and you will arrive where you belong.
When the facts of this fallen world violate that vision, the wound cuts deep. How can it be that the better colleges are stuffed with the children of suburban professionals from sinful New York and wicked California? How come all that hard work did not get my child into the college of his dreams? How could a little SAT test trump those years of elbow grease? It’s not fair …
Next, keep the Christian vision, but change the ethnicity of those making the lament. Ask now, Why are there so many white suburbanites crowding these elite colleges and the elite occupations to which they lead? Why the attempt to hide privilege behind the mask of this obviously biased SAT test? It’s not fair …
Next: tying the threads together–social position, social mobility, college admissions, and the SAT
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