Traditionally perceived as a highly mobile society, the U.S. has recently been shown to be less mobile than many people believe and much less mobile than many other high-income countries, particularly in Europe. This finding has sparked something of a holy war among adherents of competing measures of economic mobility. Those on the political left tend to favor measures of relative mobility. These measures indicate how freely individuals (or their offspring) can change positions in a population distribution ordered along some social dimension, such as income or education.

Parents have strong, perhaps even primordial motivations to invest in the social and economic well-being of their children. But as economic inequality rises and the gap between the rich and the poor grows increasingly larger, the ability of rich and poor families to make such investments diverges significantly. One consequence of the differential ability of rich and poor parents to invest in their children is larger gaps in child outcomes by socio-economic status.

One of the long-standing goals of the Foundation’s program on the Future of Work has been to assess the broader social consequences of the long-term structural changes in the U.S. labor market that have left many American workers, particularly those with no more than a high school education, without the prospect of a stable, high-quality job.