Economic and Political Sociology Workshop

Glen Pine

Short-Term Class Mobility, Class Categories, and Class Operationalizations

This paper presents and analyzes four findings pertaining to short-term class mobility in the US over recent decades. Analysis of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) panel data reveals a high degree of intragenerational class mobility over two-year periods, given six-class versions of Wright and Erikson-Goldthorpe (E-G) schemas. Despite the mobility, the data also reveal highly static class structures over the observed periods, as well as some statistical correlations between present income and class location twenty years earlier. Unlike NLSY79 data, Forbes Richest Americans data shows almost no downward mobility during the relevant periods. The paper draws several conclusions from these findings.

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