Recent decades have seen declining intergenerational mobility in the US, though its pattern varies widely. In new research, Kohei Takeda unpacks the relationship between declining manufacturing in parts of the US – which are often termed the ‘Rust Belt’ – and workers’ income mobility. This mobility is affected by both falling labor mobility and the historic employment choices of people in former manufacturing centres. More education to break the persistence in these choices, he writes, may be the key to workers regaining intergenerational mobility. The declining ability for Americans to increase their incomes across generations has attracted enormous interest in the US. Children from families in San Francisco have 8 percentile higher prospective income rank compared to those from Detroit in terms of their prospective income rank. Why, in the same country, are the citizens of San Jose or Tucson on entirely different trajectories than those in Detroit and Cleveland? The key to answering this question is the interplay between structural transformation in the aggregate and local economies in the US. The last half-century has seen sustained deindustrialization and a general shift toward the service sector in the US. At the same time, there has been a significant variation […]
