05/10/2012 - Americans love economic mobility. It’s kind of a
founding myth for us: We see ourselves as having broken free
from rigid, aristocratic Europe to form a meritocracy that
guaranteed a chance to move up in the world. Though there has
been much talk lately about rising income inequality in the
United States, what has worried pundits on both the left and the
right has been recent reports that Americans aren’t as
economically mobile as citizens in other Western nations. The
Pew Economic Mobility Project has been studying this phenomenon,
and is out with a new report examining which regions in America
are the most and least mobile. Researchers looked at Americans
ages 35 to 39 and then examined their incomes ten years later.
The study covered the time period between 1978 and 2007, and
tackled three different measures of income mobility: absolute
mobility (as measured by inflation-adjusted income growth over
time), and relative upward and downward mobility — i.e. movement
up or down the socio-economic la