The politics of mobility

Social mobility gauges the openness or closure of a society. An open society will exhibit a high level of social mobility due to a low persistence of privilege from one generation to the next; a closed society will exhibit a low level of social mobility due to persistence of social position across generations. As citizens and social scientists we endorse equality of opportunity, even when we disagree about the appropriate absolute level of inequality, so openness is a widely shared goal. We might even say that although we study mobility for many reasons, none is more important than to study social mobility in order to change it for the better. That said, we might go on to ask how the accumulation of research on social mobility over the past decade guides that interest in making society better.