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CIAO DATE: 06/06
Overcoming Barriers to Mobility: The Role of Place in the United States and UK
Alan Berube
April 2006
Introduction
In late 2004 and the first half of 2005, the US media elite caught the mobility bug. Within weeks of one another, three newspapers of national record – The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times – each independently published a series of articles describing, by various measures, whether and how Americans are 'getting ahead' today. Collectively, the articles offered a re-examination of a powerful narrative in the United States: that of a classless society, with boundless opportunity awaiting those who choose to seize it.
Why these newspapers all chose to examine the issue at the same time is anyone's guess. But one might wonder why the media elite did not place social mobility on the public radar in the run-up to November 2004, when the nation was embroiled in yet another narrowly contested presidential election. It would have been illuminating to watch candidates Bush and Kerry grapple with the policy implications of changing opportunity and mobility in US society, rather than argue about who was going to give the nebulous middle class a bigger tax cut (and reduce the budget deficit at the same time).
For frustrated US researchers, then, it is quite gratifying – and envyinducing – to see the issue of social mobility assume a central place in the public debate across the Atlantic. In the UK, the discussion is empirically grounded, its implications are acknowledged across the political spectrum, and policymakers connect the issue to a series of domains, including education, health, safety, and employment. Americans who foolishly argue that the UK is not really a 'foreign' country need look no further.
One important strand of the UK mobility discussion has focused on the role of 'place'. The central questions here seem to be (a) 'Does where you live affect your chances in life?' and (b) 'If so, how much?'. The answers could inform a range of policies regarding housing, schools, regeneration, and welfare – and could help policymakers assess the relative importance of reforms in these areas to broader efforts aimed at enhancing social mobility.
Notably, the potential influence of place on social mobility received only passing attention in recent US media accounts. But among US sociologists, economists, and policy professionals, the degree to which location might influence life chances – at least for a subset of Americans – has animated a great deal of research, experimentation, and spirited debate. Those efforts have also underpinned a range of US housing policy interventions over the past 10 to 20 years, aimed at breaking the connection between place and poverty.
In that spirit, this chapter offers a brief overview from the US side on what we know about the links between place and social mobility. First, it reviews the evidence on mobility generally, in both the US and the UK, to establish the relative scale of the challenge. Second, it examines both theory and evidence, mostly from the US side, of the role that location might play in determining a series of important outcomes for people. The chapter concludes by assessing the possible implications of US work on this subject for UK research and policy.
