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Speaker: Prof. Bloome @Harvard University

Title of the Webinar: Absolute Income Mobility Obscures Marginalized Children’s Disadvantages

Abstract: Intergenerational mobility captures the distance between the socioeconomic positions of parents versus their adult children. Researchers measure this distance in absolute and relative units, such as absolute dollars and relative ranks. Absolute and relative mobility often diverge. For example, absolute mobility can rise while relative mobility declines. How should scholars and policymakers understand this divergence? We conclude that they should understand it as follows: absolute mobility is less reflective than relative mobility of marginalized children’s socioeconomic disadvantages. We base this conclusion on analyses of survey, administrative, and simulated data on income mobility in the contemporary United States. We analyze multiple points of difference in mobility, which facilitates the recognition of several asymmetries. First, high-income children’s experiences weigh more heavily in absolute-mobility trends than low-income children’s experiences, particularly when economic growth is positive. Second, this asymmetry is more characteristic of absolutethan relative-mobility trends. Third, absolutemobility differences across demographic groups are more prone than relative-mobility differences to obscure marginalized groups’ socioeconomic disadvantages. These asymmetries have policy implications: We caution that focusing on absolute mobility as a policy target can divert attention away from society’s most disadvantaged children.

Speaker: Prof. Tony Tam @CUHK

Speaker: Prof. Wen Fangqi @OSU

Title of the Webinar: Social Mobility and Assortative Mating in the Tang Dynasty, 618-907 CE

Abstract: For a long time, research on social stratification and mobility has focused on the role of education or educational credentials, attributing its equalizing effect on social mobility to modernity. However, examining this relationship is difficult without reliable historical data. In this study, we constructed a dataset from tomb epitaphs in China’s Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), which contain detailed and extensive information about the ancestral origins, family background, career histories, and marriage relationships of the deceased. Our results, which have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the medieval Chinese aristocracy had gradually lost their political advantages in the bureaucracy as early as the mid-seventh century CE, while passing the Imperial Examination (Keju) had become increasingly more important in determining a man’s career success. In a follow-up study, we further show that while the Chinese medieval aristocracy decayed politically, they maintained their advantages in the marriage market. Over the entire course of the Tang Dynasty, aristocrats tended to marry each other. Additionally, men with both an aristocratic background and exam success had gradually become the most popular suitors in the mid-to-late Tang Dynasty marriage market. Our findings demonstrate both the persistence of the old elites and the coalition of the old elites and the new elites in the rise of meritocracy.

Speaker: Prof. Song Xi @UPenn

Title of the Webinar: Intergenerational Social Mobility of Asian Americans

Abstract: An early sociological view in the United States, traceable to Edward Alsworth Ross (1866–1951), was that Asian American immigrants had lower standards for their children’s education than Whites. According to this reasoning, it was not until the Civil Rights Movement that the socioeconomic profiles of Asian Americans began to improve, leading to a new well-educated, “model minority” generation. With recently released linked 1900–1940 full-count U.S. Census microdata, we challenge this view with new evidence on the intergenerational mobility of native-born Asian Americans before the Civil Rights Movement. We find that Chinese and Japanese Americans who grew up during 1882–1943, a period of anti-Asian policies in the U.S. (for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Gentleman’s Agreement), exhibited exceptionally high educational mobility amid these policies. However, their higher educational mobility failed to translate into higher occupational mobility. The discrepancy between educational and occupational mobility suggests labor market discrimination was at work for Asian Americans prior to the Civil Rights Movement.

Speakers: Professor Jean C. OI and Professor Andrew G. WALDER @Stanford University

Title of the Seminar: Distinguished Symposium on China’s Political Economy