Parents and Children: Incomes in Two Generations

This book reports the results of a study of intergenerational income mobility in Great Britain, based on a follow-up survey of the families interviewed in Rowntree's study of poverty in York in 1950. The study examines the continuity of economic status across generations, especially with regard to poverty, and also looks at mechanisms such as education that lead to the transmittal of economic advantage across generations. Problems of research design included the difficulties of tracing the children of the original families after more than 25 years and the fact that neither of the samples was nationally representative. The study measures economic status by income or earnings. Direct and indirect factors examined include mobility between income groups of parents and children, the extent to which advantage or disadvantage were associated, life cycle influences, family background, education, and access to better paying jobs or the labor market. The authors study the continuity of jobs across generations especially with regard to industrial patterns of employment. The effects of age, education, and location on unusually high or low incomes are also examined. Few people question that high or low incomes are associated across generations, but the extent to which they are associated is rarely studied, and this book attempts to fill that gap.