ABSTRACT
A common pursuit in investigating the American dream in recent decades is to ask whether there is more or less upward economic mobility in U.S. society now as compared to previous decades. In this chapter, I suggest that the focus on economics or financial upward mobility obscures the fact that the operative measure should be membership in a class and that by examining the extant studies of the working, lower, middle, and upper middle classes in the United States, it is apparent that movement among classes is very limited, whether within a generation or intergenerationally. Generally, as many studies make clear, classes act to reproduce themselves so that members born into any class can, for the most part, anticipate remaining a member of the class one is born into and passing on the same class position to one's children.
