Is Nordic social mobility much lower than conventionally measured?
Core argument: Correcting for measurement error by comparing relative rather than absolute correlations of relatives, the authors find that educational intergenerational mobility in modern Denmark and Sweden is much lower, and parent–child and sibling correlations much higher, than conventionally measured.
Attempts to compare societies in terms of their degree of social mobility across time and place have often failed to take any account of the problem of measurement error. In this paper we suggest a method of correcting for measurement errors that is based on looking not at the absolute correlation of relatives in outcomes, but at their relative correlation. Applying such methods to Denmark, Sweden and England now, as well as England in the nineteenth century [that] actual educational intergenerational mobility rates in modern Denmark and Sweden are much lower than conventionally measured, [and] the correlation of parents and siblings in educational attainment is much higher than conventionally measured. Denmark and Sweden’s more generous public support of education, and compression of household income inequalities, has at best modestly reduced the importance of families in determining child educational outcomes. Table 3 suggests that Denmark and Sweden have underlying social mobility rates that are similar, though not quite as high, as modern England, across all three dimensions of mobility. Marital assortment is as strong in the Nordic countries as in modern England, and intergenerational and sibling correlations are nearly as high. Even more remarkable in Table 3 is that nineteenth-century England had intergenerational and sibling correlations that only modestly exceed those of modern Denmark and Sweden.