67 percent of the income of White households, and in 2000 they earned 66 percent
(Featherman and Hauser, 1978; Pomer, 1983; U.S. Census Bureau, 2001).
Historically, women have had less opportunity for upward mobility than men
because of the types of jobs they were permitted: mostly clerical and service positions
that do not offer many opportunities for promotion or increased responsibility. And
when they married, they were expected to quit even those jobs or else decrease their
hours to part time.
Today, many middle-class women still do not pursue careers that afford middle-
class lifestyles because they curtail career ambitions for household and child care
responsibilities. As a result, if they divorce, they experience downward mobility. Not
only do they lose the second (and often higher) income from their husband, they also
lose benefits like health care and insurance (Weitzman, 1996).
Social Mobility Today
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States has become less
mobile than it has ever been in its history. According to a recent survey, Americans
are more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they
were born. Rates of mobility are about the same as France or England—countries with
hereditary aristocracies and, in the case of Britain, a hereditary monarch. American
levels of mobility are significantly lower than Canada and most Scandinavian coun-
tries (Economic Mobility Project, 2006).
That doesn’t mean that Americans have stopped believing in mobility, though.
A recent poll in The New York Timesfound that 40 percent of Americans believed
that the chance of moving up from one class to another had risen over the last
30 years—the same period when those chances were actually shrinking (Scott and
Leonhardt, 2005).
Global Inequality
Global inequalityis the systematic differences in wealth and power among countries.
These differences among countries coexist alongside differences within countries.
Increasingly the upper classes in different countries are more similar to each
other—especially in their patterns of consumption—than they are to the middle classes
in their own countries. The world seems to be developing a global class structure.
The same processes we observed in the United States are happening on a world
scale. For example, over the past 30 years, the overall standard of living in the world
has risen. Illiteracy is down, the infant mortality rate is down, the average income is
up, and life expectancy is up. But many of these gains are in countries that were high
or middle income to begin with, such as the advanced industrial economies of
Europe. The standard of living in many of the poorest countries has actually declined.
Rich countries are getting richer; poor countries are getting poorer.
The income gap between rich and poor that we see in the United States is becom-
ing the pattern worldwide. The richest 20 percent of the world’s population receives
about 80 percent of the global income and accounts for 86 percent of total private
consumption, while the poorest 20 percent survives on just 1 percent of the global
income and accounts for 1.3 percent of private consumption (Figure 7.4). Actually,
the three richest U.S. individuals together—Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Paul
Allen—earn as much as the annual economic output of the world’s 48 poorest coun-
tries (Miller and Serafin, 2006).
GLOBAL INEQUALITY 229