The Social Mobility Of My Family

The following paper includes research of Social mobility within social classes and how this has affected my family. This is a controversial issue whether socioeconomic inheritance or the class one is born into plays a role to the social mobility of the individual in one direction or another. I will give examples of my family’s social mobility for the past four generations. Some may argue that starting off at a lower social class can restrict one from social mobility. From this perspective, it is thought that not having access to education or many opportunities for success make it much harder to get out from under a life of always working from paycheck to paycheck. On the other hand, others argue that we all have the same opportunity to advance our social status and move up or down the class structure within generations. The textbook spells out several different philosophies in regards to social class. Karl Marx believed that social class was created by a person’s relationship with labor. Marx separated people into those who own the means of production, and those who sell their labor (Henslin 188). Another concept the textbooks talks about was established by Joseph Kahl and Dennis Gilbert, and they based their opinions on Max Weber. Weber alleged social class is a large collection of individuals who are categorized carefully to each other in property, power and prestige (Henslin 202). Kahl and Gilbert added to this notion to include a person’s education or lack thereof. Kahl and Gilbert state that today the quality of education that an individual receives also denotes the capabilities a person may possess. Kahl and Gilbert created a class social structure that contained of capitalist, upper middle class, lower middle class, working class, working poor and underclass. The higher one is in social class the greater their property or income is, along with prestige of the university they attended and the power they hold in their occupation. After analyzing the two different ideas of social class structure, I believe the most adequate structure is the social class structure of Kahl and Gilbert. Their structure allows for more wisdom and inconsistency in social class as well as superior means for explaining the difference of classes.

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My family’s story

My analysis of my family’s social mobility starts with my mother’s grandparents. Prior to the great depression they were that of upper middle class and would have been considered very well off. They had several farms a very large house with servants and over 1000 acres. My grandfather’s part within the family of 8 was to work on the farms with his older brother getting a management role and other siblings going to college and waiting to be married. My grandfather was a very hard worker and fell into the role to handle the farms and such even though he was from the same class as the rest of the family he was seen as lower because of his younger age and hardworking mentality. Much of the family looked down on him for getting his hands dirty. His father did not allow him to continue school and he dropped to work the farms in the 8th grade. His older brother and father handled the money and management of the farms operations until the Great Depression occurred in the late ’20s. After a fire which resulted in them losing several animals, a house and barn as well as other circumstances from the depression they ended up losing it all. My grandfather ended up renting a farm being a time of the dust bowl he was unable to raise sufficient crops so he began buying horses and cattle that were in poor health for very little. He would clean them up train the horses and sell them back months later for a large profit. He did this several time until he eventually saved enough to buy back the family farm where he began to milk cows and cash crops as the land was much better. My grandmother came from a very low social class but did get to go to college as her oldest sister and her husband made it possible by paying for all of their siblings to go to college as well as they both became professors and continued to live very frugal lives never having children and having a very giving life. My Grandmother graduated college at 16 and soon met my Grandfather they had 5 children with my mother being the youngest. My grandmother started teaching soon after the children were out of diapers. A very large age gap made it so that my mother was still young when the oldest brother joined the navy during WWII. A few years later my mother’s other siblings went off to college as the economy recovered as a result of the war. My mother and father started dating while my mother was 16 and they married soon after meeting and had my oldest sister at age 17. They moved into a small house just down the road from my grandparent’s farm and had three more children. Eventually my father built us a house on the family land that my grandmother gave them. My father is a very hardworking man and worked as a farmhand then a machinist and a carpenter until an accident in 1975 that left him disabled and unable to work. This along with a recession in the 1980s hurt my parents financially. After struggling to make things work they divorced in 1981. My mother, brother and I moved to an apartment in Madison. My sisters moved out by themselves or with boyfriends and got working class jobs as my parents did not have the means to help pay for college. Our income, status and social class level dropped to the poverty level. Living in a single parent household led by the mother we experienced the Feminization of Poverty (Henslin, p. 206). My father was on disability with very little means to even care for himself let along his children. My mother took on several jobs but with no education it never seemed to be enough. I started working to pay for food and such and help out with clothes and such. I was washing dishes and odd jobs mowing lawns. On my fifteenth birthday I decided to move out on my own. My mother had met someone and they were getting married. He had moved in and I did not get along with him or my mother very well. I tried to do well in school but trying to make rent made that a difficult task. I did try and go to college but never having enough money for rent or food made that impossible. I eventually dropped out of school and took on construction jobs. I guess I inherited some of those skills from my father and I am not afraid of hard work so I focused on that. I did well in construction and eventually married and had two children. During the 2000 construction boom I flipped several houses and built myself a very nice house. I had moved my family back up to middle class life. After my children were born my wife struggled with depression and eventually it got so bad that we decided to separate and were divorced in 2002. I had decided I would not make my children go through what I went through with my parents’ divorce so I decided to give it all to them and my ex-wife so we would not have to sell the house and make them possible change schools. I had paid down the mortgage to around 100,000 on a house that is worth well over 500,000. I took all other bills credit cards and car payments. I felt with my skills that I would be able to rebuild my life and they would be taken care of. Then a recession hit slow at first with construction getting slower and slower and eventually in 2008 the economy got really bad. It has been hard to turn around and the recession could not have hit a worse time. I have actually moved several times in the past years downgrading to a lesser quality home and car to save money. With very little work and the economy slow to recover I decided to apply to go to school. This is my second semester at Madison College and I am doing well. I am on the dean’s list with a current 3.9 GPA. Being the only one of my siblings going to college it is important that I finish. I am hopeful that the US economy turns around and I can find a decent job or get my business back making money. The problem is that I am now somewhat stuck not making enough to borrow money to buy my way out and with no college education to get a great paying job while the construction market is saturated and not coming back very fast. Having circumstances affecting each generation has had an impact on the social mobility of my family in a negative way starting with the great depression and continuing with the current recession. I feel that education is a key factor for social mobility. In the past younger siblings lost out on getting to go to college and getting to take over families businesses with the oldest male child usually taking over.

My view

My own view is that while there is a real disadvantage with education and opportunity advantages it is still possible to move up or down within social class that we were born into but for some it is very hard if not impossible. Though I concede that this may be a hard thing to overcome and defiantly harder for the lower class than within the middle or upper class. I still maintain that good work ethic and faith can increase the success of social mobility. For example my grandfather took an approach to find new innovative ways to make money and save for the right opportunity to come and then follow through. Although some might object that upper middle class and upper class should not have to pay for those born into lower class. I would reply that it is our social responsibility to give everyone an education and increase the opportunity for success for each and every individual within the United States. The issue is important because of how we are evolving humanity and making everyone so they can contribute to their potential is better for all. The alternative is that many will go on welfare or break laws and end up in prison as they have no way out of the life they were born into. This cost is much higher than the cost an education would be.

Family disruption or economic loss

The experience of family disruption during childhood substantially increases the odds of ending up in the lowest occupational stratum as opposed to the stable families having a better chance to be in a high class. Family disruption also weakens the association between dimensions of occupational origins and destinations. The socioeconomic destinations from nonimpact family backgrounds bear less resemblance to their socioeconomic origins that those from intact backgrounds. Those from traditional two-parent homes exhibit a stronger pattern of intergenerational occupational inheritance than those from disrupted families. Upward income mobility has decreased to such a point that the United States appears to have the highest rate of income inequality in the industrialized world, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. Longstanding partisan battles in Congress about policy issues such as instituting a more progressive tax code, the tax treatment of capital gains and inheritance, and the expansion of social welfare benefits like food stamps and healthcare in recent years have not ended very well for the nation’s poor. “Empirical analyses estimate the United States is a comparatively immobile society, that is, where on starts in the income distribution influences where one ends up to a greater degree than in several advanced economies” (Cite). Reports suggest the U.S. is no longer, if it ever was a nation where the poorest can feasibly lift themselves up by their bootstraps. If income were equally distributed, each fifth household would account for 20 percent of total income. The poorest of these has long since accounted for far less than its proportionate share, barely budging from about 4 percent in recent decades, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (Cite). Meanwhile, since 1968 the middle class has seen its total income share decrease steadily, while those among the top-fifth of earners – particularly the top 5 percent – have seen their incomes skyrocket. For instance, the top 5 percent held 22.3 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2011, up from 16.3 percent four decades earlier. The advantages offered by an affluent lifestyle clearly influence an individual’s chances for economic mobility, the CRS reports. According to an analysis of empirical data, the study authors estimate there is a positive relationship of about 0.5 between a parent and adult income. Children of parents with above-average salaries are more likely, on average, to also bring in high incomes. Half the economic advantage the children of well-off families enjoy comes from having been born into wealthy families in the first place. On top of that, the chances of adults moving up from their initial income economic position has decreased or remained stagnant in recent decades, which is of particular concern since most Americans still believe economic mobility in the U.S. is completely within their reach. “Americans may be less concerned about inequality in the distribution of income at any given point in time partly because of a belief that everyone has an equal opportunity to move up the income ladder. Different types of family structures experienced during childhood have varying effects on socioeconomic attainment and social mobility. Those within the middle class will, statistically, experience some economic mobility. According to a study by the Pew Economic Mobility Project, 43 percent of children whose parents were born in the bottom one fifth remained at the bottom when they became adults. In contrast, 40 percent of children born to parents at the top one fifth were also at the top as adults. The study compared intergenerational mobility rates between 1984 to 1994 and 1994 to 2004.

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Conclusion

The topics of particular importance in contemporary sociology seem to be the inequality of educational opportunity and mechanisms of social mobility or immobility. Also the effects of the household’s saving behavior and the implication of this behavior for the distribution of wealth and the relationship between the extent of free enterprise and opportunity in the economy and socioeconomic mobility, that is, the movement of families across wealth classes over time. Some studies suggest that as technology advances, lower income workers do not have the skills or educational requirements to keep up with changing labor needs. The demand for highly skilled workers trained in engineering or information technology has elevated, while the need for lower skilled and middle skilled workers has diminished which is one of the casualties of globalization. The philosophical battle over how to achieve economic growth and social mobility has escalated to a point that conservatives have resisted attempts to direct more investments in programs such as early childhood education and college tuition aid. The battle continues as Democrats are pushing for more investments in social safety net programs while Republicans are calling for a self-reliant approach. Education gap creates more inequality and arguably promote equality in the opportunity to move up the income ladder, which an increasingly unequal distribution of income may suggest a lack of and which may itself curb the potential productive capacity of the economy an education gap is one of the main reasons commonly offered to explain the nation’s widening income inequality. Although many still firmly believe, and constantly argue, that Americans have an equal opportunity to move up the economic ladder, the researchers conclude that opportunity is far from “equal.”