Social Classes and Mobility
How class emerged, hardened, and softened across ten thousand years.
Pre-Speech ~2M – 100k BCE
There were essentially no social classes. People would sabotage anyone getting too much power and so hierarchically society stayed flat. Not really much the strongest rule. Eventually, like chimpanzees, there was coalitions and alliances that began to emerge that created two ways to social power 1. being darwinism and 2. being prestige (social skills essentially).
Speech Emerges ~100k – 50k BCE
As speech emerged prestige became an even more important part of social power and dynamics but mobile hunter and gatherer communities stayed relatively flat hierarchically.
Symbolism Emerges ~50k – 12k BCE
Counting and art in the form of cave paintings and tally marks emerge, but societies are still egalitarian. Ganging up on anyone who's gaining too much power. Social classes are established by prestige and attempts at dominance are punished.
Writing Emerges ~3200 BCE
Once the complexity of the storable surplus, and the logistics required to feed a great nation put pressure on the civilization we get what are called primary states. The first states where people could specialize in ways that did not produce sustenance. Writing emerges as a way of measuring, tracking, and calculating the logistics and storage of the surplus resources. (Mostly food)
Full Class Systems Emerge ~3000 BCE onward
With the advent of writing, and civilization getting ever more complex, some people specialized into only scribing, being priests, officials, and leadership of these greater organizations.
There were typically 5 social classes
- Some kind of leader dude
- The leaders officials
- Merchants, and skilled people like craftsmen, warriors, etc
- Basic worker people
- Slaves
This is where the challenge of social mobility begins. How can someone who is born with nothing end up doing well in middle age
There are 3 paths
- Relationships
- Skills
- Assets
Basically, if you weren't born to a strong family you make a relationship that can get you into training for 1 or 2, or you learn a skill.
As a note, most of the rest of this will talk about Old to Modern Europe and the Developments from there since they are first chronologically when it comes to schools in this form, and later industrialization. I will still include things I find interesting in the way other societies did education and social mobility, because it's always either first or best.
These different societies approached social mobility differently.
Rome ~300 BCE – 400 CE
Rome also improved mobility through manumission and military service
Then comes the medieval ages ~500 – 1400 CE
Rome collapses and with it literacy and mobility in that area, but other countries are opening the gates up for anyone of merit.
China, Middle East, West Africa.
In Modern day Europe, the status quo is turned backwards to feudalism. Social classes are decided by land, because land meant income. Everyone else worked for those with land. Land was passed through families.
The paths of social mobility were the church due to celibacy required, and interestingly that also meant they would be 'educated' due to the churches knowledge of roman education.
Eventually around the 1000s Towns arose again and The phrase "town air makes free," Stadtluft macht frei. Became common. If a serf could make it in a town for a year, by law they were free. The urban middle class formed, The Bougeojise. Whereas in the countryside things remained the same, feudalism.
An Aside - During this time the Islamic states are balling tf out. Social mobility is way feasible because of religious sponsored schooling, and they are crushing. West Africa similarly. China also has invented a state run exam to let anyone from any background get the positions of officials in government. (This is gated by time and money to study)
The Renaissance ~1400 – 1600 CE
Most people are still broke, but big ocean boats drop and a new merchant class grows.
The Enlightenment ~1680 – 1800
In reality, mobility remains with birth, although philosophically people are refuting Aristotles argument that nature decides.
As Locke and others eventually take hold through the
French Revolution and American Revolution and human rights are put into law. 'Everyone is equal at birth'. First changes in law that reflect mobility possibilities. In practice it takes time to change. And later Civil rights revolutions
Here we see the takedown in much of the western world of the 5 class system.
No longer is the class system Leader dude, officials, craftsmen and merchants, peasants, slaves
In Haiti, the slaves overthrow their masters and create the first black-led republic
Now it's capitalists, then middle class (managers, craftsmen depending on credentials and skills), then the basic workers ( selling their time for money ) This accelerates all the way into
the Industrial revolution ~1760 – 1900 CE
So anyway, back to 1944 the GI bill more than doubled college attendance. A kid born around this time in America had the greatest chance ever of out earning his father before or since.
From 1940 - 1980 civil rights were finally awarded to all people in the US. The California college system was low cost and high quality, Federal Aid helped lower class families with money for school.
The Class system was 4 parts. Small Upper Class, Upper middle class of managers and professionals, huge middle class with even factory workers making enough to be in the middle class, and a small poor minority.
Elsewhere Western Europe built out social safety nets and programs, Asia had state sponsored education and South Korea went from one of the poorest countries to one of the richest in about 50 years. (50' - 2000).
1980-2020's ~1980 – now
However, for social mobility, 1980 in the U.S is when things began to change from this boom.
What happened?
Manufacturing was automated, College costs rose, Degree Inflation lowered the value of any degree (and the Information Age even more so), K-12 funding was tied to property taxes making schools unequal (Rich neighborhoods spend 2-3x per student), and mating practices further hardened this.
According to Raj Chetty's Harvard Study
A child born in the bottom 20% of U.S. income has about a 7.5% chance of reaching the top 20%. In Denmark, 12%. In Canada, 13.5%.
Of children born in 1940, 90% earned more than their parents. Of those born in 1980, only 50%.
Today
A child born poor in Canada or Denmark has a better statistical chance at the 'American Dream' and out earning their parents. In fact, a child born poor today in the US has the same likely hood of staying poor as in 1900.
Where you grow up matters enormously. Neighborhoods within the same city can differ in mobility outcomes by factors of 3 or 4.
The class system has flattened to Some economists describe the U.S. now as a two-track society.
Upper-middle class and above, top 20-30%, college-educated, professional, often dual-income, concentrated in expensive metros, kids go to college, life expectancy climbing.
Working and lower class, bottom 50-70%, increasingly non-college, increasingly precarious, declining marriage and employment rates, life expectancy falling in some regions, kids less likely to surpass parents.
In Europe mobility is generally higher but also stalling, same with China tho their boom happened later.
So why is social mobility falling in the U.S.?
Marriages are working less, Networks are more closed, Places that have high-paying jobs are less accessible, and the cost of a degree to get a high paying job is higher than ever.
Statistically about two-thirds of someone's economic outcome is determined by factors outside their control. The remaining third, which is real, runs through the three paths you named at the start of your essay. Skills (the right credential or trade). Relationships (networks, marriage). Assets (savings, eventually ownership).
Social classes are sorted by financial success mostly.
The trends for Millinials and Gen Z are trending lower for social mobility and it looks like
Here is the list of correlated points, and controllable points:
Correlated to social mobility:
- Family Background (Income, Parental relationship, Investment in you)
- Zipcode you're born in (Schools, Safety, etc)
- Social Capital
- Health
Patterns
These are the forces that pushed mobility up or down across the whole timeline. They shape the story from underneath instead of showing up as dated events.
1. Absolute vs relative mobility
Two different questions both get called mobility. Absolute asks whether you earn more than your parents did, and that mostly rides on whether the whole economy grew. Relative asks whether you changed rank, whether a poor kid became a rich adult. Rank works like a fixed set of seats, so when one person climbs, someone else drops. The 1940-to-1980 figure (90% down to 50% out-earning their parents) is the absolute kind, and it fell as growth slowed. The 7.5% bottom-to-top figure is the relative kind, and it measures how stuck rank has become.
2. Structural change is the main engine
The largest jumps in upward mobility came when the economy changed shape and new rungs opened that no family already owned. Farm to factory, then factory to office. When a third of a country stops farming within two generations, large numbers of kids end up in higher-status work than their parents with little effort. The postwar boom ran mostly on this. Once the shift runs out, mobility leans on the relative kind, which is far harder to move.
3. The key asset changes each era
Every era has one scarce thing that decides your class, and getting access to it is what moving up means. Territory in the first settled groups. Land under feudalism. Machines and the factory under industry. Schooling and credentials today. The asset keeps changing. The split underneath stays the same: you either own the scarce thing or work for someone who does.
4. Serfs to wage workers
The step between feudal land-classes and the capitalist-and-worker system was people losing access to land. England's enclosures are the standard case. Common fields got fenced into private ownership, and families who had farmed them were left with only their labor to sell. That labor filled the factories and formed the working class named later.
5. The U.S. boom was uneven by race
The 1940-to-1980 rise and the exclusion of Black Americans happened together. The GI Bill, cheap college, and new suburban mortgages were often delivered through segregated schools and redlined neighborhoods, so Black veterans received far less of the lift. The strongest mobility in U.S. history was real and racially tilted at the same time. Chetty's later race-specific data shows the gap plainly.
6. Assortative mating
People increasingly marry someone with similar schooling and income. Two high earners pair off, two low earners pair off, and the distance between households grows faster than the distance between individuals. This is a recent force, tied to more women earning and to sorting by education level.
7. Moving to opportunity
Relocating to where the work is has always been one of the strongest ways up. "Town air makes free" was an early version. The Great Migration was another. The problem now is that the high-opportunity cities cost so much that the people who would gain the most can't afford to live in them.
To add
Black Death (mid-1300s)
Around a third of Europe died, which made labor scarce. Surviving peasants could demand higher pay and walk away from bad lords, and in Western Europe this helped break serfdom. In Eastern Europe the lords tightened their grip and serfdom got worse. The same shock produced opposite results depending on who held power locally. This one fits inside your medieval section as a dated event.
Race-based slavery in the Americas (1500s to 1865)
For roughly three centuries the Americas ran on slavery fixed to race. It was a class you were born into and could not leave, held in place by law. Freedom came in 1865, then closed again fast. A short opening under Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow laws that pushed Black Americans back down for about ninety years, until the 1960s. This is the clearest case in the whole timeline of a group's mobility being turned on and then off, and it sits under the race gap in the modern numbers.
Immigration
Moving to a new country has been one of the strongest ways up, above all in the United States. Poor immigrants often stayed poor themselves, but their children and grandchildren tended to climb. Work that tracks families across a hundred years finds this held for the old European waves and holds again for recent ones. It is a core part of the American Dream story and is missing from the piece.
Women and mobility
The history here runs father to son. For most of the past a woman's main route up was who she married, not her own pay. That shifted in the twentieth century as women moved into paid work and gained the right to own property. The change reshaped households and connects to the assortative-mating pattern above.
Unions
Organized labor is the missing cause behind the mid-century middle class. When workers bargained as a group, a factory job could pay a wage that reached the middle class. Membership peaked around the 1950s and dropped after 1980, and the wage gains faded with it. The piece shows the result, factory workers earning enough to live middle class, without the thing that produced it.
Homeownership
The main way ordinary families built wealth in the twentieth century was buying a home with cheap, government-backed loans. That is the "assets" path from your three paths, working at scale. The same setup that opened home wealth for white families through the GI Bill shut it off for Black families through redlining, which is part of why the racial wealth gap stays wide.
Men and women, by the numbers
Absolute mobility split hard by sex over the last century. Sons out-earning their fathers fell from about 95% for the 1940 birth cohort to 41% for 1984, a steep drop in men's prospects. Daughters out-earning their fathers went from 43% in 1940 to 26% in 1984, though that undersells them, because a daughter's gain over her mother was large as women moved into paid work. Around 80% of daughters raised in the bottom fifth now out-earn what their fathers made.
Rank mobility moved the other way for women. As female participation rose, a daughter's adult rank started tracking her parents' rank more closely. In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden the parent-child earnings correlation climbed across cohorts born 1951 to 1979, strongest from mother to daughter, and US data points the same direction. Women gained income and independence while movement between ranks tightened.
Social Classes Emerge ~12k – 4000 BCE
Eventually the mobile hunters and gatherers found places that provided a storable surplus of food and water. They became sedentary and built more permanent homes and structures. They still hunted and gathered, but from a home base. In these places we see a simple 3 class social system emerge.
Social mobility was basically non existent since territory was passed through family. (or was it chiefs so you could be skilled and get it?)