The path to convergence: Intergenerational occupational mobility in Britain and the US in three eras

Late nineteenth-century intergenerational occupational mobility was higher in the US than in Britain. Differences between them in this type of mobility are absent today. Using data on 10,000 US and British father and son pairs followed over two intervals (the 1860s and 1870s, and the 1880s and 1890s), we examine how this convergence occurred. The US remained more mobile then Britain through 1900 but the difference fell over the last two decades of the nineteenth century (as British mobility rose) and was erased by the 1950s (as mobility fell by more in the US than in Britain).