An executive summary of an article originally published by Brookings.edu Over the past several years, social policy research and initiatives in the United States have been framed less around the need to alleviate poverty and disadvantage, and more around an imperative to promote upward mobility. This shift owes, among other factors, to the groundbreaking research of Raj Chetty and colleagues, which spotlights the relatively low levels of upward mobility experienced by many groups in America, especially African-Americans and those growing up in poor neighborhoods. As economist David Autor shows, decent-paying jobs for workers without college degrees have been disappearing for decades, and most of those workers end up in low-paid occupations. In this sense, we need to pair a burgeoning agenda to promote intergenerational economic mobility with one focused on improving intragenerational mobility. They examine more than 25 years of data to identify places in the labor market that provide non-college workers with a better shot at reaching the middle class. Their findings point to three things that influence upward mobility opportunities for these workers. In America’s large metropolitan areas today, only 20 percent of workers without college degrees possess what Shearer and Shah label “Good jobs”-those in which workers earn better-than-average wages for their local community, and have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. Another 13 percent work in what the authors call “Promising jobs,” which do not provide good pay and benefits, but do have a track record of helping their occupants reach a good job within 10 years. ...
