Amid global turmoil, the standard patterns of social mobility are shifting. Career choices are being recalibrated as financial and other rewards rise and fall
Designers, artists and musicians, largely from richer families, have seen their incomes fall on average 40 per cent below that of their parents in the US. Photograph: iStock
This social surge could be felt in every corner of the country. In a sense, you could call this “bourgeois-isation” of much of the population the “Irish Dream”. The Americans had their American Dream in the 1950s and 1960s, where children were likely to end up better off than their parents. These are the Boomers, much maligned by the younger and poorer Millennials and Generation X, largely because incomes are stagnating across America.
Chief executives are less likely to come from wealthy families, suggesting meritocracy is alive within corporate America Again, we are helped by American data because the US has been keeping better sociological data than most countries for longer. After a period of rapid social upward mobility, America tells us what is likely to happen here. The study of US children born around 1979, the year of our pope’s children, compared how they fared vis-a-vis their parents in later life. The study, published inWhat it shows is that, unexpectedly, doctors, surgeons and dentists fared far better than their parents.
Of the dozens of occupations assessed, the group that fared worst, who saw their income fall the furthest from their wealthy Boomer parents, are designers, artists and musicians; largely coming from richer families. They have seen their incomes fall on average 40 per cent below that of their parents. Kids who go into the arts tend to be middle-class.
Ireland could be on the cusp of a similar trajectory as the US. Growth slows, social mobility begins to stall and opportunities are harder to find. It’s a world where career choices matter more than at any time over the past 30 years and those who fall behind might lurch politically in search of a saviour who might come from the unlikeliest of places.
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