to sons.2

There is, however, a significant difference revealed in the above table between the United States and the other countries: while the majority of the sons of American fanners have shifted to non-agricultural occupations, in France and Germany seven farmers’ sons out of ten stay on the land. That is, the American urban economy has offered many more opportunities than the European, drawing large numbers of people from rural areas into cities, with the result that the number of people engaged in farming in the United States has declined at a far greater rate than in France or Germany. But this is not so much a reflection of the difference in the rate of social mobility between America and Europe, of any severer limitations imposed by class originsthis fact emerge clearly from two studies, one of Stockholm, and the other of a San Francisco area.

In the first study (“Social Mobility in Sweden,” a paper presented to the International Sociological Association at Liège in August 1953), two Swedish social scientists, Gunnar Boalt and Carl-Gunnar Jannsson, determined the name and father’s occupation of every boy in the fourth grade of the Stockholm public schools in 1936. By checking these same names against the Stockholm electoral register for 1949, they were able to discover the occupations of 94 per cent of the 1936 schoolboy group. To their surprise, 69 per cent were employed in non-manual occupations; over half of the sons of manual workers had entered nonmanual work, though the group was only about twenty-four years old in