Class Ceilings and Inequality

class ceilings and inequality flow diagram illustration
class ceiling book cover

This stream of research has two parts: one focused on the UK, and one on the US.

Pretty much everything I’ve written about class inequality and class ceilings in the UK has been with the excellent Sam Friedman. We wrote The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to Be Privileged (2019), published with Policy Press in the UK.  (The online appendices are now hosted here.)

If you want to know more before you buy the book you can read an interview with me in The Atlantic or read an excerpt in the The Guardian. If you want more details on the quantitative parts of the book, read the American Sociological Review article. We also published a bunch of other articles coming out of this work, including a number with Dave O’Brien and others on class inequality in the cultural industries.

I’ve also been working on analyses of the US. I’ve got a work in progress (with Sam Friedman again) showing that there are class-origin pay gaps in top occupations in the US that appear larger even than the significant ones we found in the UK.

And I’m very proud of “Class Mobility and Reproduction for Black and White Adults in the United States: A Visualization”  in Socius (2020), with my awesome friends Carolyn Chernoff and Dawn Dow.