Answer:While accepting that an inverse relation of some kind exists between inequality and mobility,
we begin by reviewing criticisms of recent attempts by economists to express this relation in
terms of income inequality and mobility – the ‘Great Gatsby Curve’. This appears to be neither
empirically secure nor theoretically well-grounded. Using a newly constructed European
dataset, we then aim to show that if mobility is treated in terms of social class, rather than
income, an inverse relation with social inequality can be suggested that is more complex but
that has a stronger empirical and a more coherent theoretical basis. Our results indicate that
European countries are best seen not as displaying entirely continuous variation in their
relative rates of class mobility, but rather as falling into a number of comparatively high and
low fluidity groups. We offer an interpretation of these results that starts out from the
proposition that within societies with a capitalist market economy, a nuclear family system and
a liberal democratic polity, some limit exists to the extent to which relative mobility rates can
be brought towards equality. Variation in such rates can then be understood in terms of how
close nations are to this limit, and whether they are moving towards or receding from it, but
with different forms of inequality impacting on their fluidity trajectories in differing ways.
