About Us

Who We Are

The agenda of AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility (COSM) focuses on expanding opportunity in America by reducing entrenched poverty, increasing upward mobility, and rebuilding social capital. COSM’s perspective is attentive to trade-offs, unintended consequences, the strengths of markets, and the importance of work and family. It champions personal responsibility and agency while acknowledging external barriers to achievement.

Poverty is On the Decline

Over the past several decades, a growing economy fueled by free enterprise has lifted living standards in the United States. Economic growth, together with a safety net that has expanded and become better at encouraging independence, has reduced poverty by more than 90% over the past 60 years. † Richard V. Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, James Elwell, and Jeff Larrimore, “Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure,” Journal of Political Economy 132(1): 1-47, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/725705.

Social Life Has Withered

Simultaneously, social poverty has dramatically worsened. Social capital – the strength of our relationships and broader associational life – has deteriorated over the past 50 years. Marriage has declined and divorce has grown more common. Fewer adults are having children and those who do are increasingly single parents. Men have become more disconnected from work, while crime and incarceration have increased. Church membership, voting, and trust in institutions have all declined. † Scott Winship, “Economic Mobility in America: A State-of-the-Art Primer, Part 3: Trends in the United States,” Archbridge Institute, November 2021, https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Economic-Mobility-in-America_Part-3_Scott-Winship-1.pdf.

Upward Mobility Lags

Even as incomes have risen, children who grow up at the bottom of the economic ladder are no less likely than in the past to remain at the bottom as adults. Men in their early thirties today who started out in the bottom fourth of the income distribution as adolescents are no more likely to have moved up than were men a generation earlier. Racial disparities in intergenerational mobility also persist. For 20% of black adults, they themselves, their mothers, and their grandmothers were all in the bottom fifth of the income distribution; the same is true for only 1% of white adults. † Scott Winship, Christopher Pulliam, Ariel Gelrud Shiro, Richard Reeves, and Santiago Deambrosi, “Long Shadows: The Black-White Gap in Multigenerational Poverty,” American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution, June, 2021, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/long-shadows-the-black-white-gap-in-multigenerational-poverty/.

More on COSM

AEI launches ‘American Dream Initiative’

"The initiative's new Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility will promote "evidence-based domestic policy ideas" that have the potential to garner broad support across the political spectrum on issues such as child poverty, homelessness and intergenerational mobility out of poverty."

The Dual Promise of the American Dream

"The new Center for Opportunity and Social Mobility [will be] producing work on intergenerational mobility, poverty, and social capital. It will also be a home for new research and policy projects focused on opportunity."