Timothy Nash, Anthony Storer and Bob Thomas May 3, 2026, 7:30 p.m. ET View Comments For years, public sentiment has viewed the American economy as a machine that freezes people in place. It is a compelling story: clean, bleak and easy to repeat. But it is also too crude. If income mobility means what serious scholars say it means, the more defensible conclusion is that important forms of mobility in the United States have improved since the 1970s, even if unevenly.