The standard-of-living question was initially framed by the long-running debate over the effects of the industrial revolution on the living conditions of ordinary people. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posed the question most dramatically arguing that industrialization reduced both the absolute and relative standard of living for workers. This formulation of the question made both the average income and the distribution of income matter in treatments of the standard-of-living question. In principle, a rise in average per capita income could be accompanied by an increase in inequality so that the living standards of workers and their families did not necessarily improve with growth in per capita income. The debate over the trend in the standard of living, especially that of workers, was fierce and ongoing. By the 1920's, the weight of evidence had

"This paper uses combinations of full brothers, half brothers, and fathers and sons to measure the effect of common family background on a household's income and wealth. While the data are drawn from a nineteenth-century [U.S.] population, the intraclass correlation for income ranges from .13 to .18, which is similar to that found in modern samples. Intraclass correlations for wealth are significantly higher (.18-.35) than are those for income. Intraclass correlations of half brothers compared to those for full brothers suggest that fathers play a dominant role in the transmission of the common family effect. When unobserved background is decomposed into individual and family effects, the individual effect dominates the family effect for income, while the family effect dominates the individual effect for wealth." A comment by Sherwin Rosen is included (pp. 80-2).

This article examines the mobility of Utah households as measured by their wealth holdings reported in the census manuscripts of 1860 and 1870. Substantial mobility is observed though there is a tendency for the households to remain in the richest decile. Control for age, nativity, or dichotomies such as urban-rural or farm and nonfarm does not substantially reduce mobility. The lack of association of characteristics with the observed mobility, combined with high levels of cross-sectional inequality, highlights the importance of measuring mobility as well as wealth or income dispersion in order to make valid normative inferences. S UBSTANTIAL effort has been devoted to analyses of distributional inequality, whether measured by individual incomes, earnings, or wealth holdings. As a consequence, we know a good deal about dispersion at various points in time for measures of economic position and hence about the changes in dispersion across decades and even centuries: income, earnings and wealth distributions evidence considerable dispersion and the dispersion appears to have narrowed somewhat in the twentieth century after earlier increases in inequality. However, the small changes happen slowly so that the stability of measured dispersion over decade or longer intervals is remarkable (Williamson and Lindert, 1980). We know a good deal less about economic mobility-the movement of individual households through these disperse distributions (cf. McCall, 1973, or Schiller, 1976). This paper considers evidence of mobility for a panel of households with a relatively stable distribution through time sampled from an economy with increasing inequality in wealth holdings. We find substantial mobility over a two-decade interval. Mobility of the sort we observe poses some difficulties for normative judgments when distributional dispersion is an element in welfare evaluations of a society or of policies likely to have distributional impacts. We return to this issue briefly in a concluding section. I. The Distribution of Wealth in Utah,