New and (Very) Old Mobility Ratios: Is There Life after Benini?

Abstract

In 1978 Hauser proposed a new mobility ratio, which, he claimed, overcomes alleged deficiencies in the old mobility ratio—the Glass/Rogoff index. I want to argue three points: first, that the nature of Hauser's objection to the old mobility ratio is only partially valid; that his point of departure in developing the new mobility ratio is flawed; and that a sensible solution to attempts to find appropriate measures of closure (or openness) between social groups was provided at the turn of the century by the Italian social scientist, Rudolfo Benini. I argue that Benini's approach, together with well-known techniques of iterative proportional adjustment, is a useful preliminary step in the analysis of mobility tables prior to formulating and testing alternative log-linear models.