"Upward mobility" and economic growth

I've realized in the last few years that a lot of my professional success is due to working at a growing company for so long.  People needed to move into new roles, learn new things, take on more responsibility, and some of that naturally went to internal people who were in the ballpark in skill and experience.  Sure, some of that happens everywhere but the rates would be very different.  So while in one sense I can look back and think "work hard and get rewarded" it just wouldn't have happened in a contracting company like much of the pharmaceutical world.

This also applies nationwide--people who came of age in the '50s would have experienced, in aggregate, a lot of salary increases over the course of their career and looking at themselves and their cohort have learned that hard work is rewarded and if you're patient you should get ahead.  The lower growth rates of the last few decades will leave people with a different view of how things work, even if all else were equal.

Long intro but I kind of assumed that this phenomenon--lower growth--is a big part of people not doing better than their parents.  Not moving up in relative terms (ie, staying in the same quintile) is primarily a policy issue but as it turns out so is not earning more than your parents.


From Vox.

In retrospect I should have been able to figure this out without seeing a graph, given what I believe about the impact of policy on equality over the last 60 years.