Achievement and social mobility: Relationships among IQ score, education, and occupation in two generations

Cyril Burt (1961) has set forth the following hypothesis with regard to social mobility (or “social promotion”): . . . in a highly organized society, the discrepancies between the general intelligence of the children and the occupational class into which they are born is bound to produce a large and fairly constant amount of “basic mobility,” quite apart from any deliberate changes in the political or educational structure of the society.