# Michael Hout

Michael Hout (born May 14, 1950) is a professor of sociology at New York University. He previously served as a professor at the University of Arizona and University of California-Berkeley.
His contributions to sociology include using demographic methods to study social change in inequality, religion, and politics. Hout's current work uses the General Social Survey to study the changing occupational hierarchies, social mobility, and long-term trends associated with political polarization. He has digitized occupational information in the GSS since 1972. Other recent projects used the GSS panel to study Americans' changing perceptions of class, religion, and happiness. In 2006, Hout and Claude Fischer published Century of Difference, a book on twentieth-century social and cultural trends in the United States. Other books include Truth about Conservative Christians with Andrew Greeley, Following in Father's Footsteps: Social Mobility in Ireland, and Inequality by Design.
One of Hout's most notable works, “Maximally Maintained Inequality: Expansion, Reform, and Opportunity in Irish Education, 1921-75” examines the persistence of social class differences in educational attainment despite the expansion of secondary education in Ireland. The study concluded that educational expansion alone does not necessarily reduce social inequality. Instead, structural factors such as economic incentives, cultural expectations, and institutional constraints play a significant role in maintaining class disparities in education.
In his 2012 article, “Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States” Hout explores the debate over whether education primarily reflects pre-existing advantages or has an independent effect on socioeconomic outcomes. The study found that higher education has a positive causal impact, particularly for individuals from backgrounds less likely to pursue higher education. It suggests that college attendance can contribute to greater social mobility.

## Early Life and Career

Michael Hout was born on May 14, 1950, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his family was rooted in the local community. His father worked for 35 years as a bus driver for Greyhound, while his mother initially sold children’s shoes at a neighborhood shop before transitioning to an office role at an insurance company downtown. Hout grew up with three siblings, all of whom still reside in Pittsburgh. Hout initially planned to pursue a career in high school education, but his academic interests shifted during his undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh under the guidance of two professors: historian David Montgomery and sociologist Brian Vargus. In 1972, Hout graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and history. Hout was encouraged by Vargus to continue his academic journey in sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. At Indiana University Bloomington, Hout was mentored by scholars such as Phillips Cutright, David Knoke, Maurice Garnier, and George Bohrnstedt. These mentors helped him develop a passion for research and academic publishing. Hout received a master’s degree in sociology in 1973 and a doctorate in sociology in 1976 from Indiana University. In 1976, Hout joined the University of Arizona as an assistant professor in its sociology PhD program, where he gained mentorship from senior faculty members, including Dudley and Beverly Duncan and Stanley Lieberson. Further guidance from scholars like Andrew Greeley and Art Stinchcombe shaped his early academic career that influenced his professional path.

## Awards and Societies

Michael Hout was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1997, the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, the American Philosophical Society in 2006, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2018, and the American Association of the Advancement of Science in 2021.
He received the Robert M. Hauser Award from the American Sociological Association's Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section in 2018. In 2016, the University College Dublin conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctors of Letters. He was awarded the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for book, Century of Difference from the American Sociological Association's section on Population in 2007, and the Clifford C. Clogg Memorial Award for his book, Inequality by Design given by the Population Association of America in 1996.
Hout is on the board of the Societal Expert Action Network (SEAN), sponsored by the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (DBASSE) at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). SEAN is focused on NASEM’s Climate Change Crossroads and the opioid crisis. The committee issued a number of Rapid Expert Consultations advising the nation on how social science evidence could contribute to social policies and public health.

## Research

Hout has explored how social class, race, and education influence political attitudes and voting behavior. His findings often illustrate the ways in which individuals’ social positions shape their political preferences and perceptions of government. For instance, his work has documented shifts in voting patterns and political engagement, particularly within specific demographics. He has continued this work in examining changes in public opinion over time, particularly around critical issues like race, immigration, and economic inequality. He has been instrumental in analyzing the growing polarization in American political attitudes, contributing to the understanding of how group identities and socio-economic factors fuel divisive political climates.
Hout has been studying political attitudes across different social classes since the mid-1970s. Hout has studied the differences between left and right leaning American voters across the intersectionality of race and religion. He studied political leanings on immigration with the turmoil over the 2016 election. Hout has also studied attitudes towards abortion, and how political divides have become more prominent than any other identifying factor. Hout has also observed with the GSS that the extent of opinions has also increased in recent years. Additionally, Hout studies voting patterns amongst different societal groups, attempting to explain voting blocks. Most recently, Hout has worked on how marital status could affect how one decides to vote in elections. He has also studied ethic attachments and class voting patterns.
Hout has studied inequality and intergenerational mobility, including dimensions of inequality, including economic status, education, race, and gender. He investigates these factors to unequal life chances and the accessibility of resources, shaping individuals' experiences and opportunities. Hout's research involves tracking changes in inequality over time. His studies use longitudinal data to assess how shifting economic policies, educational attainment, and demographic trends affect levels of inequality. Inequality by Design argued that the hyper-individualism of inequality studies like The Bell Curve captured some significant aspects of the rank of individuals but could never account for the rapidly growing inequality of jobs, wages, and family outcomes, and life chances. It expanded on work Hout completed on the interaction between socioeconomic background and higher education in social mobility in the United States and Europe.
Hout's work on religion uses survey data, most notably from the General Social Survey (GSS), to illuminate patterns of affiliation, attendance, and belief. In “The Center Doesn’t Hold: Church Attendance in the United States, 1940–1984” (1987), Hout and Andrew Greeley wrote that “official attendance counts fail to capture the ebb and flow of religious participation,” highlighting the tendency of individuals to overreport churchgoing and the danger of relying exclusively on institutional figures. These findings anticipated their later argument in The Secularization Myth (1989) that perceived religious decline may be overstated when demographic evidence — especially birth rates, intergenerational retention, and survey-based nuances — is overlooked. At the same time, Hout and Greeley's “Musical Chairs: Patterns of Denominational Change in the United States” (1988) underscored the complexity of affiliation switching: Catholics, Protestants, and others frequently shifted denominational ties without necessarily abandoning religion entirely.
Hout has studied fertility's impact on denominational growth. He, Greeley, and Melissa J. Wilde wrote in “The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change” (2001) that "higher birth rates within evangelical and sectarian groups, coupled with demographic momentum, have a profound influence on American religious markets". His analyses of Catholic persistence, such as “St. Peter’s Leaky Boat: Falling Intergenerational Persistence Among US-Born Catholics Since 1974” (2016), show younger cohorts drifting from active ties due to political dissatisfaction and cultural shifts; but he notes that Catholic identity remains resilient overall, with many “returnees” later in life, echoing his observation in “Counting the Returnees” (1990) that “religious affiliation often reemerges in the wake of marriage, childbirth, or other family milestones.”
Hout has explored the rising number of Americans with “no religious preference,” which he and Claude S. Fischer attribute partly to political backlash in “Explaining the Rise of Americans with No Religious Preference” (2002). In “Religious Ambivalence, Liminality, and the Increase of No Religious Preference in the United States, 2006–2014” (2017), Hout describes a “liminal state” in which many retain private spiritual beliefs while rejecting organized religion, often due to partisan conflicts over moral issues. He also connects religious participation to subjective well-being, cautioning in “Religion and Happiness” (2012) that “the social networks and communal support found in religious groups may foster happiness,” although economic inequalities and generational turnover strongly modulate affiliation patterns. Throughout, Hout has advocated meticulous demographic methods—outlined in “Demographic Methods for the Study of Religion” (2003)—to capture how family formation, mortality, and cohort replacement shape the American religious landscape in ways that defy a simplistic “secularization” narrative.

## Methodological contributions

Early in his career, Hout applied and refined log-linear models to examine intergenerational mobility and social stratification in “Association and Heterogeneity: Structural Models of Similarities and Differences” (1987). He collaborated with Leo A. Goodman to extend these innovations in “Statistical Methods and Graphical Displays for Comparing How Two-Way Associations Vary Among Countries, Among Groups, or Over Time” (1998), introducing uniform association models that disentangle the impact of social background, education, and labor market conditions from purely individual attributes. Hout's later work integrated multilevel and longitudinal approaches to capture cohort effects and time-based shifts in phenomena such as religious affiliation and occupational structure. As he has emphasized in “Demographic Methods for the Study of Religion” (2003), macro-level transformations—whether in class identification or faith communities—cannot be fully understood without considering how births, deaths, and generational replacement intersect with cultural variables.
Hout has been involved with the General Social Survey (GSS). He was chair of the GSS Board of Overseers (1997–2001) and co-principal investigator (2009–2016); during this time, the board worked on the digitization of occupational data, standardizing decades of survey responses to the 2010 census classification—a move that, in the words of a later overview, “allowed researchers to systematically analyze long-term occupational trends under a consistent coding scheme, thereby enabling new insights into social mobility, class identification, and demographic change.” He has worked on large-scale projects like the American Opportunity Study.

## Main works
### Mobility Tables

Mobility Tables (1983) is a methodological work published by Sage Publications as part of their Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences series. The book provides a comprehensive review of methods for analyzing cross-classified data on occupational origins and destinations, with particular focus on social mobility.
The work systematically presents a progression of statistical models for analyzing mobility tables, beginning with basic tests for perfect mobility and advancing to more complex models of partial mobility. Hout demonstrates these methods using data from David L. Featherman and Robert M. Hauser's 1973 study of occupational mobility in the American labor force. The book examines various aspects of mobility analysis, including socioeconomic achievement and the application of mobility table methods to other research areas.
The book begins with fundamental mobility tests and progresses to more sophisticated analytical frameworks, addressing both ordered and unordered categorical data.

### Inequality by Design

Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996) is a book published by Princeton University Press, co-authored by Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martín Sánchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Voss. The work serves as a response to The Bell Curve (1994) by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth and IQ measures from the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, the authors analyzed the relationship between intelligence measures and social inequality. Their analysis found that measured IQ accounts for approximately 10 percent of the variation in earnings, concluding that American income inequality would show little change if everyone had the same test score.
The book challenges several core arguments about intelligence and social inequality. The authors argue that intelligence is not a singular construct and is more influenced by schooling content and family resources than genetics. In examining social policy implications, they point to factors such as the relationship between poverty risk and variables like gender and marital status, noting that groups with different poverty rates often show similar IQ scores.
Chapter 8 specifically addresses racial differences in test performance through cross-cultural comparisons. The authors examine how various groups, such as the Irish in Great Britain or Koreans in Japan, perform on standardized tests when facing similar social conditions. They argue that group differences in test scores reflect social inequalities rather than inherent capabilities, summarized in their conclusion that "Groups score unequally on tests because they are unequal in society".
In a review in Political Science Quarterly, Lawrence Bobo noted that while the book was highly readable, it was primarily directed at an academic audience. The review also noted that some alternative perspectives, such as the role of educational tracking, received limited attention in the work.

### The Truth About Conservative Christians

The Truth About Conservative Christians (2006), published by University of Chicago Press, is a book co-authored by Michael Hout and Andrew M. Greeley. The work examines the beliefs, practices, and political views of conservative Christians in American society.
Using data from the General Social Survey from 1972 to 2004, the authors analyze various aspects of conservative Christian life, including religious beliefs, voting patterns, political ideology, attitudes about freedom and inequality, and demographic characteristics. The research challenges common media portrayals of conservative Christians as a monolithic group, finding more diverse and nuanced views among them.
The book argues that while conservative Christians are more likely than other Protestants to hold conservative positions on issues like abortion and to vote Republican, these correlations are not as strong as often portrayed. The authors found that the additional Republican vote among Conservative Protestants, compared to Mainline American Protestants, was approximately seven percentage points.
In analyzing race and religion, the work examines how racial identity intersects with and reshapes the relationship between Conservative Protestantism and conservative politics. The authors developed a classification scheme that treated African-American religious bodies separately from other Protestant denominations due to their distinct historical traditions.

### Century of Difference

Century of Difference (2006), published by the Russell Sage Foundation, is a book co-authored by Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer. The work examines how social divisions in American society transformed throughout the twentieth century.
The authors argue that while traditional divisions such as race, gender, and region declined in significance between 1900 and 2000, disparities in education and income became more pronounced. They note that "region, race, and gender divided Americans much less in 2000 than they did in 1900," while educational attainment increasingly determined social outcomes.
The book documents major transformations in American work life, from predominantly agricultural and manual labor to office-based and service-oriented jobs. By 2000, college-educated workers were more likely to work longer hours than those without degrees, reversing earlier trends.
A significant focus of the work is the expanding role of education in American society. The authors analyze how educational attainment became increasingly crucial for economic mobility, particularly after the 1980s when rising college costs contributed to educational inequality. They argue that "access to a better life—signified not only by more money but also by better work, a better neighborhood, and a more stable family life—shrank even as college and postgraduate credentials became all the more critical."
The research also examines changes in wealth distribution and consumption patterns. While wealth disparities widened over the century, access to consumer goods became more uniform across social classes. In terms of religious and cultural shifts, the authors found that while religious practice became more individualized, the overall religiosity of the population remained relatively stable.