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February 24 - February 25, 2019
while there was a significant degree of upward mobility in Britain during the post-war period, this was mainly due to the expansion of middle-class and professional occupations.
The apparent golden era of social mobility in the mid-twentieth century was to some extent deceptive. The expansion of white-collar professions created more room at the top – and thus more structural social mobility.
The authors of the report attributed this fall to ‘the increasing relationship between family income and educational attainment’.
They added that there was greater intergenerational mobility between income groups in more egalitarian societies like Canada and the Nordic countries.
In countries with high levels of inequality, such as Britain and the United States, intergenerational mobility was ‘at the lower end of international comparisons’.
Britain remains a country in which it is exceedingly difficult to go from stacking shelves in a supermarket to the boardroom of a top company.
By contrast, the technical professions – scientists, accountants, engineers, IT workers and academics – appear to be more open to those who have started life nearer the bottom of the ladder.
Inequality in Britain has unarguably increased over the past thirty-five years. Those who believe that social mobility has also decreased are inclined to view the relationship as causal – growing inequality has hampered social mobility.
the study found that, when the rich got richer relative to the poor, social mobility fell.30
They added that the recent decline in social mobility was ‘only partially explained by education’.
Meanwhile, the average income of the top 0.01 per cent increased almost nine-fold, from $4 million to $35 million.34
An expansion in the number of low-paid jobs in recent times (as well as a subsequent decline in the number of professional and managerial positions) appears to have increased the risk of downward mobility in Britain, too.
social mobility is as much a reality as it was in the past – however, today it is transporting more people down the ladder rather than up.
As we have seen, what looks in retrospect like a highly socially mobile society in the post-war period was in reality an economy in transition. More children from working-class families were swept up into the professions because the professions were hungrily swallowing up more and more people.
As this trend slowed, social mobility slowed with it. This settling down of the economic climate is responsible for at least some of our perceptions about the betrayal of a golden age of social mobility.
the elite has become more exclusive and u...
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In the UK, a person’s earnings are more likely to reflect their father’s than in any other country.
Whether this is a feature of the last thirty years or the last 300, it is no less shameful.
‘Sads’, or Sons and Daughters
the children of privilege who, as if by magic, had snapped up the same cushy jobs as their older relatives.
Either way, public life in Britain is increasingly dominated by the sons and daughters of money.
Just 7 per cent of Britons are privately educated, yet according to a government report published in 2014, 33 per cent of MPs, 71 per cent of senior judges and 44 per cent of people on the Sunday Times Rich List attended fee-paying schools. Almost half (43 per cent) of newspaper columnists and a quarter (26 per cent) of BBC executives were products of the private school system, too.
While Oxford and Cambridge graduates comprise just 1 per cent of Britain’s population, according to the aforementioned report they make up 75 per cent of senior judges, 59 per cent of Cabinet ministers, 47 per cent of newspaper columnists and 12 per cent of the Sunday Times Rich List.
Even the music industry, which once gave expression to working-class authenticity, is increasingly dominated by the children of privilege.
According to the BBC controller of drama commissioning Ben Stephenson, ‘Acting has become a very middle-class profession because it’s too expensive to become an actor.’
the combined wealth of the Cabinet in 2012 was nearly £70 million, with eighteen out of twenty-nine ministers millionaires.
Yet the extent to which Parliament has become the talking shop of the middle classes is evident in other ways, too.
yet non-white MPs make up just 6 per cent of the parliament.
It is increasingly said that the public are ‘disenfranchised’ with politics because of ‘liberal elitism’ over issues such as Europe and immigration. There is undoubtedly a degree of truth to this. Outside of London, the ubiquity in politics of what the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has termed ‘Davos man’ – rich, cosmopolitan and intensely bourgeois in his tastes – has left many who still value concepts like national identity feeling alienated.
The increasing allure of populists could boil down in part to their simply looking and sounding a little more like the rest of us.
government policies which have in recent years maintained the so-called ‘triple lock’ on pensions while cutting benefits for the young and poor.
The young have lost out to the old across rich and poor alike, but the losses have been strongest in average or poor families.
To borrow a phrase from George Orwell, Britain is a family with the wrong members in control.
Children from working-class backgrounds may occasionally make it to the top in Britain; however, the odds of them doing so are not good.
Unless the structure of the economy changes as it did during the post-war period, the absolute rate of social mobility is likely to remain flat for the foreseeable future. A bright but poor child will rarely move up the ladder unless one of his peers higher up passes him on the way down. There is only so much room at the top.
EDUCATION IS THE most important factor in determining whether a child will grow up to be a poor adult.
On average, poor children have already fallen behind wealthier children by the time they start school.
The expansion of university education has also arguably created a two-tier system of higher education, with the employment prospects of students attending the new universities (the former polytechnics) significantly worse than those attending traditional institutions.
Graduates of the traditional universities are also far more likely to end up in the elite than those who attended former polytechnic institutions.
Wealth, power and the opportunity to attend a top university are seemingly handed down the generations like a sacred family heirloom.
it is worth questioning the efficacy of a policy that will see many poorer students, who are far less likely to attend the elite institutions, saddled with mountains of debt for what amount to second-rate degrees.
And networking takes on an increased importance the higher up the job market one looks.
Weak ties are everything.
Homes in desirable school catchment areas cost significantly more than those in areas with unpopular schools.
Pupils who attend fee-paying schools are five times more likely to go on to study at Oxford than their peers from the state sector.
Half a century after a Labour government first moved to abolish grammar schools, there is no equality in education. The most deprived areas in Britain have 30 per cent fewer good schools than the least deprived.
British schools are some of the most socially segregated in the developed world.
It should come as no surprise to learn that so many parents want to send their children private when they are subsequently likely to earn £193,700 more on average between the ages of twenty-six and forty-two than those who attend state schools.
As discussed already, Michael Young’s polemic against meritocracy was originally aimed at the grammar school system, which was seen to epitomise the ruthless separation of ‘gifted’ pupils from the rest at an early age.
Calls to bring back grammar schools are often based on similarly inegalitarian assumptions: the sheep must be ruthlessly sorted from the goats in the name of ‘social mobility’.
