“I know it when I see it” was one American judge’s celebrated failure to define pornography. Social class is altogether harder to pin down. “I don’t know it when I see it” would be a better description of the head-spinning experience of those on the wrong side of the divide, as chronicled by writers from F Scott Fitzgerald to Sally Rooney. Money, power and status are naturally part of the mix, but so too is the age of your money and knowing which books to talk about. Other suggested markers of distinction have included battered old cars smelling of Labradors, and saying “lavatory” rather than “toilet”.
Social science generally gets nowhere near any of this; it’s left to the novelists. Some studies fall back on past occupational grades, still attaching anachronistic prestige to “non-manual” work or a “monthly salary”. Others foreground income, even though that might mean elevating to the elite an electrician enjoying a high-earning year. Others stake everything on education, identifying postgraduate degrees as a passport to the pinnacle—a hard thought to sustain when you think of the obstacles in the way of a twentysomething walking into a whole load of debt to try their hand at a master’s in web design at a former polytechnic. All these approaches get at something, while missing so much more. But what on earth are you meant to do when analysing a known unknowable such as class?
Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman have come up with an arresting solution to this conundrum, by crunching 125 years of that great Bible of British snobbery—Who’s Who. Along with abridged CVs for “noteworthy and influential” individuals, the directory includes dashes of colour: recreations, club memberships. It does not merely record the elite but authenticates it. Faced with being booted out of the presidential palace in Khartoum, Germaine Greer spotted a copy of the big red book just in time: the mere fact of her entry saw her hostile guarding give way to a proper reception, “red carpet, drinks, the lot!” Winston Churchill considered the tome to be of such “national importance” that he intervened to ensure wartime shortages didn’t interrupt publication.
Exactly as with the markers of class, the rules for inclusion blend the obvious and the entirely opaque. Half the entries are allotted to public positions—MPs, peers, top judges and so on. The other half are selected on “reputation” by an anonymous board of advisers, any one of whom can—as in a gentleman’s club—blackball a single name they want to keep out. So it’s tough to get in, but once you’re in, you’re in for life—and beyond. Dead entrants are immediately shuffled for eternity into the companion volume, Who Was Who. Merge the two books and you’ve got details on all 125,000 members of the British elite .
Once you’re in Who’s Who, you’re in for life—and beyond
The Born to Rule authors—who have both had associations with the London School of Economics—initially feared they’d killed their own project. After circumventing the gatekeepers, by writing code to “scrape” data from the Who’s Who website, they were dramatically locked out: the whole of the LSE’s online access to Oxford University Press materials was blocked. But the Who’s Who team was intrigued, and—once safely inside the loop—extremely helpful. They not only granted Reeves and Friedman access to all their published records, but agreed to send over entrants’ surveys, so that the sociologists could garner intelligence on elite characteristics not listed in Who’s Who, including personal finances and political opinions.
This is only the first of several brilliant bits of string-and-sticky-tape connections improvised between distinct data sources. To get a handle on inherited wealth, the authors tracked down the probate records of entrants’ deceased parents; they tacked on the music and book choices of the 1,200 Who’s Who entrants who’ve been on Desert Island Discs; they dug deeply into genealogical soil to reveal how status seeps through extended family trees; they conducted interviews to tease out the stories that top people tell about themselves. The result is an exhilarating and revelatory picture of the British establishment.
The inclusion of cohorts born as long ago as the 1830s ensures that many changes are seen. Military and ecclesiastical posts loomed less large over time; law and government became more prevalent. After education became universal, the old public schools lost some of their grip. Aristocratic hobbies, such as hunting, became minority sports. Among newer entrants, there are (relatively) more women, and (a few) more ethnic minorities.
More striking, though, are the continuities. Even now, more than 80 per cent of entrants are still male, and 97 per cent white. Attendees of the nine venerable “Clarendon” schools, which have supplied two-thirds of all prime ministers (including David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak), remain 52 times more likely to merit an entry. The relative power of Oxbridge slid a bit after new universities opened, but the old institutions learned new tricks and recovered. The Oxbridge graduate share among recent entries is as high as it’s ever been.
At the root of it all are connections—and cash. Reeves and Friedman’s ingenious splicing of sources allows for the identification of a distinct “wealth elite”, a subset within the top social echelon whose positions win them a place in Who’s Who, and who also rank in the “top 1 per cent” in terms of riches. The additional effects of money, over and above prestige and position, are thereby disentangled. Despite the great 20th-century widening of property ownership, the “propulsive power” of inherited money has been remarkably consistent. Over 150 years, the share of the elite drawn from the richest 10 per cent of families has bobbed around half; the share from the top 1 per cent has oscillated around a fifth. The over-representation of wealth varies between fields—being more extreme in, say, military and sport—but it’s always there. Even in education and medicine, scions of the top 1 per cent grab about 15 per cent of posts at the pinnacle.
Younger elites reject Britain’s imperial past and are convinced that the country is racist
This seriously moneyed elite leans, as you’d expect, against new wealth taxes. It is exceptionally unlikely to regard healthcare and affordable housing as government priorities. And the wealthy are well placed to steward their interests: hanging out with politicians more than do other Who’s Who entrants. There is, however, more than self-interest to politics at the top. Among the purely positional (i.e. not monied) component of the elite, and especially among those preeminent people who have truly had to battle to the top, progressive views have gained traction: younger elites reject Britain’s imperial past and are convinced that the country is racist. The non-plutocratic part of the elite is also far keener on raising taxes for better state services than is the wider public.
Here, then, is a bit of grist for the mill of conservative populists, who charge uber-educated elites with becoming badly detached from everyday folk. But a final twist concerns the extraordinary manoeuvres that elites undertake to appear “normal”. The backdrop is the rise and fall of high culture as a mark of distinction over the early 20th century. Since then, pop classics have steadily replaced actual classics as elites’ picks on Desert Island Discs. And Reeves and Friedman show that if you remind privileged people about the wealth gap before they make their selections, their choices become even more pop, and they explain them with fewer highfalutin’ claims of quality—and with more relatable family memories.
Conservative readers will find the book insufficiently curious about hereditary ability. Precisely because it is so sweeping, it will also run into academic criticism. Do the two scholars sometimes lapse into editorialising? Do they occasionally put more weight on small survey subsamples than those subsamples can bear? Have they really thought through all the errors that could creep in when bolting sources together? They give an admirably clear account of their methods, which will see off many charges, but there are so many potential threads to pull on that I’d expect a little unravelling here and there. But, in an academy in which many careers are consumed entirely with running technical checks rather than establishing new substance, this duo prefer to prosecute a big argument—and hunt down every last scrap of data to test it and flesh it out. The result is a book that tells you something interesting on every page.
Having grown up with a mostly unemployed dad but also a maternal grandfather who was a professor of medicine listed in Who’s Who, I—like so many others—have always experienced class as a riddle. By grappling with all the gory complexities, Reeves and Friedman can help us to solve it.
