Read the rest of our big ideas of 2015
The idea that social mobility—ending up in a different occupational class or income group from one’s parents—is in decline or has ground to a halt has much currency in Britain today. The truth is more complicated, though not reassuring: there is plenty of mobility, but more downwards than up.
New research by academics at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics suggests that social mobility has not stalled. Examining more than 20,000 British men and women in four birth “cohorts” (1946, 1958, 1970 and 1980-84), they found that around three-quarters ended up in a different class from the one they were born into, and that this proportion was roughly constant over time.
The picture is similar in other developed economies. A recent US report showed that the chances of a child born there to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution moving up to the top fifth have barely changed in four decades. But the UK report also shows that “more mobility is going in a downward direction than in the past.” The experience of sliding down the social ladder rather than up it has become more common.
In the so-called “Golden Age” of social mobility in the three decades after the Second World War, there was an enormous expansion in the number of professional and managerial jobs. That created more “room at the top” and a steady rise in upward class mobility. Now that this expansion has slowed, the children of the baby boomers have less favourable prospects than their parents.
John Goldthorpe, a sociologist and doyen of such studies, says that the “emerging situation is one for which there is little historical precedent and that carries potentially far-reaching political and wider social implications.” The trend could be even more pronounced if “intelligent machines” or robots become able to do the kinds of professional jobs that were once thought to be immune to the threat of automation.
The idea that social mobility—ending up in a different occupational class or income group from one’s parents—is in decline or has ground to a halt has much currency in Britain today. The truth is more complicated, though not reassuring: there is plenty of mobility, but more downwards than up.
New research by academics at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics suggests that social mobility has not stalled. Examining more than 20,000 British men and women in four birth “cohorts” (1946, 1958, 1970 and 1980-84), they found that around three-quarters ended up in a different class from the one they were born into, and that this proportion was roughly constant over time.
The picture is similar in other developed economies. A recent US report showed that the chances of a child born there to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution moving up to the top fifth have barely changed in four decades. But the UK report also shows that “more mobility is going in a downward direction than in the past.” The experience of sliding down the social ladder rather than up it has become more common.
In the so-called “Golden Age” of social mobility in the three decades after the Second World War, there was an enormous expansion in the number of professional and managerial jobs. That created more “room at the top” and a steady rise in upward class mobility. Now that this expansion has slowed, the children of the baby boomers have less favourable prospects than their parents.
John Goldthorpe, a sociologist and doyen of such studies, says that the “emerging situation is one for which there is little historical precedent and that carries potentially far-reaching political and wider social implications.” The trend could be even more pronounced if “intelligent machines” or robots become able to do the kinds of professional jobs that were once thought to be immune to the threat of automation.
