Social Mobility in the UK

Tim Bale has circulated a very interesting piece on social mobility in The Times by Tim Hames, to which I initially responded in an email to colleagues. He suggested that I post my comments here, and I'm happy to do that.



The link to the Hames article is here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/tim_hames/article1878529.ece



However, for ease of access I'm pasting it in below, with my own comments. Please feel free to add your own thoughts.



Paul Webb





The Times (London) June 4, 2007, Monday



The Tories and education? It's a no-brainer - Tim Hames



Meritocracy is a slippery concept. The word achieved popular currency almost half a century ago with the publication of Michael Young's The Rise of Meritocracy. Young detested the country as it was in the 1950s, arguing that "nobody should be born with a silver spoon in his mouth or, if he is, it should choke him". At the same time he was appalled at the thought of a society divided into new classes on the basis of academic intelligence alone and feared that it could result in a new elite that would have no sense of compassion for, or shared responsibility with, those "below" them. Despite Young's misgivings, meritocracy is regarded as worthy in the modern world (on the whole, rightly) -although he was wise to to give warning against a pure Brave New World approach to brainpower. The reality, however, as Mr Willetts has conceded, is that Sad Old World is more plausible. The evidence that Britain has become less socially mobile is clear, even if it is not widely understood. This is partly because, while sociologists are wonderful people, their language is rarely less than opaque.



Social mobility is measured by "transitional matrices", in which absolute social mobility is taken to mean that a person's ultimate income and social class is unrelated to that of their parents. If someone is born into a family in the bottom quarter of the population by income, for instance, if they had total mobility they would have an exactly equal chance of ending up in any of the four quartersof relative wealth. The evidence suggests otherwise and it is pretty disturbing. Two huge sub-sections of the population were identified -those born in 1958 and 1970 -and their lives closely followed. Of those born in 1958, those in the poorest quarter had a 31 per cent chance of being in the same place at the age of 33 and a 17 per cent chance of having moved up to the highest quarter. By 1970 the same sort of people had a 35 per cent chance of being > stuck where they were and a 16 per cent chance of jumping up. The results for the middle class are much more dramatic. In 1958 those born to the wealthiest quarter had a 35 per cent chance of staying where they began and a 17 per cent chance of slipping down to the lowest income section by the age of 33. But those who were born in 1970 had a 42 per cent chance of carrying on in comparative luxury and a meagre 11 per cent chance of descending to the lowest income quarter.



Put brutally, the story of the past 50 years is that the middle class has got bigger and has also become highly effective at defending its own -including the least impressive of its offspring. How and why has this happened? The conventional explanation...is that the massive expansion of higher education and degree qualifications in the past few decades is a rave to which the working class has not been invited. There were 220,000 students attending universities in 1974. Thirty years later there were more than 1.6 million. Yet it is those who were born into comfortable households who secured these new places (especially the girls) and benefited from the economic rewards that flow from them. If so, this is one hell of a dilemma. It implies that the principal challenge of social mobility today is less how to raise up the bright but poor (though this is a real challenge) than how to force down the dim but rich. That is really, really hard. No one objects to the State intervening to assist the smart but disadvantaged. A massive middle class would go nuts at the sort of measures that government would need to introduce to ensure that Tristan and Jemima were exposed to serious penalties for being, well, thick. This is, to use a technical phrase honed by experts, a bummer of a public policy problem.





PW's COMMENTS:



Thanks for this, Tim - it's a great piece for stimulating debate. I can't resist a quick salvo!



1. I attended a really interesting panel at the Elections, Public Opinion & Parties conference in Manchester last month which was on social mobility, and one thing that came across very clearly is that the sociologists were NOT of one mind that rates of mobility had gone down under New Labour (see paper by Fiona Devine on the conference website if you're interested here http://www.epop08.com/papers/documents/FionaDevine.doc). As ever, these things tend to come down to rather abstruse arguments about method and theory.



2. The Hames article is undoubtedly right in saying that the middle class have been the principal beneficiaries of the expansion of HE - to be personal about it for a moment, there is no other explanation for the fact that I myself had the opportunity to go to Uni in the 1970s while my equally if not more intelligent father never got a look in in the 1940s. However, I think the slightly outraged tone of Hames article overlooks a couple of things.



First, he himself points at that '...the story of the past 50 years is that the middle class has got bigger and has also become highly effective at defending its own...'. The fact that the middle class has got bigger as the social structure of Britain has changed inevitably means that we cannot expect mobility rates to remain unchanged. That is, if the MC has got bigger at the expense of the WC, then it is probably a good thing, not a bad thing, that people are more likely to remain within it and not suffer downward mobility. The decrease in mobility rates is a function of changing shape of social structure (once the expansion of the MC has stabilized). Of course, one could still argue on normative grounds that, in effect, the MC needs to keep getting bigger and bigger, thus permitting more upward mobility from the remaining WC, but eventually this process is bound to plateau, and so the class structure of society will stabilize and mobility rates necessarily decline.



Bear in mind too, that in terms of absolute levels of wealth and income, the experience of being in the WC is far different today to that of a generation or more ago. So while the relative differences between classes may remain acute ever, society is actually less polarized than hitherto, in that more of us live in a broadly middle class way.



The second thing is that Hames focuses his comments on class mobility and is dismissive of an important alternative form of 'social mobility' which has affected this country - the equalisation of opportunities across gender lines. He says: 'it is those who were born into comfortable households who secured these new places (especially the girls) and benefited from the economic rewards that flow from them.' Quite. The expansion of HE access to girls is no small matter and arguably constitutes a social revolution in its own right. To return to my parochial example once again, it wasn't only my father who never had a shot at University in the '40s, but my older sister barely had realistic chance in the '60s either, despite having had a good school record. Although she opted to take a quite different career path, the limits of her teachers' aspirations for most of their girls was teacher-training. Few were expected to go to university to read the humanities, social sciences (let along sciences). By contrast, my daughters' (state) school tends to socialize them into the attitude that university entrance will be the norm for them and their friends.



In brief, the expansion of HE over the past two to three decades has provided access to greater life chances to a enlarged middle class and to women more generally. These are no small achievements, though Hames' article does not really acknowledge them.

Mandy

You thought taxing core voters was bad judgement. Mandelson is a big problem for Tories. Coulson 'on guard'. But he's a much bigger problem for Brown.