Social Mobility Myths Peter Saunders
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Social Mobility Myths Social Mobility Myths Peter Saunders Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society London First Published June 2010 © Civitas 2010 55 Tufton Street London SW1P 3QL Civitas is a registered charity (no. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales (no. 04023541) email: [email protected] All rights reserved ISBN 978‐1‐906837‐14‐3 Independence: Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society is a registered educational charity (No. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee (No. 04023541). Civitas is financed from a variety of private sources to avoid over‐reliance on any single or small group of donors. All publications are independently refereed. All the Institute’s public‐ ations seek to further its objective of promoting the advancement of learning. The views expressed are those of the authors, not of the Institute. Typeset by Civitas Printed in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Group Trowbridge, Wiltshire “Aim high For though you may not reach the sky You will most certainly reach the mountaintops” Teacher’s inscription in my father’s autograph book on the day he left school at the age of 14 in the summer of 1939. After leaving school, my father started work as a factory operative. At 17 he joined the RAF, and after the war he enlisted at a teacher training college. He went on to complete a successful and rewarding career as a sports and science teacher, which included almost 10 years teaching in Zambia, Uganda and Namibia. This book is dedicated to my father, and to all those teachers, past and present, who encourage children to rise above their circumstances, to take advantage of the opportunities that are available to them, and to exploit their talent to the full. Contents Page Author ix Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 1 Absolute mobility: How tall are the ladders; how long are the snakes? 8 2 Relative mobility: Who benefited most from the expansion of the middle class? 21 3 Is social mobility falling? 34 4 What would a perfect meritocracy look like? 47 5 Is Britain a meritocracy? 67 6 How robust are the research findings? 87 7 Policy responses: Faint hopes, false starts and red herrings 101 Appendix: Do we really want to live in a meritocracy? 124 Notes 141 vii Author Peter Saunders was until 1999 Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, where he is still Professor Emeritus. He has also held visiting academic posts at universities in Australia, Germany, New Zealand and the United States. In 1999 he moved to Australia to become Research Manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne, and in 2001 he moved to Sydney to take up the position as Social Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies. In 2008 he returned to the UK where he now works as an independent writer and consultant. His books include A Nation of Home Owners; Capitalism—A Social Audit; Social Theory and the Urban Question; Introduction to British Politics; Privatisation and Popular Capitalism and Australia’s welfare habit and how to kick it. He recently published two reports for the London‐ based think tank, Policy Exchange: an analysis of the family tax and benefits system in Britain, and a critique of the government’s child poverty targets. More details of his work can be found at www.petersaunders.org.uk. ix Acknowledgements I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr Rod Bond at the University of Sussex with whom I worked closely in the 1990s analysing social mobility data, and who was mainly responsible for developing the path model outlined in Figure 1 (p. 86). Some of my early work was supported by a small personal research grant from the Economic and Social Research Council; the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney supported me when I needed to respond to criticisms a few years later; and Civitas in London has funded this latest return to the topic. I am particularly grateful to David Green, the Director of Civitas, who first suggested I have another crack at these issues, and to Claire Daley at Civitas, who has done an excellent job editing the manuscript. I am also grateful for comments, help, suggestions or guidance at various times in the past from Bob Blackburn, Alan Buckingham, Ian Deary, Geoff Evans, David Hitchin, Gordon Marshall, Trevor Noble, Geoff Payne, Ken Prandy, and Peter Shepherd, although none of these people bears any responsibility for what follows. x Introduction Almost 30 years ago, Professor Peter Bauer, an economist at the London School of Economics, attacked what he termed the ‘British obsession’ with class. Britain, he said, sees itself as a peculiarly class‐divided nation when in reality we are a remarkably open society. According to Bauer, there is a strong and pervasive myth in Britain that class divisions are sharper and more enduring than in other western industrialised countries, and that social movement between classes is rare and difficult to achieve. Seeking to refute such claims, he appealed to anecdotal and sociological evidence to try to show that Britain has in reality been a relatively open society for a long time.1 Back in 1981, when Bauer published this essay, there was not a lot of evidence on contemporary rates of ‘social mobility’ for him to draw upon. But in the years since then, sociologists and economists have been busy documenting and analysing people’s social and economic origins and destinations. As a result, we now know a great deal about movement up the ladders and down the snakes of our society. We have accurate measures of how many people born to lowly parents end up in high status positions, and how many children with privileged beginnings fail to make the grade. We know how likely it is that somebody born to poor parents will end up affluent, or that someone born to rich parents will end up penniless. What is ‘social mobility’? Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals from one position in society to another. This movement may be measured in the course of their own lives (e.g. by comparing their first job after leaving school with the job they end up doing later in their career), in which case it represents ‘intra‐generational mobility’; or it may be assessed by com‐ paring their current position with the position occupied by their parents when they were the same age (‘inter‐generational mobility’). The ‘positions’ that are compared may be based on occupational rankings, incomes, education, or some measure of social class or socio‐ economic status. Social mobility is said to occur when individuals move from a lower to a higher position (‘upward mobility’), or from a higher to a lower one (‘downward mobility’) on one of these scales. 1 SOCIAL MOBILITY We can also make reasonably reliable claims about why people succeed or fail. Much of what happens to individuals in the course of their lifetimes is down to chance and idiosyncratic circumstances, but social science can make some generalisations. We can assess whether hard work makes much of a difference to where people end up; how far intelligence drives personal success; whether formal education and paper qualifications matter most; or whether the advantages bequeathed by one’s parents—being born with a ‘silver spoon’ in your mouth—are what really count in the end. In 1996, I wrote a short book which assessed the evidence on social mobility in Britain that was then available to us. Entitled Unequal But Fair?,2 the book basically supported Bauer’s claim that Britain is a relatively open society in which people’s achievements mainly reflect their own efforts and talents. I suggested that, while competition for high income and high status employment did not take place on a completely level playing field, modern Britain was a much more open and ‘meritocratic’ society than most commentators seemed willing to acknowledge. In particular, the positions which individuals achieved for themselves in modern Britain had a lot more to do with their abilities and their hard work than with the social advantages or disadvantages bestowed upon them by accident of birth. What is a ‘meritocracy’? The word was coined in 1958 by Michael Young in his widely‐read and influential book, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870‐2033. Young detected in post‐war Britain a growing emphasis on social recruitment based, not on social origins, but on individual talent and motivation, and he anticipated a time when the higher occupational positions in British society would all be filled by the most able and hard‐working individuals. He was himself somewhat worried about such an outcome, for he thought a meritocratic society would run into severe problems as a result of the disaffection of the less talented and less committed majority congregating at the base of the social pyramid.3 Young defined ‘merit’ as consisting of ‘intelligence and effort together’.4 In a meritocracy, in other words, intellectual ability and hard work alone determine social placement. 2 INTRODUCTION In Unequal But Fair?, I showed that rates of social mobility were not markedly different from what we would expect to find in a perfectly meritocratic society, where people’s achieved socio‐economic status depended entirely on their ability and hard work. I also demonstrated that, to the extent that Britain fell short of the meritocratic ideal, circumstances of birth operated mainly to prevent less able, higher class children from failing, rather than to stop more able, lower class people from succeeding. I concluded that, if you are reasonably bright and motivated, there is little in modern Britain stopping you from succeeding in life (even if some rich kids do get an unfair start).