HYPOCRISY AND CONFUSION DISTORT THE DEBATE ON SOCIAL MOBILITY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

Hypocrisy and confusion distort the debate on social mobility

It is the economy, not education, that really determines life chances

Martin Wolf


In the cohorts of the generations born between 1940 and the early 1980s, upward and downward mobility rates converged © Alamy


Perhaps no topic is more buried in hypocrisy and confusion than social mobility. We pretend to be in favour of it. But few middle-class parents are in favour of downward mobility for their own children. We also believe that changing individual characteristics, principally via education, will increase social mobility. But this is largely untrue. We need to be far more honest.

The broad picture of inherited class advantage is clear enough. The latest report of the UK’s Social Mobility Commission states: “Those from better-off backgrounds are almost 80 per cent more likely to be in a professional job than their working-class peers.” More­over, it adds: “Due to this gap in access to professional jobs, people from working-class backgrounds earn 24 per cent less a year than those from professional backgrounds.” So far, so familiar.

The report touches briefly on the central point: “Downward mobility is a key component of a socially mobile society.” It is right. If the class structure of the economy is unchanged, the chance that someone from a working-class background will experience upward mobility can only increase if there is a matching increase in the “relative chances that someone from a professional background will move downwards”.

This is where the hypocrisy comes in. The chief obstacle to social mobility is the family. People do not put huge amounts of time and resources into their children in order to watch them fail. Those with the material, social and intellectual resources to prevent such failure will use them. Also, they do not have to try so hard: these resources advantage their children from birth.

Given that, what determines the rate of social mobility? To have a clearer picture of this, one needs to move from the pieties of the Social Mobility Report to a brilliant lecture, “Social class mobility in modern Britain”, delivered in 2016 by John Goldthorpe, doyen of scholars of this topic. What Mr Goldthorpe calls the “underlying mobility regime” remains strikingly unchanged. But the context has become more adverse. Furthermore, he adds, “the effect of educational expansion and reform on mobility processes and outcomes has in fact been very limited”.

Mr Goldthorpe’s work focuses on class, not income, because the former decides the latter, over a lifetime. Crucially, he distinguishes relative from absolute mobility. The first refers to what would happen if the class structure stayed unchanged. The second refers to actual changes in class positions.

The proportion of male salaried managerial and professional workers in the UK economy jumped from 11 per cent in 1951 to 25 per cent in 1971, 35 per cent in 1991 and 40 per cent in 2011. More room opened up at the top, albeit at a slowing rate. This change in the job structure automatically generated a rising rate of upward mobility and declining rate of downward mobility in cohorts born before 1947. The economy delivered more of the upward mobility everybody wants, with less of the downward mobility upper-class parents fear.

Education had little to do with this. People were promoted, even though they had few paper qualifications, just as many of today’s graduates work in jobs that used not to require degrees. Society was not then more open; the economy was just more helpful.

Now move forward to the generations born between 1940 and the early 1980s. In these cohorts, upward and downward mobility rates converged. This is partly because expansion of new opportunities at the top has slowed. It is also because a larger proportion of people has inevitably been born into the professional classes and a smaller proportion into the working classes. Given the finding of constant relative mobility over time, the outcome has been a rise in absolute downward mobility and a fall in absolute upward mobility. This makes society unhappy.

The chief determinant of social mobility, then, is the class structure of the economy and its rate of change. If, as some predict, artificial intelligence demolishes many professional jobs, downward mobility will overwhelm upward mobility. The political consequences would be devastating.

Education has only second-order effects on mobility. It influences, but does not determine, the structure of the economy: that is why graduate unemployment is quite common across the world. It is, in fact, more of a positional good: relative education matters. While some from working-class backgrounds will get more of this good, professional parents will always help their offspring to outcompete them.

In sum, if we really care about social mobility, it is on the economy that we should focus most of our attention.