More mobile than we think
David Goodhart
3487 words
20 November 2008
Prospect Magazine
Copyright 2008. Prospect Magazine.
has elected not just a black president but a leader who is the son of a single
mother who was, at least briefly, dependent on food stamps. It couldn't happen here,
says the political and media consensus in Britain which alleges that social mobility
ground to a halt sometime in the 1980s, after a brief golden age in the 1950s and
1960s.
America
Not everyone agrees with that consensus. "There really has been a lot of nonsense talked
about the death of mobility," says the eminent sociologist John Goldthorpe. He is himself a
beneficiary of social mobility, having been born 73 years ago in south Yorkshire , the son of
a colliery clerk. He rose via Wath on Dearne grammar school (attended 25 years later, then
a comprehensive, by William Hague) to University College , London . As a young sociologist
he wrote a famous study of affluent workers in Luton and went on to become one of the
world's most respected academic analysts of social mobility.
One of the people who is most responsible for the "death of mobility" consensus is the
businessman Peter Lampl. By chance, like Goldthorpe, Lampl spent some of his early years
in the Yorkshire coalfield-the son of an immigrant Czech mining engineer. When his father
moved south to the National Coal Board office in London , Lampl went to Reigate grammar
school and thence on to Oxford and business success in America . When he returned in the
1990s, Lampl was horrified to find fewer bright children from state schools going to Oxbridge
than had been the case in the 1960s and 1970s and set up the Sutton Trust to try to do
something about it.
In 2005, the Sutton Trust funded and publicised the work of three economists-Jo Blanden,
Stephen Machin and Paul Gregg-who burrowed into the British cohort studies (social data on
a big sample of individuals born in a particular year) and found a significant decline in
upward mobility between the cohort born in 1958 and that born in 1970. They attributed this
fall to the growing income inequality of the 1980s and to the expansion of higher education
being monopolised by the better off.
This slender analysis has, arguably, had more influence on public debate than any academic
paper of the past 20 years. Every commentator and politician who "knows" that mobility has
fallen off a cliff in recent years is almost certainly basing his or her assumption on the Sutton
Trust report. Yet it is a highly controversial and contested piece of work.
I became interested in this subject a couple of years ago after reading an article by
Goldthorpe on the complexities of tracking mobility. With a view to writing about it myself, I
began to collect references to the death of mobility in Britain-from newspapers, reports,
political speeches-but within a month my file was full to bursting so I stopped collecting.
But how did this dubious consensus come to appeal to so many different kinds of people?
For the old left, it just confirmed an old song about the deep and intractable scars of class.
For the new David Cameron Conservatives it was a way of attacking the government and
burnishing their new progressive credentials. And for the Daily Mail it was a sad story about
the abolition of grammar schools.
The apparent "crisis of mobility" also seemed to be confirmed by the return of Etonians to
high office-first as Tory party leader and then as London mayor. But despite the flood of
articles about the return of privilege this was mainly a red herring. Figures compiled by the
Guardian showed-contrary to the spirit of the article they accompanied-that the number of
private-school educated members of the Tory shadow cabinet was at an all-time low of 62
per cent this May, down from 80 per cent in John Major's cabinet 15 years before. There are
only two Etonians (Cameron and Oliver Letwin) in the shadow cabinet, also the lowest level
in modern times.
The government itself has seemed unsure how to respond to this gloom about mobility. Even
if things really did get a lot worse for the 1970 cohort, and it is not clear that they did, Labour
cannot be held responsible for what happened in the 1980s or 1990s. But it was hard for
Labour to challenge the pessimism without appearing complacent about improving mobilityone of its main long-term goals, and the driver behind much social investment.
Yet even Paul Gregg, one of the authors of the Sutton Trust study, thinks the pessimism is
overdone. "Mobility did not decline as much as some people have implied, in any case this is
all about things that happened a while ago," he says. The most recent work he has just
completed on the 1991 cohort suggests that things might be moving in the right direction and
that the link between educational attainment and family background may be loosening a bit.
(Gregg, like many of the players in this debate, also has an interesting mobility story. The
Bristol-based professor, who still dresses a bit like the late 1970s punk he once was, is from
Luton . Having been unemployed for a few years in the early 1980s he applied to his local
authority to go to university but was rejected on the grounds that he had been out of work
too long. He wrote to his MP, Graham Bright, and the case came to the attention of Keith
Joseph who intervened on Gregg's behalf. Gregg now returns the compliment by stressing
the positive difference made by Joseph's GCSE reforms of 1986, which led to higher staying
on rates at school.)
Social mobility is not only hard to measure-and requires good data on income and
occupations going back over many decades-it is also conceptually quite complex. The
mobility debate overlaps with-and is often conflated with-related but distinct debates about
inequality and meritocracy. Of course, high mobility and meritocracy usually go together, but
it is possible to imagine a meritocratic society with open competition for the top jobs but a
low level of general mobility. ( Britain , as we shall see, seems to be the other way round with
a decent level of general mobility but with restricted access to the elite, especially for those
from near the bottom.)
When most people talk about social mobility they mean a society in which the link between
parents' income and class position and that of their children is not too fixed-and a society (in
which ability is more or less randomly distributed) which allows bright poorer people to rise
up the scale and dim richer people to fall. This latter sort of mobility is called "relative
mobility" or zero-sum mobility-for everyone that goes up someone comes down. But there is
another kind of "absolute mobility," or positive-sum mobility, in which people can rise into
better jobs without anyone going down. That is because the economic structure can change,
as it did rapidly between the 1940s and the 1970s, and continues to do more slowly, to
produce what Goldthorpe calls more "room at the top." In the 1960s that meant fewer blue
collar jobs and more managerial and professional jobs, many in the expanding welfare state.
Back in the 1930s, less than 10 per cent of the population ! belonged to the professional and
managerial class- it is now more than 40 per cent.
There are also two different ways of measuring these two types of mobility-measurement by
income over generations and measurement by class/occupation over generations (usually
using a seven-class model from "higher managerial and professional" at the top to "routine"
at the bottom). Although there is some overlap between these two measurements they can
also give strikingly different results. And as it is economists who tend to measure by income
and sociologists by class these differences are given an extra twist of departmental rivalry.
The Sutton Trust study was the work of economists which, as we have seen, stressed the
fall off in mobility as measured by income between the 1958 cohort and the 1970 one. For
both cohorts, family income when a child was aged 16 was compared with the child's
earnings when aged 30.
But if you look at the actual figures for movement between different income quartiles two
things strike you-first, the difference between the 1958 and 1970 cohort is rather small,
surely not big enough to base a claim about a dramatic fall-off in mobility; second, the actual
level of movement across the quartiles for both cohorts is rather high for a country that is
said to be so rigid. So, for example, for the 1958ers who were born to fathers in the lowest
income quartile only 31 per cent stayed in the lowest quartile and nearly 40 per cent reached
the top two quartiles (22 per cent one from the top, and 17 per cent in the top). For the
1970ers the position had deteriorated a little, with 38 per cent of those born into the bottom
quartile still there at age 30, and 33 per cent graduating to the top two quartiles. (At the high
earning end, only 35 per cent of children born to fathers in the highest income quartile
stayed there in the 1958 cohort, rising to 42 ! per cent for the 1970 cohort.)
I put these two points to Paul Gregg of the Sutton study. On the first point, as we have seen,
he does not endorse a radical "end of mobility" thesis, but does argue that the 1958 to 1970
decline is greater than that single snapshot I quoted makes it appear. If you take several
comparative readings of fathers' and childrens' incomes then the decrease in mobility
between those cohorts can be as much as one third. But even on this broader range of
income measurement more than half of the 1958 sample still moved out of their father's
income quartile-which is probably more movement than most people would expect.
Sociologists like Goldthorpe consider that such income data is too unreliable to study
change, chiefly because family income is not comparable between the two cohorts.
Moreover, the sociologists find no evidence from their own alternative class/occupational
data for any significant falling off in mobility in the 1980s or 1990s. They do, however, say
that there was a period of exceptional and mainly positive-sum upward mobility from the
1940s to the 1970s as more "room at the top" was created at a faster pace than usual. That
reverted to a more normal pattern but, according to a paper by Goldthorpe and Colin Mills,
that pattern still means 65 per cent of sons moving (mainly upwards) from their fathers' class
category.
The other big difference between the economists' income distribution approach to mobility
and the sociologists' occupational approach is where it leaves Britain in the international
league tables of mobility. The income figures leave Britain close to the bottom, usually just
above the more unequal US. In the occupational mobility tables, however, Britain does much
better, with a mid-table place usually above Italy and even Germany , which suffers from a
particularly rigid link between education and occupation.
Where does that leave us? Both sociologists and economists agree that there has been
some falling off from the high levels of mobility in the mid 20th century, although both record
higher continuing levels of mobility-absolute and relative-than most non-experts would
expect. The economists connect the 1980s slowdown in mobility to the sharp rise in
inequality in that decade, which seems logical because as the income spectrum widens you
have to get a bigger pay rise to move up from one quartile to another. Yet this does not show
up in the sociologists' occupational analysis, perhaps because a lot of the increase in income
inequality was happening within occupations, especially at the top end-a humble
conveyancing solicitor versus a top City lawyer. Both forms of analysis are perfectly valid,
with income acting as a useful "sanity check" against the vagaries and status inflation of
occupational groups.
Moreover, lots of other things have been going on-socially and politically-in recent decades
that are not necessarily picked up by these big aggregate analyses and could be affecting
mobility both for better and worse. There has, for example, been a big increase in women
taking higher status jobs and there are now many more female students than male. These
are mainly middle class women but there is also quite a lot of upward mobility among
women. This must have had some effect in reducing "room at the top" for lower income men.
"Feminism has trumped egalitarianism," concludes Tory thinker David Willetts. Similarly, the
recent high levels of immigration have been mainly into lower-paid jobs, but in professions
such as medicine and finance there has been a stream of migrants into top jobs too.
Then there is the effect of the abolition of most grammar schools. The sociologists, with their
stress on mobility being driven by changes to economic structure, tend to see educational
institutions as channellers of mobility not creators of it. If grammar schools had not existed
people would still have been selected by some mechanism for the new higher status jobs.
(Before grammar schools and then universities took over the role, big organisations from the
army to large manufacturers acted as mobility "scouts"-spotting bright people with little
education and often propelling them right to the top.)
Moreover, sociologists point out that grammar schools only ever educated about 15 per cent
of the cohort and were middle-class dominated except in heavily working-class areas like
Goldthorpe's south Yorkshire . Both left and right have invested too much significance in
grammar schools. But they did help to move a few people from close to the bottom to the
very top, and Labour's abolition of most grammars is one factor behind the continued private
school domination of Oxbridge and key professions. Fewer grammar schools and more
middle-class colonised universities also seem to have contributed to that hardening of the
link between educational attainment and family background-the opposite of what the
advocates of university expansion wanted.
Nevertheless, the lazy consensus which has decreed the end of social mobility is both wrong
and damaging-implying that despite the billions that Labour, in particular, has poured into
pre-school support, primary and secondary education, relieving child poverty and so on,
nothing will ever change.
That is not to say that everything is set fair, and it may indeed be the case that the longerterm trend is for high levels of social mobility-both absolute and relative-to become ever
harder to achieve. For one thing social mobility has always been "sticky" downwards-once
people reach a certain level of wealth, or position, their children tend not to fall back too far;
this was true even in the Soviet bloc. When, for example, the big bang swept out some of the
dull but well-connected brokers from the City they were more likely to become estate agents
than binmen.
And there is today among middle-class families an unprecedented focus of attention (and
stress) on improving or at least maintaining their own children's position-a kind of "arms
race" in everything from schools to job internships. And as the group of immovable
professional and managerial families slowly expands then it is likely that there will be less
overall movement, at least through relative mobility.
also has a stickiness problem at the other end of the scale with a "long tail" of
social failure-often reproduced over generations. Paul Gregg says: "The long tail is
very important in holding back the overall level of mobility in Britain ." Technology
and free trade have wiped out many "good" working-class jobs and the young men
and women who would once have done those jobs often don't feel able to compete in
the education race, so more or less drop out in the second or third year of secondary
school. Some of them go on to join the ranks of the Neets (people who are neither in
employment, education or training).
Britain
The shape of Britain 's social order has moved from a pyramid at the start of the 20th
century, to a light bulb bulging in the middle by the 1970s, but may come to resemble an
oddly shaped hourglass-with people at the bottom of the hourglass finding it harder and
harder to get up into the top part.
Goldthorpe suggests that the decline of manufacturing has not only wiped out a big band of
middle income, middle status jobs but it has also reduced the "shopfloor to boardroom" route
to social mobility. In the higher end service sector-such as finance, media and creative
industries-which (at least until the crash) were hailed as key drivers of growth, it's often now
impossible to go from the bottom to the top. You cannot start as a secretary or security guard
in the City and end up as a fund manager.
Another obstacle to higher mobility from below is the requirement that many post-industrial
service jobs have for "soft skills"-the right behavioural traits and personal skills, which tend to
go with the right sort of family and upbringing.
To sum up: although mobility, both absolute and relative, has dropped off the high levels of
the mid 20th century it still remains quite high, except at the very top and in the long tail at
the bottom; the trouble is they are the places that matter most.
In December, the government will publish a long awaited white paper on social mobility. This
follows the publication in November of a paper from the strategy unit which tried to marry the
sociologist and economist world views to present an unusually upbeat analysis-including the
good news from Paul Gregg that studies of the 1991 cohort suggest that social mobility may
be rising once again.
Although all political parties say they want more social mobility, it is not an easy issue for
politicians to grapple with. Improving relative social mobility, means one person goes down
for every one who goes up. Gordon Brown naturally prefers to stress the positive-sum future
of absolute mobility and yet more "room at the top." He will argue in the white paper that
Britain can create many more such higher status jobs-Goldthorpe warns, on the contrary,
that there are severe constraints on that process.
Labour will never bring back grammar schools-although if they were based, like the new
academies, in deprived areas it would improve the meritocracy record by helping bright poor
children compete for elite universities. Instead, the white paper will stress the importance of
further investment in children's early years, especially for the less well off. It will also accept
the connection between higher inequality and declining mobility. Gregg has an interesting
take on this connection, saying: "If inequality widens too far it makes middle-class parents
battle even harder to ensure their children don't drop."
Many of the ways that parents can help children-through networks and contacts-cannot, in a
liberal society, easily be broken. And official thinking about mobility understandably stops at
the level of the university degree or some other qualification.
But it may be that the drift towards "credentialism"-the need for more elaborate qualifications
for increasingly basic jobs-helps people at the higher and middle levels of attainment but
shuts out many of those among the 40 per cent of young people who still leave school
without five decent GCSEs. Rather than investing large sums in pushing poorer students to
university and then into low-grade graduate employment, the government might be better
advised to invest even more in "stepping stone" para-professional jobs-such as teaching
assistants or police support staff-which can give people a second chance to get on a decent
career ladder.
Perhaps in the end mobility, like happiness, is best pursued indirectly. John Goldthorpe, the
doyen of mobility sociologists, agrees. "I am sceptical about placing too much emphasis on
mobility," he says. This is not because he supports a rigid social order, but rather because
like Michael Young, author of The Rise of the Meritocracy (see Toby Young's piece
following) he has an old left suspicion of meritocracy and mobility, and worries about the
esteem of those left behind. He would prefer, for example, to spend more money sorting out
the Neets than trying to push the university participation rate to 50 per cent. "If I was in
charge," he concludes, "I would push for more genuine equality of opportunity and then let
the mobility chips fall where they will."