What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility?

Lee Elliot Major,Stephen Machin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529733198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

Featured in the Financial Times Best Books of the Year 2020 The evidence is rigorously marshalled and the...solutions equally clearly illuminated. A definitive study. - Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator, The Financial Times In this vital new book, Britain?s first Professor of Social Mobility Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin, reveal the causes of the UK's low social mobility, explain why it?s getting worse, and outline how we reverse this worrying trend, before it's too late. It covers the history of social mobility in the UK, explores international comparisons, analyses the recent 'dark age' of declining absolute mobility, and investigates issues such as how family traits affect inter-generationalmobility.The authors then outline what it is we should do about this pressing issue. Calling for a fundamental shift in debates about social mobility and arguing that only by establishing general principles of fairness in society can we agree the major policy reforms that can make Britain a more mobile and just society for all.

1 Introduction

We know quite a lot about social mobility, but much less about what to do about it. For at least a century we have been gathering evidence on the transmission of traits from one generation to the next. Yet, for all our efforts, the truth is that we have made little progress in creating a more fluid society where a person's family background is less predictive of their outcomes.

Our motivation for writing this book is to assess, given the evidence, what general principles we might agree upon to frame credible policies paving the way for greater equality of opportunity. We want to elevate the discussion to consider the bigger picture that so often gets lost in the countless feverish debates over how to make society more open.

Too often, social mobility debates resemble throwing confetti at a wall: a well-intentioned rush to do something, anything, about it. What emerges is a host of short-term piecemeal, often small-scale, initiatives. Such minor tinkering with policies is unlikely to lead to transformative change. Another tendency is for people to wave a magic wand and ignore the evidence altogether. They claim there is one simple answer: vanquishing inequality, enabling education to be the great leveller, boosting economic growth, creating more high-status jobs. Others take another extreme view: it is all down to our genes and we are powerless to do anything about intergenerational inequalities at all.

A fundamental shift in the debate is required. It was needed before the COVID-19 crisis, and has become even more pressing as the vulnerable in society are suffering most from the global economic recession triggered by the pandemic. In hard times, the disadvantaged take the biggest hit. They suffer longer run consequences: the scarring effects from economic downturns that damage life prospects. There are credible concerns that inequalities resulting from COVID-19 could have a generational impact, with the potential to trigger a dark age of declining opportunity. Yet the unprecedented government steps taken to alleviate the crisis may signal a new dawn for renewed thinking in which we seriously consider radical policies to create a more inclusive, better functioning economy.

Why should we care about social mobility? One reason the topic has attracted so much interest among politicians is connections with the concept of equality of opportunity. That interest has flourished during a modern era when governments have embraced market-based policies in an increasingly global economy characterised by widening inequalities. The hope that everyone has the same chance of getting on in life is essential to defend a world of ever starker gaps between the haves and have-nots.

The problem, as we shall discover, is that the link between social mobility and equality of opportunity is not as simple as decision makers would like to believe. There is a deceptively complex relation that requires many assumptions (and contradictions). Indeed, some political philosophers spend their working lives ruminating over these issues (Swift, 2006). There are clear trade-offs. While we might want a fair society that promotes the life prospects of the most disadvantaged, parents also want to be able to do the best for their children. Those two aspirations often do not happily co-exist. The question of where you draw the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable becomes a matter of judgement.

Moreover, improving social mobility is not simply a matter of catapulting a fortunate few into elite universities and prestigious professions, but a much broader challenge: creating decent jobs and improving prospects for the unfortunate majority living in neglected areas across the country. Our view is that society is currently not doing well on the social mobility test: failing to meet our collective responsibilities; failing to empower local communities, failing to provide decent jobs and lives, and to offer fair access to opportunities for all.

Higher levels of generational persistence, when compared with other countries or earlier times, suggest we are missing out on a sizable talent pool, fishing in the same small pond generation after generation. That is not just unfair for individuals who are unable to realise their potential, but damaging to the nation's overall economic productivity. Even modest increases in social mobility could increase the UK's GDP growth by 2–4 per cent a year, equivalent to recovering from a recession (Sutton Trust, 2010).

Allowing movement into the higher echelons of society is important because diverse elites can make for better leaders and decision makers (Elliot Major and Machin, 2018). In a world of increasingly complex and diverse organisations, we need leaders to empathise with the people they are meant to serve. They are less likely to suffer from the groupthink and narrow perspectives that undermine homogeneous ruling classes. Newsrooms are healthier if they are made up of journalists from different walks of life. Cognitive diversity, like gender or ethnic diversity, improves decision making in organisations.

In medicine, general practitioners from less affluent backgrounds are more likely to practise in deprived communities (Steven et al., 2016). This is one of the reasons why we should pursue both social mobility and social justice. Improving social mobility unlocks the upper parts of society making justice more likely. Less ingrained privileged elites may be more inclined to support the redistributive policies that enable those on the lowest ranks to get a foot on the ladder. But, even then, improving relative social mobility is much more realistic in a world of increasing absolute mobility, where more opportunities are available.

The UK's low level of social mobility is an increasingly pressing issue: young people growing up today are fighting over fewer opportunities amid the growing spectre of downward mobility. We have become a fragmented and fractured country, defined by economic, geographical and political divides. Failure to do something will store up greater problems for future generations. That was already the case before the coronavirus crisis; it is even more so as we emerge from it.

Measures of Mobility

It is important to be clear what social mobility means. Often policy debates and academic studies fall at this first hurdle, with people unclear about what aspect of social mobility they are hoping to improve. In economic research, mobility patterns are usually assessed by studying individual or family earnings and income, with a small set of studies also looking at wealth. In sociology, the changing status of people is studied in terms of social classes, based on the jobs people and their parents do, sometimes considering how much they earn and how much job security they enjoy.¹

Both can be tracked within families across generations, providing different insights into where people come from and where they end up. For example, economic studies often rank the population with the richest at the top and the poorest at the bottom, looking at cross-generation movements up and down the income distribution. This means the relative income categories used to classify people can be kept constant across successive generations.² By contrast, as the composition of the labour market has altered through time, the numbers of people in different social class categories has changed. It may come as little surprise that the economic and sociological approaches have sometimes produced differing estimates of how social mobility has changed over time.

Most of the early research on intergenerational mobility tracked only the status of fathers and their sons. This was because fewer women were working in the labour market in the past, and their patterns of employment were less predictable than those for men. There were therefore prohibitively low sample sizes of mothers with labour earnings in many data sources. This has changed during recent decades as more females have joined the labour force, and richer data have become available. There is a separate literature focusing on many important issues of gender inequality we do not cover. However, where possible we report mobility trends and relevant statistics for women as well as men.

Similarly, the literature has for the most part suffered from a paucity of data tracking the outcomes for people with different ethnic backgrounds. An important emerging research area is gauging intersectional impacts – assessing outcomes for people categorised by status, gender and ethnicity – but the studies are few and far between. Wherever possible we highlight findings for the UK as a whole, but sometimes (especially on school education) we have to make do with data covering just England. Many of the most relevant large-scale data studies also come from the United States, but we will refer to international studies where relevant as well.

Intragenerational mobility, as opposed to intergenerational mobility, refers to movement between income or class positions during a person's own lifetime. Multigenerational mobility refers to transitions over not one, but multiple generations. Social mobility can be short range and long range, featuring a nudge along the income spectrum, or a full rags-to-riches leap. Average social mobility rates conceal large variations for those at the top and bottom of society. Considering the whole distribution as well as the nature of shifts at different points is critical for the study of intergenerational mobility patterns.

Social mobility can be measured in absolute or relative terms. For relative measures, if one person goes up, another one goes down. On the other hand, absolute mobility rates show the percentage of people whose income or class destinations improve or worsen compared with their income or class origins. This can be upward and downward in direction. An example of upward absolute intergenerational mobility would be earning more in real terms than your parents. Alternatively, it occurs when your social class is higher up the class structure. Relative mobility rates on the other hand describe the relative chances of people from different backgrounds moving up or down the income or social ladder. Sociologists sometimes call this social fluidity.

In education debates, social mobility has been used as a more generic term for improving the results of pupils from poorer backgrounds – tied to efforts to close achievement gaps between disadvantaged children and their more privileged peers. The guiding principle is that children should fulfil their potential irrespective of their background. However, as we do not know the status of students’ parents or outcomes of students as adults, these are only indicative measures of social mobility, based on the assumption that the individual benefits from education in the past will continue for future generations.

Social Mobility Research

To our knowledge, the term social mobility was first coined in the early twentieth century. The Russian–American sociologist Pitrim Sorokin was himself a story of upward mobility – a trait of many scholars in this field. In 1922, he fled from Russia, evading capture by Lenin's forces as the Bolsheviks consolidated power after the Russian Revolution. Sorokin emigrated to the United States where he founded Harvard University's sociology department.

Sorokin was a keen political activist and was interested in the stratification of societies into lower and upper classes defined by their wealth and power. Tracking the backgrounds of people entering various elites, Sorokin studied what he called vertical social mobility – ‘any transition of an individual, social object or value…from one social position to another’ (Sorokin, 1927). Vertical mobility could occur when individuals leaped from one class to another. On the other hand, it could describe the movement of whole groups or people closer or further apart.

Over the last century, the field has gone from data poor to data rich. The golden era of British sociological studies after the Second World War was founded on nationally representative cohort surveys offering rich details of parents, families and children. However, even these studies seem small scale compared with the big data era of the early twenty-first century.

Chetty et al. (2014b) used the tax records of some 40 million Americans to reveal a detailed map of upward mobility levels for children born between 1980 and 1982 in different cities, counties and states across the United States. This landmark work based on extremely rich data shows how far social mobility research has advanced.

Data are the life blood of social science. The UK has been blessed with national cohort studies enabling researchers to gain numerous insights into the changing life experiences and outcomes of successive generations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Titles in the Series
• About the Series
• About the Authors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Background
• 3 What do We Know?
• 4 What should we do?
• Conclusion
• References
• Index