Читать книгу What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? - Lee Elliot Major - Страница 11

Studies of intergenerational persistence have become increasingly multi-dimensional. Generational persistence is observed not only for earnings and occupational class but also for many other attributes as well: from wealth to health, education to happiness, crime, consumption and even divorce.

The extent of intergenerational persistence (or immobility) can be measured using various statistical methods. Table 1.1 summarises statistical measures used in the literature. The first four measures described in the upper panel are relative measures: a correlation coefficient of a particular measure of economic or social status between generations; the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) from statistical regression methods; a rank correlation which compares rank in the respective distributions from one generation to the next; and transitions between different parts of the economic or social status distribution of family members across generations.

Table 1.1

For the first three correlational measures, a value of 1 corresponds to complete immobility, with parents and offspring outcomes perfectly correlated. A correlation of 0 corresponds to complete mobility, with no relationship between family background and the adult outcomes of children. For transitions, the example given in the table splits parental and child measures into five equally sized groups – quintiles running from the bottom 20 per cent to the top 20 per cent. In this case, complete mobility corresponds to children growing up in any parental quintile having a 20 per cent chance of ending up in any of the five quintiles in their own generation. Complete immobility is where everyone stays in the same quintile as their parents. There is no movement and everyone remains on the diagonal of the five-by-five transition matrix.

Absolute mobility is about how well all children of a generation do compared with their parents. The metric of absolute mobility shown in the lower panel of Table 1.1 is therefore the fraction of children who do better for a given measure of economic or social status than their parents did in an earlier time. For example, it could be the percentage of children whose labour market earnings or family income are higher in real terms than their parents were at the same age. It could be the percentage of children with higher education levels or social class than their parents

It is possible, in theory, to have different patterns of absolute and relative mobility (Berman, 2019; Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2016; Nybom, 2018). There could for example be near-complete absolute mobility and, at the same time, little or no relative mobility, if children are growing up in periods of rapid economic growth. Nybom's (2018) review, however, concludes that ‘it turns out that absolute and relative mobility levels seem to go hand in hand'.

One of the first academic papers on the intergenerational transmission of traits was published in 1886 by Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. ‘Regression towards mediocrity in hereditary stature’ reported results from a study of the relationship between the heights of parents and the heights of their children as adults (Galton, 1886).³ The correlations between the heights of parents and their offspring are relatively strong, varying from 0.4 to 0.6.⁴

Correlations for intergenerational income for developed countries vary a lot. For example, OECD (2018) reports a range from 0.12 to 0.62 for 23 developed countries, with Britain registering a relatively high 0.44. This is around twice as high as the clustering around 0.2 for the Scandinavian countries. Consideration of international differences, and their drivers, from comparable research is important as it suggests how the UK might improve its mobility levels.

There are far fewer studies assessing intergenerational persistence of wealth – including assets and housing – but what data exist show strong persistence, indicating that assets can have profound impacts on the trajectories of offspring (Blanden, Eyles and Machin, 2020; Charles and Hurst, 2003).

A large body of research confirms that education begets education. This works in several ways. Children with highly educated parents perform better in school and achieve higher test scores than children with less educated parents (Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2019). There is strong intergenerational transmission, as people whose parents attended private school are vastly more likely to themselves be privately educated (Dearden, Ryan and Sibieta, 2011).

Strong intergenerational education correlations feature in almost all countries, confirmed by research looking at the association between parents’ education, measured as the average years of schooling of the father and mother, and children's completed schooling (Hertz et al., 2008). The global average correlation between a parent's and child's schooling was 0.4. In a separate OECD study, d'Addio (2007) found one in ten people with low-educated parents continues on to tertiary education compared with two-thirds of children who do so with high-educated parents.

Intergenerational correlations in health status have generally been found to be smaller than other attributes, ranging from 0.2 to 0.3 (Halliday, Mazumder and Wong, 2018). However, more recent studies have produced higher estimates, suggesting that health status, like other measures of socioeconomic success, is strongly influenced by family background. Several studies have found that children with separated or divorced parents have a higher risk of experiencing instability in their own marriages or partnerships as adults (Kiernan and Cherlin, 2010). This is found not just in the UK, but also around the world. Sons of divorced couples are also less socially mobile than their peers from intact families.

Crime persists across generations. Swedish researchers found that children with criminal fathers in Sweden are twice as likely to have a criminal conviction than those with non-criminal fathers (Hjalmarsson and Lindquist, 2012).⁵ This is a high level of persistence across generations, and other evidence confirms this pattern in other countries. It suggests that law enforcement agencies should in part think of fighting crime as an intergenerational battle.

One lesson from these studies is that we should consider longer term cross-generational policies. Ideally, these should recognise the scope and aims of improving outcomes for both current and future generations. They are likely to have greater impact than the short-term reforms typically preferred by politicians.

In this book, following the background discussion in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 covers what is known about social mobility, summarising the main studies from several disciplines, focusing mainly on the UK, but also drawing on evidence from other countries, particularly the United States. Insights from research are grouped into four sections: reviewing international comparisons; detailing the era of declining absolute mobility; charting the variation of social mobility by place; and considering the persistence of traits across several generations.

Chapter 4 covers what we can do about social mobility. This is in some ways the harder question. We explore the general principle of fairness – which lies at the heart of all social mobility debates – and show how this relates to notions of collectivism, decency, community and equitable access, alongside intergenerational justice. We then assess the evidence for policies that have the potential to make the UK a more mobile society.

But first we provide the background on historical trends of social mobility.