Читать книгу What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility? - Lee Elliot Major - Страница 13

We know little about the UK's social mobility trends before the Second World War. There is a lack of data on pre-war generations. But what we do know appears to confirm the UK's reputation as a rigid society. One study tracking fathers and sons from the beginning of the 1850s to the beginning of the 1900s found higher rates of social fluidity in the United States compared with Great Britain before both countries introduced modern welfare systems (Long and Ferrie, 2013). ‘Britain has been viewed, since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx (in the early nineteenth century), as a considerably more rigid system in which family background plays a much more significant role in determining current prospects than in the US', they reported. Miles (1999) found between 60 and 68 per cent of men married between 1839 and 1894 in England were in the same occupational class as their fathers when the grooms married.¹

The UK's social mobility story since the end of the Second World War can be told in much richer detail. It can be defined by four distinct ages, across seven decades since 1950. First was the golden age of absolute social mobility, fuelled by a boom in professional jobs of the new post-war economy; then came the decade of economic decline, triggered by a global recession; this was followed by the era of rising inequality with those on the upper rungs of the social ladder increasingly detached from the majority below; finally, there was a modern era of falling absolute mobility, defined by shrinking opportunity and increasing divides in society. The fear is that this will turn into a dark age with the COVID-19 recession exacerbating existing inequalities and hindering social mobility.

Figure 2.1 shows each of these time periods featuring different patterns of absolute mobility resulting from economic growth and societal inequality. The upper right quadrant corresponds to the high growth of 1950 through to 1970 with relatively low levels of inequality. With the 1970s came declining absolute mobility, but again without inequality rising, as shown in the lower right quadrant. The 1980s is the period of rising inequality, but with decent economic growth generating absolute mobility (the upper left quadrant), while the post-global financial crisis period from 2008 to the present day (in the lower left quadrant) has the worrying feature of falling absolute mobility.

Figure 2.1 Four ages of social mobility in the past 70 years