What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility?. Lee Elliot Major
Elliot Majoris the UK's first Professor of Social Mobility, based at the University of Exeter. His Penguin book Social Mobility and Its Enemies, co-authored with Stephen Machin, has attracted attention across the world. His book What Works? (Bloomsbury, 2019), provides evidence-informed tips for teachers to improving learning. He was formerly Chief Executive of the Sutton Trust and a trustee of the Education Endowment Foundation. He has a PhD in theoretical physics, and was previously a journalist working for the Guardian and THES. He is the first in his family to attend university. Lee was awarded an OBE in 2019.Stephen Machinis Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, has been President of the European Association of Labour Economists, is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and was an independent member of the UK Low Pay Commission from 2007–14. He has researched extensively in various areas of empirical economics, including current research interests in the areas of labour market inequality, social mobility, the economics of education and the economics of crime.
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