What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility?. Lee Elliot Major
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.
Notes
1. British official statistics since 2001 are based on the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC). At the top of the class hierarchy are the two levels of the managerial and professional salariat – Classes 1 and 2; and, at the bottom, are wage-workers routine jobs – Classes 6 and 7.
2. The distribution can be split into equal-sized groups of so-called quantiles, for example ten as deciles, five as quintiles, or the full set of 100 percentiles.
3. Galton uncovered the statistical phenomenon known as regression to the mean: the tendency of any measures to move closer to the average when they follow observations that are particularly high or low. The paper used many statistical terms still used by researchers to this day, namely correlations, standard deviations and percentiles.
4. A correlation of 1 would equate to complete immobility, with parents and offspring outcomes perfectly correlated. A correlation of 0 would signal no relationship. These are correlations and do not prove causality.
5. They titled their paper ‘Like Godfather, Like Son'.
2 Background
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