Britain’s stiff upper climb

Dr Lee Elliot Major blogs on lessons from abroad for social mobility.

Is it harder to climb the social ladder in Britain than in other countries? I’ve been asked this many times in recent weeks. And more often than not it is a question posed by non-Brits. The British class system holds a fascination beyond these shores. How else to explain the success of Downtown Abbey overseas?

The issue has attracted extra piquancy after former Prime Minister John Major bemoaned the “truly shocking” dominance of the privately educated among the country’s professional elites. Meanwhile on BBC TV’s popular show Have I got News for You a panel of mostly public school boys made light of all the fuss. As one overseas colleague of mine has observed: posh Brits respond to the social mobility issue in one of three ways: deny it, laugh about it, or avoid it altogether.

The best data on this question comes from the Canadian economist, Miles Corak. Professor Corak  is arguably the world’s leading experts on international social mobility comparisons, and delivered the opening address at the Sutton Trust’s 2012 social mobility summit.

Being an economist, Corak measures mobility in economic terms: how people from one generation to the next rank in society in terms of where they are on the income distribution. This is but one measure of success in life, but it has the great advantage of being comparable internationally: you are looking at what income decile children end up in compared to their parents. It’s all relative. In contrast, like for like comparisons of social class – and the occupational titles it is based on – are devilishly difficult across different countries.

Below are Corak’s conclusions from a vast research literature. He ranks nations by the ‘intergenerational earnings elasticity’. This measures the stickiness between generations – the opposite of mobility. An elasticity of zero equates to a perfectly mobile society, where parental background has no impact on life outcomes; a coefficient of 1 would represent a world without any movement between income levels from one generation to the next, where outcomes were completely dictated by who your parents happen to be.

In the Scandinavian countries, as well as Canada and Australia, the link between the economic status of parents and the adult outcomes of children is relatively weak:  on average one-fifth of any economic advantage that a father has is passed on to a son in adulthood (having an average intergenerational earnings elasticity of 0.2). In contrast, in the UK and US, the link is strong: around 50 percent of any advantage is inherited by the next generation (having an intergenerational earnings elasticity of 0.5).

The figures suggest that in Britain (alongside Italy and the US) climbing the social ladder is far harder than all developed nations for which we have data.

Meanwhile the OECD last month published an international survey of adult skills which computes social mobility using a scale based not on economic but educational qualifications. This time parental background is defined in terms of whether parents left school without any qualifications or earned university degrees. This is then compared with their offspring’s scores in literacy and numeracy tests – a strong barometer of life outcomes in general. The tests were undertaken by adults from 16 to 65 years old.

What is fascinating is that these separate and very different data broadly confirm Corak’s international picture. Below I have looked at a subset of countries in the study that also feature in Corak’s comparisons.  The countries are ranked by the difference in numeracy scores for adults with parents who left school without any qualifications and adults with graduate parents. A bigger gap suggests lower social mobility.

You would of course expect a gap in numeracy scores for any country. But by far the biggest gaps are witnessed in the US and England /Northern Ireland. This suggests that educational as well as economic mobility is lower for these countries.