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 low sample sizes of mothers with labour earnings in many data sources. This has changed during recent decades as more females have joined the labour force, and richer data have become available. There is a separate literature focusing on many important issues of gender inequality we do not cover. However, where possible we report mobility trends and relevant statistics for women as well as men.
Similarly, the literature has for the most part suffered from a paucity of data tracking the outcomes for people with different ethnic backgrounds. An important emerging research area is gauging intersectional impacts – assessing outcomes for people categorised by status, gender and ethnicity – but the studies are few and far between. Wherever possible we highlight findings for the UK as a whole, but sometimes (especially on school education) we have to make do with data covering just England. Many of the most relevant large-scale data studies also come from the United States, but we will refer to international studies where relevant as well.
Intragenerational mobility, as opposed to intergenerational mobility, refers to movement between income or class positions during a person's own lifetime. Multigenerational mobility refers to transitions over not one, but multiple generations. Social mobility can be short range and long range, featuring a nudge along the income spectrum, or a full rags-to-riches leap. Average social mobility rates conceal large variations for those at the top and bottom of society. Considering the whole distribution as well as the nature of shifts at different points is critical for the study of intergenerational mobility patterns.
Social mobility can be measured in absolute or relative terms. For relative measures, if one person goes up, another one goes down. On the other hand, absolute mobility rates show the percentage of people whose income or class destinations improve or worsen compared with their income or class origins. This can be upward and downward in direction. An example of upward absolute intergenerational mobility would be earning more in real terms than your parents. Alternatively, it occurs when your social class is higher up the class structure. Relative mobility rates on the other hand describe the relative chances of people from different backgrounds moving up or down the income or social ladder. Sociologists sometimes call this social fluidity.
In education debates, social mobility has been used as a more generic term for improving the results of pupils from poorer backgrounds – tied to efforts to close achievement gaps between disadvantaged children and their more privileged peers. The guiding principle is that children should fulfil their potential irrespective of their background. However, as we do not know the status of students’ parents or outcomes of students as adults, these are only indicative measures of social mobility, based on the assumption that the individual benefits from education in the past will continue for future generations.
Social Mobility Research
To our knowledge, the term social mobility was first coined in the early twentieth century. The Russian–American sociologist Pitrim Sorokin was himself a story of upward mobility – a trait of many scholars in this field. In 1922, he fled from Russia, evading capture by Lenin's forces as the Bolsheviks consolidated power after the Russian Revolution. Sorokin emigrated to the United States where he founded Harvard University's sociology department.
Sorokin was a keen political activist and was interested in the stratification of societies into lower and upper classes defined by their wealth and power. Tracking the backgrounds of people entering various elites, Sorokin studied what he called vertical social mobility – ‘any transition of an individual, social object or value…from one social position to another’ (Sorokin, 1927). Vertical mobility could occur when individuals leaped from one class to another. On the other hand, it could describe the movement of whole groups or people closer or further apart.
Over the last century, the field has gone from data poor to data rich. The golden era of British sociological studies after the Second World War was founded on nationally representative cohort surveys offering rich details of parents, families and children. However, even these studies seem small scale compared with the big data era of the early twenty-first century.
Chetty et al. (2014b) used the tax records of some 40 million Americans to reveal a detailed map of upward mobility levels for children born between 1980 and 1982 in different cities, counties and states across the United States. This landmark work based on extremely rich data shows how far social mobility research has advanced.
Data are the life blood of social science. The UK has been blessed with national cohort studies enabling researchers to gain numerous insights into the changing life experiences and outcomes of successive generations. The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS) follows the lives of 17,000 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week of 1970. Other birth cohort studies include the 1946 Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD), the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 2001 Millennium Cohort Study (MCS).
Without the findings from these studies, we would live in a less enlightened world, less equipped to face future societal challenges. It is criminal that social mobility research in the UK has itself suffered its own dark ages. We have no nationally representative datasets of similar quality tracking generations born in the 1980s and 1990s. The studies were victims of cuts to social science research under Margaret Thatcher's government. Thatcher's children are the lost generation at least in research terms. It is a tragedy that no British cohort study has been commissioned since the Millennium. Future researchers will be left guessing about the generations born in the 2010s (and perhaps 2020s), and will have to use different types of analysis and data to try to fill the gap.
Different Dimensions
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)
