Social Mobility In Decline In Britain, Official Survey Finds

Post Reply New Topic

This article is three years old, but it still rings true today. I found this particular quote interesting:

"Just under a third of people in the north-east said they felt they had a good chance to get on in life in their own region, compared with 74% of those in the south-east and 78% of Londoners.

The commission said the survey, carried out for its annual social mobility barometer, revealed deep unease in many regions about whether people had the same access to good education, jobs and housing as those living in the more prosperous south."

There really is a north/south divide in the UK. I suppose it might be similar in the US, in terms of the variation between different states, particularly the wealthy states versus those of lower ranking economic status?

Link below:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/21/social-mobility-decline-britain-official-survey-finds

I think social mobility is in decline pretty much everywhere in the Western world (will look for relevant sources if I can must up the energy). Simply put: If all the "nepo babies" get to have the fun and highly paid jobs via some kind of quasi automatic blue-blood "birth right", well the "lower casts" born into families of sanitation workers and grocery clerks get the... well, not so fun jobs since that's all there is left. Not that there's anything wrong with sanitation workers and grocery clerks: They were labeled as "heroes" during the pandemic and rightly so.

"People from disadvantaged backgrounds consistently fare worser than those born into more money, even when they match richer folk with educational attainments and so on. And today, it is even more true with the housing crisis of houses often being unaffordable without the bank of Mum & Dad"... (Sorry, I don't know how to use the quote function for a small part of the post).

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has published a book in the 60s (The Inheritors) to explain how students from disadvantaged backgrounds, even when they worked hard, did not have the same access to "Culture" (capital C) than students from privileged backgrounds. i.e.: the academic system tends to reproduce social inequalities at an early age.

But it's even worst nowadays in this era of "instant celebrity" (via social media, press concentration and the likes): Bourdieu's notions of "symbolic capital" (family notoriety, etc), "social capital" (network, contacts for "leg up") and "cultural capital" still hold true but are multiplied by an easy, almost instant access to higher positions on the social ladder for those born with vast amounts of all these forms of capital (capital is not simply money: your parents' notoriety and position on the higher rungs of the social ladder can be "inherited" too and the "bank of Mom and Dad" passes on more than just money and paid houses to the "inheritors"). Add a perennial housing crisis to the mix and, yes, social mobility is pretty much a thing of the past. According to Bourdieu it never really existed anyway.

Nose diving in Canada.

_________________
No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.