We all know social mobility has declined right? Well no, it probably hasn't.

If you study social mobility you are pretty much forced to study it through the rear view mirror, looking back, as it were, over your shoulder. You can of course pretend you are Mystic Meg and on the basis of what you know about how kids are doing in school take a punt at fortune telling (sorry, model based prediction) and if that's your thing good luck, you need read no further. Personally I find it hard enough to say what happened in the past and I'll leave speculation about the future to others.

But how far back should you go? That's a good question, but I'm going to substitute another: how far back can you go? "Can" here means something like: find a bunch of mobility tables that stretch back from more or less now a tolerable distance into the past, that cover roughly equivalent populations (though obviously not the same population) and can be coded into a reasonably disaggregated and  harmonized set of categories. 

The answer in the UK, if you are interested in social class mobility, is 1963 (other sorts of social mobility can be studied - terms and conditions apply).

I have assembled a set of 22 social class mobility tables for British men (tables for women & for households are in the pipeline) that cover the period from 1963 to 2018. All of these with the application of a little ingenuity & perspiration can be and in fact have been coded to the ONS's NS-SEC scheme. This wouldn't have been possible without the witting and in most cases unwitting help of colleagues both in Oxford and elsewhere who gave me access to, or put in the public domain, cross-walks and lookup tables that made it possible to span the decades of changing official occupational classifications. The results are not perfect but I'm as sure as I can be that diminishing marginal returns to time spent on classification set in long ago. I confess that there is one more table I could have added - the UK contribution to the 1991 International Social Justice Project -  but my nerve failed when I contemplated the effort needed to render ISCO88 codes into 1990 ONS SOC codes (I know there is an ONS lookup table - but that still leaves you with work to do). It didn't seem worth it to gain a few 100 cases when I already had several data points in the early 1990s.

So I have 141,247 observations, spread, rather unevenly, over 22 7x7 tables and a lot of caveats. Because this is a blog post and not an academic article I'm not going to go into all the caveats here. Apart from anything else I'm reasonably sure they don't affect the big picture. Suffice to say that age ranges are not always entirely consistent - mostly 20-64, sometimes 20-59, occasionally 20-49 and once 30-59. The target population varies a little - mostly GB, occasionally UK and once just England. There are minor variations in how origin class is defined. You can play endlessly with all of this, leave out tables, narrow down age ranges so everything is precisely aligned and...it doesn't seem to matter. None of this forces you to revise the prima facie obvious conclusion which staring at Figure 1 suggests.

The black dots are the multiplicative parameters from a so called "unidiff" model. As time moves forward they move downwards away from 1 (the level of association in the reference table which is the pooled and reweighted data from the 1972 English and Welsh Social Mobility Inquiry, the 1973-4 Northern Irish Social Mobility Study and the 1974-5 Scottish Mobility Survey). That means that the origin-destination association decreases over time. In other words, social class mobility increases. 

Maybe you don't like log-linear models, after all they are associated with those nasty Nuffield College guys and we know what they are like...OK, the red dots are the Altham index for each table. You would draw the same conclusion from looking at that...as you would from the Prais index, Frobenius' index, Yasuda's Index, Cramer's V, the contingency coefficient, the canonical correlation and Pullum's index 1 (remember that?). All agree that association declined - probably most rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s - ergo social mobility increased. The decline in association sees to have slowed down in the 1990s and may have flatlined after the turn of the millenium - but it is difficult to tell because we don't have many data points covering the last 2 decades.

But does any of this matter, or rather, how much does it matter? A rough and ready way of answering this question is to take  the odds-ratios from one of the early tables - the pooled 1970s English, Northern Irish and Scottish mobility Surveys and impose them on the marginal origin and destination distributions of the latest table in my collection which comes from the pooled 2014-18 Labour Force Survey (culled from Table 3.3 of this report). This gives a counterfactual 2014-18 mobility table representing what social class mobility would have been like in 2014-18 if the level of origin-destination association had been the same as it was observed to be in the early 1970s.

 

Table 1 shows you the observed 2014-18 "outflow" percentages ie p(D|O) x100. There is nothing very startling about it. Table 2 shows you the percentage differences between Table 1 and the counterfactual table that would have (hypothetically) been observed if in 2014-18 origin-destination association had the strength it was observed to have in the early 1970s.

Most of the differences don't look that big - but actually in proportional terms even small differences can be significant. Broadly speaking long distance upward mobility would have been rarer as would long distance downward mobility. Probably the standout difference concerns not mobility but immobility. In the counterfactual table almost 50% of those with class 1 origins have class one destinations but in the observed table it is nearer to 40%. On the face of it this is somewhat surprising. We are told that the privileged classes habitually use all their wiles to make sure their off-spring remain in the parental social class. They, like the rest of us, like the idea of social mobility but not the idea of downward social mobility. The social changes that have increased mobility could be said to have reduced the ability of  class 1 to "reproduce" itself. Why that might be will have to be a topic for a another time. But a parting thought. Could it be that the resources that are implicated in class reproduction - whatever these may be - are no longer as correlated with social class membership as they used to be (assuming that all of this isn't just some sort of measurement error induced illusion)?

Whatever happened to the working-class?

The current flurry of interest in social mobility seems to have lost sight of part of the motivation that sociologists (for, let's face it, sociologists have been consistently interested in social mobility for much longer than some other disciplines one could mention) had for studying it. Yes, estimating the probability that you can be found in a particular social class given that you started off in another class is useful. And ratios of such conditional probabilities (and even odds) can tell us important things about the "openness" of the society we live in. But there is another way of looking at things. 

Unless you have a prospective cohort study to hand you will almost certainly have to make do with a cross-sectional survey with retrospective reports on the social origins of the respondents. Rather naturally this leads you to do the conditioning the other way around and ask: given  you are now observed in this class what is the probability that you come from that class? For a previous generation of sociologists this opened their eyes to a different kind of concern. As well as mobility telling you about openness they were interested in the demographic homogeneity or heterogeneity of the social classes. If you read John Goldthorpe's Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain you will find that a lot of the analysis, discussion and speculation is precisely about this. 

One of the questions addressed in that book was whether the working class was becoming more demographically proletarian in its class origins. As rates of mobility out of the working class increased and in as far as the middle-classes were successful in making sure their progeny did not fall out of the middle-class nest it seemed to follow that the working class would increasing consist of people who themselves had working-class origins. What followed from that was speculation about the implications of this for the "classness" of the working class, the implications for class solidarity and for working-class politics.

But how have things actually turned out? The figure below reveals a rather different story.

As in my last post I'm restricted to talking about men because of the lack of  useful data about the class mobility on women in the 1970s. On the other hand I can bring the story pretty much up to date by pinching some QLFS data from Lindsey Macmillan and Luke Sibeta's Social Mobility Commission Technical Annex: Quantitative Analysis of Downward Mobility which I recommend for your reading pleasure. As an aside, though the QLFS collects data on social mobility, ONS perversely do not include father's or mother's NS-SEC in the most easily accessible public release version of the data (it isn't possible to construct the NS-SECs from the, much more disclosive, 2 digit SOC codes that they do release).

The figure shows the proportion of men aged 30-59 observed in the working-class (NS-SECs 6 and 7) at three time points: 1972-5 (the pooled England & Wales, Scottish and  Northern Irish mobility surveys), 2009-10 (Wave 1 of Understanding Society) and 2014-18 (pooled QLFS) by their class origins ( father or head of household's social class when the respondent was 14 years of age).  The pattern these data reveal is very straightforward. Compared to 1972-5 rather than becoming more homogeneously proletarian in class origins the working-class seems to have become more heterogeneous. Take for example NS-SEC 7 routine occupations. In 1972-5 around  two-thirds of the  men found in this class had fathers who themselves had either routine or semi-routine occupations. In 2009-10 this had dropped to about 55% and by 2014-18 it was less than half. In the seventies less than 5% of men in NS-SEC 7 had father's in professional and managerial occupations, but by 2014-18 just short of one-fifth had so!

If we can trust these numbers then it is no exaggeration to say that the "working-class" ain't what it used to be. Of course those who concern  themselves with electoral politics have long noted the decline of the working-class. But what they had in mind was usually its numerical decline not the increased heterogeneity of its class origins. Long ago Frank Parkin turned the conundrum of working-class conservatism on its head by arguing that conservatism should be thought of as the natural political disposition of the working class unless its members are exposed to countervailing institutions, such as trade unions or countervailing experiences such as some kind of demographic or cultural class continuity with previous generations. Maybe it is time for psephologists to take these ideas more seriously.

Footnote: The numerical results look rather solid - large samples, reputable surveys etc. But the sceptic in me does worry a bit about measurement error. Mobility is a difference variable and we all know that difference variables accumulate error like nobody's business. In particular the differences between the 2009-10 and 2014-18 surveys are suspiciously large (though conveniently supportive of my narrative).

The post-war baby boomers: a tale of two classes

Fertility in the UK soared during the second world war peaking in the 1946 birth spike. By 1949 when the Royal Commission on Population's report was published the threat of population decline that had motivated its investigations had disappeared. Between 1946 and the mid-50s, when a second baby boom erupted, fertility plateaued at a significantly higher level than that achieved in the 1930s. Pessimism about the future gave way to optimism. 

The children born between 1946 and the mid 1950s are often  tagged the lucky generation. The first to be born into a welfare state, they all, in distinct contrast to their parents, received a  secondary education and  the lucky few  a place in the the new universities of the Robbins expansion. They entered the labour market when the economy was growing,  powerful trade unions bargained on their behalf and income inequality reached historically low levels. Their careers were established before the shock of the OPEC oil crisis, stagflation and the subsequent radical change in the UK's political economy. They were old enough to live and in some cases make the sweeping cultural change of the sixties and to see it all turn to dust in the dreary seventies. Now, in 2021, almost all will have retired. How did things work out for them?

By chance rather than design it turns out that we can answer this question, albeit for only 50% of the population.  Between 1972 and 1975  data on the social mobility experiences of men was collected in all of the nations of the UK. Pooling and weighting it appropriately gives us a large sample of men aged 20-26 in the early 1970s. These men are part of the birth cohort  that was 58-64 when the first wave of the Understanding Society survey was  fielded between 2009 and 2010.  We don't observe the same individuals , but we can observe what happened to the same birth  cohort. 

Let's look at men coming from very different backgrounds, those whose fathers had higher professional or managerial occupations and those whose fathers had a routine occupations. In terms of the standard NS-SEC classification they were nurtured at the opposite ends of the social class structure: their class origins are  solid middle and core working class. We are able to see how the social class destinations of this cohort depended on their class origins at two points in their career, first in the early 1970s when they were in their early twenties and secondly in 2009-10 when they were in their late fifties and early sixties. It's worth noting that even in the earlier observation period we are not looking at new labour market-entrants. Most of these men left school at age 15 and the youngest of these had been working for at least 5 years before being surveyed in the early 1970s. The oldest would have been in work for at least a decade.

The top two bars in the figure give the context within which the class careers of the cohort evolved. They show the male class distribution, using the NS-SEC classification, in the early 1970s and in 2009-10. In their early 20s these men inhabited a world where just under 40% of the male working population was working-class (NS-SECs 6 and 7) and roughly 25% middle-class (NS-SECs 1 and 2). By the time they were contemplating retirement per capita GDP had roughly doubled and the class distribution had changed radically: 25% were working-class and more than 40% middle-class.

The next pair of bars show how things went for men with routine working-class origins (NS-SEC 7).  In the early 1970s just under 50% held routine or semi-routine jobs (NS-SECs 6 and 7) and about 12% had risen into the professional and managerial classes (NS-SECs 1 and 2). However, these men experienced considerable work-life class mobility. By 2009-10   just over a third held  routine or semi-routine jobs and just under a third professional or managerial jobs. In addition about 15% were small employers or working on their own account. In sum, about half had experienced some form of social class mobility by their early 20s and roughly two-thirds by the time their careers were drawing to a close. It would be perverse to regard their class origin as their class destiny.

For those coming from higher professional and managerial origins it is very much a tale of two cities or a game of two halves. By the early 1970s 50% had already established themselves in middle-class occupations (NS-SECs 1 and 2) and 50% were downwardly mobile in class terms with 20% holding routine or semi-routine working class jobs. However, by 2009-10 roughly 70% held professional or managerial positions and all but 10% had avoided ending up in the routine or semi-routine classes.

 Clearly for this cohort  "counter-mobility" - the experience of an initial period of downward mobility - followed by upward moves through work-life promotion - was still an important feature of the social mobility regime just as the 1970s social mobility inquiries had shown it to be for older cohorts of men. Some of this counter-mobility was probably "pre-programmed" in the sense that it was from intermediate white-collar clerical occupations in which promotion  would be an easily  anticipated outcome. But for the fifth of men from higher  professional and manager origins that entered routine of semi-routine jobs it is not entirely obvious that promotion would follow as night follows day. And it is worthwhile remembering that it is unlikely that many of these jobs would be holiday, fill-in or otherwise temporary jobs such as nowadays might be held by students or people still in the process of "finding themselves". Overall there is an impressive amount of middle-class reproduction. But a non-negligible proportion of it is via the path less traveled by.

Clearly I've only given you half of the story. As is well known the 1970s mobility inquiries did not collect data from female respondents and there are no large sample alternatives that can plug that gap. The mobility experience of this cohort's women cannot be investigated using these methods. The same is true of immigrants. There are simply not enough sampled in the 1970s surveys to give us any leverage. One thing that can be done is to exclude from the 2009-10 sample all cases in which the respondent was born outside of the UK. Doing so makes no substantial difference to any of the numbers I've reported so we can be confident the patterns are not influenced by that particular source of compositional change. The same cannot be said about compositional change due to mortality and emigration. The influence of the former is most probably negligible. Having survived to be observed at 20 the chances were high that the members of that cohort would survive to their 60s. Emigration was an important part of demographic change in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily to the countries of the old commonwealth. In my parent's generation  two out of three of their siblings emigrated in those years, one to Australia  the other to Canada. How they would have done had they remained in the UK is not knowable. As things turned out they made a decent life for themselves in a new place, though neither were mobile in social class terms. All in all it is unlikely that the general outline of the mobility pattern would be radically altered if we were able to take compositional change into account.

This cohort was then the original OK boomers. They were succeeded from the the mid 1950s until the mid 1960s by another, even larger, boomer cohort - one which I'm part of.  Perhaps someone with time and patience can tell class mobility story of the men and women of that cohort with the ONS Longitudinal Survey (it may be that Buscha & Sturgis already have).