WHICH COUNTS MORE: ABILITY OR CLASS?

Abstract

There is plenty of evidence about social mobility in Britain. The best is the National Child Development Survey, which has analyzed all the children born in a single week in 1958 at various points in their lives. In "Two Nations? The Inheritance of Poverty and Affluence," the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research group, analyzed this data. It found that by 1991, 34% of those in the highest income quintile had fathers who were also in the top income group; 11%, however, had fathers in the poorest quintile. In a society with full equality of opportunity, and ability distributed equally across the population, 20% of the richest quintile would have had fathers from the richest quintile, and 20% from the poorest. This suggests that opportunity is dispersed in Britain, but not fully equalized.

But what if ability is not in fact distributed equally amongst the population? This question is explored, using the same data as the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in "Unequal but Fair?", a pamphlet by Peters Saunders, a sociologist at Sussex University, published last month by the Institute of Economic Affairs. He concludes that ability is greater at the top of the class/income pile than at the bottom, and that individual ability plays a crucial part in deciding where an individual will end up. Ability alone is well over twice as important as their class origins, three times more powerful than the degree of interest their parents showed in their schooling, and five times more powerful than their parents' level of education or the aspirations which their parents harbored for them while they were growing up.