Keith, While your 80/20 thingee may have some descriptive relevance (I'm not even sure there but that is an argument for another time) I'm quite sure it has no analytic or explanatory relevance at all so your comments below are I think quite misleading. The issue in the UK (perhaps more than elsewhere) is one of "social class" and how that has persisted and been filtered and sliced and diced over time. The persistence of "class" as a useful analytic category in traditional working class areas (where the "class" has persisted long after the work has disappeared), in accents and styles (which seem to persist and move into prominence depending on the ebb and flow of the economy and of ruling class twittery particularly in the Conservative Party); the persistence in the role of class as a determiner of educational performance at the level of the family, the school and the neighborhood (into which immigrant populations have been assimilated in an interestingly different fashion from the experience of immigrants into the other English speaking democracies and so on and so on gives rather more useful content to a discussion of the data presented in the Guardian article. It has been a long time since I looked at that stuff directly but everything I read indicates that a simple ins/outs; 20/80s; or whatever doesn't really account for very much in the current experience of the UK. M -----Original Message----- From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2012 12:33 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; michael gurstein Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: [NetBehaviour] Social mobility: the charts that shame Britain
At 13:13 23/05/2012, Mike wrote: Subject: [NetBehaviour] Social mobility: the charts that shame Britain Can you go from stacking shelves to heading up a major corporation in Britain? The data suggests it's unlikely. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/may/22/social-mobility-data-cha rts#zoomed-picture I suppose we ought to feel shame over here. We have crocodile tears from the leaders of the Lib-Dems (just as we do from the Tories) from time to time. But as they have always been (and still are) predominantly products of the privately-educated 20-class their anguish soon subsides. As for the Labour Party, we can't hope for any worthwhile reform from them. On the one hand, they daren't encourage quality competition from a much wider swathe of private schools because they're strapped by the state teachers' unions; on the other hand, the leaders make sure that their own children go to private schools (or to one of a handful of exceptional state schools, usually in London) and when they retire from politics, make sure they make enough money to securely implant their descendants within the 20-class fold. However, despite those comments I'm optimistic about social mobility in future decades within the UK (or any country that wishes to be economically viable). The increasing need for specialization and high talent in future years means that the 20-class will longer be quite so self-selective in education and parentage as it has been for the past 150 years or so, but will have to expand opportunities to children of the 80-class more than somewhat and also to try and reach down to earlier ages before too much mental blunting has been done by lack of adequate nursery socialization and education. At present, this leaves most "ordinary" 80-class children at the time of puberty at least four or five years behind 20-class children. From puberty onwards, any deficiencies in high skills not learned by then can seldom be remedied. As the 80-class continues to decline in numbers due to insufficient family size, then I think we'll see social mobility growing hugely within the remaining 20-class. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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