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Social mobility: Ambition is everything
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by generaldecay | July 22, 2009 at 09:44 am
56 views | 12 Recommendations | 2 comments
Sometimes the obvious needs to be stated. Britain is an unequal society. The elite look after their own. Poverty traps people from one generation to another. Government action and huge expenditure have at best stopped social division worsening. Encouraging aspiration is hard. And these conclusions, from yesterday's excellent report on access to the professions, sit alongside some startling individual facts.
Here is some information that may be obvious to some people but it wasn't to me. I half thought that in these days of open access to education, technology, and all manner of opportunities, social mobility in Britain may have been increasing, at least marginally. But apparently not. It seems that it is as difficult as ever to 'rise up' in this country. It seems that British society is still based on a 'who you know not what you know' system for success.
British society is determined by who you know, and who your parents are. Some things have improved, of course. There is more gender equality (although not enough); more racial equality, too. But effort and merit are not rewarded as they should be. In some regards, poor children born in 1958 had better prospects than those born five decades on.
This piece diverts a little and goes on to claim that there is not enough individual aspiration for social mobility to take place but I'm not seeing much evidence of that in the piece (perhaps there is more in the report itself). It seems to me that, ultimately, it's rather more about systemic limitations on who can 'rise' and when than about the desires of individuals themselves.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 13:13 on July 22nd, 2009
It's always interesting to delve into exactly how far individual efforts can go before systemic limitations begin, where success in anything is concerned!
at 23:07 on July 22nd, 2009
cyn.koo, it is indeed. As I said in the piece, my inclination is to believe that limited social mobility is rather more about systemic failures than individual failures. Although I don't discount, of course, that individual motivations play a part.
Thank for you the recommendation and comment.