Tim Worstall

Changes in Social Mobility

We are told repeatedly that social mobility has declined in the UK. That it is lower than in wonderful high tax societies like Sweden.

OK, so I went out to try and see if there were any papers that would allow me to see what might be the causes of this. I found this from The Sutton Trust (I’m not claiming to have done a thorough search, this is the first one on the subject that turned up in Google) and they make it quite clear that they think there is a causal relationship between lower educational opportunities for the poor and the decline in said social mobility.

The period studied (1958 cohort, 1970 cohort and partially a later one) coincide reasonably well with the destruction of the streamed education system. Well, OK, I would say that wouldn’t I?

However, there’s something else that puzzles me a great deal more. All the figures used are ratios of father to son earnings. But this time period also saw, for the first time ever, a huge explosion of female entry into the full time paid workforce. I can see no allowance being made for this factor at all. The highly paid professions were, in the 1960s and 70s, almost exclusively male (the 1958 cohort) and this has now changed where, in 2006 the entry cohorts into things like medicine and the law are majority female.

That there are 50% fewer such jobs available to males now….well, don’t we think that this will have some effect on income mobility for males? And if we’r going to have a paper on income mobility for males, shouldn’t we actually mention this?

So, a provocative thought (and yes, I would love it if people, even Jim, were to point me to more research): the decline in male income mobility is an artefact of greater female participation in the labour market, most specifically the way in which some if not many of the traditionally high paid professions have become feminized.

Update. The lead author on that paper very kindly answered an email question on this. As what is being measured is the income quartiles amongst males only, the influence of women in the labour market isn’t an issue.

The UK figures are on father’s income, the cross country comparisons on family, so that the two sets are not directly comparable but that’s very different from the issue I raise above.

In

11 responses

  1. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    On that basis you should actually be seeing serious male labour mobility downwards. My cynical guess on this would be that there is a pretty close correlation between the class of both partners & in particular that women don’t marry down – lady doctors don’t marry brickies – so it wouldn’t make much difference.

    Reply
  2. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    On that basis you should actually be seeing serious male labour mobility downwards. My cynical guess on this would be that there is a pretty close correlation between the class of both partners & in particular that women don’t marry down – lady doctors don’t marry brickies – so it wouldn’t make much difference.

    Reply
  3. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    On that basis you should actually be seeing serious male labour mobility downwards. My cynical guess on this would be that there is a pretty close correlation between the class of both partners & in particular that women don’t marry down – lady doctors don’t marry brickies – so it wouldn’t make much difference.

    Reply
  4. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    On that basis you should actually be seeing serious male labour mobility downwards. My cynical guess on this would be that there is a pretty close correlation between the class of both partners & in particular that women don’t marry down – lady doctors don’t marry brickies – so it wouldn’t make much difference.

    Reply
  5. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    On that basis you should actually be seeing serious male labour mobility downwards. My cynical guess on this would be that there is a pretty close correlation between the class of both partners & in particular that women don’t marry down – lady doctors don’t marry brickies – so it wouldn’t make much difference.

    Reply
  6. Martin Avatar
    Martin

    Tim,
    For your thought to succeed one must assume that men who would have become doctors or lawyers ended up doing something else because of demographics.
    Not necessarily. More female lawyers equals more lawyers all round, because the greatest historic driver of employment growth in that sphere has been Parliament enacting more laws. We joined the EECU over the same period, and that has increased the number of laws almost exponentially.
    Similarly, deregulated financial markets may have done as much as demographics to broaden the accountancy profession’s sphere of operations, increased NHS funding and research advances, and the growth in private medicine, doing the same for the doctors, etc.
    And the Sams who lost out to the Samanthas’ UCCA scores might have become highly successful entrepeneurs. So unless someone can produce firm data, one would have to say it’s merely an interesting idea.

    Reply
  7. thebizofknowledge Avatar
    thebizofknowledge

    I stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. Most research that is reported in the media is distorted, not necessarily intentionally. Correlational studies are attributed as cause and effect, and confounding variables are often not discussed at all, as you have pointed out here.

    Reply
  8. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    Pity that so few of the lassies took it into their heads to be physics teachers, eh?

    Reply
  9. james C Avatar
    james C

    It could well be that when, to be somewhat facetious, lots of posh women entered the workforce they took high status jobs that would otherwise have gone to men from the lower classes.
    James

    Reply
  10. James of England Avatar
    James of England

    It strikes me that women are a lot like immigrants in this model, no? One of the arguments I still have some difficulty understanding the rebuttal to (I know that there is a rebuttal, but my economics is often weak) is that the economic problem with immigration comes in part from knocking out the entry level opportunities for poorer and lower skilled natives. That would, I suppose, lower income mobility. That said, if you’re not going to allow people to get away with ignoring some frictional issues with the statistics, it seems a bit unkind to criticise La Polla for the same oversight.

    Reply
  11. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Tim could you explain the explanation a little more?
    Tim adds: Sure. My original contention was wrong.
    I was thinking that the impact of women joining the workforce would naturally mean lower income mobility amongst men. That the figures used are only about income quartiles of men means that that supposition is wrong.
    I’d still love to see the full figures, but so far, I’m not correct.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to james CCancel reply

Discover more from Tim Worstall

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading