In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two tramps hang around for a mysterious character who never turns up. Swap “policy solutions” for Godot and the Social Mobility Commission for the vagrants, and the plot could hold for this country. Everyone is waiting to see if the commissioners have ideas to improve social mobility, even though they cannot agree on what they mean by it. Last year, the commission said that new measures of how the circumstances of birth determine outcomes in life were needed to “inform early thinking about policy solutions”. This week, its report saw more indices appear, but no proposals that might influence them.
Historically, the focus of social mobility research has been on class, not income, because over an individual’s lifetime, the former decides the latter. The advantages of class are laid bare in a recent paper by Erzsébet Bukodi, John Goldthorpe and Inga Steinberg, from Oxford University, which looked at this country’s scientific elite by examining the biographies of all fellows of the Royal Society born since 1900. The study found one university, Cambridge, is key for membership of this exclusive club. Even when schooling was accounted for, Cambridge admission depended on having the right sort of parents.
