Income mobility is fair to middling
Nigel Williams, 4 February 2014
A great feature of research by John Jerrim’s that he looks at the evidence before pronouncing. His piece, published today by the Institute of Education, looks at incomes across generations using three international datasets. The European Social Survey, the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies all have the potential to shed light on the questions that frequently get only the glib assumption that Britain has ceased to be socially mobile. Looking particularly at the gap between incomes of the children of highly educated and less educated parents, he finds plenty of comparable countries perform better and plenty worse, if the ideal is to close the gap. Civitas author Peter Saunders has been saying something similar for years and need not worry that his conclusions are in danger of being overturned.
Looking more closely, Britain has some distinctive features. The report uses quantile regression, which is a technique to compare results across the spectrum rather than using a single summary statistic. Dr Jerrim’s analysis takes the offspring of highly educated parents and calculates incomes 20, 30, 40, to 80 per cent up the scale. It does the same for the offspring of less educated parents. A graph shows the proportional differences between them. In those terms, the gap is larger at the low-income end than the higher. Those doing well from a background with fewer educational qualifications can earn a substantial proportion of the income coming to their peers from a more educated backgound. However, at the bottom end of the income distribution, an educated parental background brought a more substantial premium as they were protected from some of the worse effects of downward mobility.
Readers will need to read Dr Jerrim’s paper themselves for his discussion and conclusions. His research may help answer the secondary question of why, when UK mobility is nothing exceptional, we like to claim that it is.