Galloping economic inequality has provoked much fretting about social mobility, and particularly about entry into the ranks of “the privileged,” along with some soul-searching on whether mobility is such a good idea after all. In the United States political philosopher Michael Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit) concludes that social mobility is a mixed blessing at best. In Australia the Hamiltons (The Privileged Few) and the Productivity Commission agree that mobility is a good thing but differ as to its condition and prospects. In Britain two new books look at the question in very different ways and contexts but arrive at conclusions of a surprisingly similar kind.
Born to Rule is that rarity, an academic blockbuster that is also a good read. Its appeal is partly in the subject matter: who gets to be Top. There is something alluring about elites, sociologists Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman admit, something that breeds “a kind of prurient fascination.” But they also have some interesting things to say about an inherently interesting subject, and some very interesting things to report about how they found out.
Their big finding is that members of the British elite present themselves to the world in ways quite different from those that obtained until recently. Where once elites “luxuriated in a sense of their social and cultural distinction,” they now work hard to present themselves as ordinary in their background and tastes. Asked to tell their life stories, for example, they often begin with “elaborate, or even tortured ways of dancing around or downplaying their class origins.” Many go on to assert that their story of a long upward climb is the nation’s story too — these days, unlike days gone by, anyone can get there if they work hard and keep their wits about them.
Another finding: this is not even remotely true. “It still profoundly pays,” Reeves and Friedman say, “to be privileged in Britain.” If you were born in the top 1 per cent of the wealth distribution anytime since the 1890s “you have consistently been about twenty times more likely to reach the British elite than others of your age”; the alumni of top schools are about fifty-two times more likely; and those Oxbridge graduates for whom data are available are more than two hundred and fifty times more likely to make it than those who didn’t go to university. Reeves and Friedman agree that there is a bit more permeability in the membrane that separates elites from the rest than there once was, but more for women and for people of colour than for the workers, and not much overall.
So why do so many members of the elite go to so much trouble to fudge the facts? Why is there a flourishing “symbolic market for ordinariness”? Reeves and Friedman suggest that as the 1 per cent get richer and richer and the 99 per cent don’t, the 1 per cent begin to suffer “an insecurity about their moral legitimacy.” So, they try to seem ordinary and authentic, and it works. Born to Rule demonstrates that those who convince others that they have risen from humble origins and/or have mainstream cultural tastes are more likely to be viewed favourably by their colleagues, peers and constituents than those who don’t. Ordinariness “represents a rich form of cultural currency.”
Reeves and Friedman support this conclusion via a series of ingenious “experiments,” but all they really had to do is point to folksy Boris Johnson’s electoral appeal compared with that of his fellow toff Jacob Reese-Mogg. What’s working the magic here of course is the near-universal agreement that if you’re “privileged” but earned it then that’s okay. Such is the legitimating power of the meritocratic ideal, as the sociologists would say.
So, that’s an interesting story, well told, albeit a not very surprising one. What is both surprising and very interesting is the story of how they know.
The go-to source for “elite studies” in Britain is Who’s Who. For one thing it provides a working definition of what is meant by “elite” — MPs, senior judges, ambassadors, FTSE Top 100 CEOs, poet laureates (!), aristocrats, fellows of the British Academy and the like, along with others selected by a board of longstanding advisers, adding up to around 30,000 people or 0.05 per cent of the British population. For another, Who’s Who has been using the same definition ever since the 1890s. And for yet another: entries typically include career details, club memberships, school attended, professional qualifications and recreations as well as name, date of birth and contact details. And the icing on the cake: it’s all in the public domain — a total of around 125,000 people over 120-odd years — and digitised.
But how to get access to it? Answer: nick it. Reeves and Friedman tell a nice story against themselves: using a script set slow so as not to stress the servers they tried to scrape this massive database off the web. All seemed to be going swimmingly until it very abruptly wasn’t. The ultimate owners of Who’s Who, the august Oxford University Press no less, blocked their access — and very much worse, put a clamp on Reeves and Friedman’s employing universities’ book and journal subscriptions, and summonsed the miscreants to a meeting.
Expecting to be rapped over the knuckles at best they were astonished to find that Who’s Who was intrigued by their project, and after “extensive discussions” gave them full access to the lot. No doubt it helped that Friedman is an Oxford graduate and a professor at the LSE and that while Reeves wasn’t an Oxbridge chap he is now a professor at Oxford. It helped too that they’re co-editors of the British Journal of Sociology; that they’re fluent hobnobbers; and that they’re white. (They are also middle-aged family men, with two children each.)
With Who’s Who as basecamp, the intrepid researchers pressed on. Next came annual “probate calendars” stretching all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century; these helped isolate a subset of the elite, the “wealth elite” (6000 or so of the 30,000). With that sorted they scavenged for amplifying information from sources as improbable as the long-running radio program Desert Island Discs, and dived into ever-smaller sub-samples via surveys, interviews, and yet more surveys to establish, among many other things, the relationship between elite membership and political preferences (extending, by the way, to the relationship between judges’ decisions and their family background).
Born to Rule is an academic feat. But is it a feat worth seven years of hard work by two exceptionally capable scholars and considerable expense met by fat research grants? Unsurprisingly, Reeves and Friedman insist that yes, it is worth it. We have assembled, they say with evident pride, the most comprehensive database on the British elite ever (and we might add, they have mined it with great skill).
It’s not just that the work “punctures claims to ordinariness and meritocratic legitimacy”; it also “tells us something fundamental about the elites we get — specifically, how they think and behave.” Their results “suggest that the family you were born into, the school you attended, the university you studied at, all leave their mark on what you value, your way of being in the world, and even the kind of society you want to live in.” Members of the elite are generally further to the right than the population as a whole, and the wealth elite are further still; elite women, on the other hand, are more progressive than elite men, all of which suggests that an elite recruited in different ways would also have a different political orientation. So: “Elite reproduction affects the politics we get in Britain.”
Well, yes; but none of that comes as a revelation; it is documentation and demonstration more than discovery. And what is meant by “elite reproduction”? In the all-too familiar “social mobility” problematic “reproduction” doesn’t refer to the reproduction of a system but rather the transmission from one generation to the next of who gets the choicest slots in that system.
When Reeves and Friedman turn to the what-is-to-be-done question there is more than a hint that they feel constrained by their sub-discipline. A couple of their proposals do flow from their analysis — quotas for entry to Oxbridge with a view to reducing “the propulsive power of private schooling,” for example. But changes to the property tax regime? Or putting workers on corporate boards? Or abolishing the House of Lords? That kind of thing seems to have more to do with their politics than their findings. In fact, it’s the sort of proposal that would come from an analysis of how elites work and organise themselves and others, for/against whom and what, in what circumstances, and with what consequences — in other words, from class and class relations analysis.
To their credit Reeves and Friedman urge that practitioners of elite studies and of class analysis should be in dialogue, which would also mean a dialogue between sociology and other disciplines, political history particularly. We must wonder whether the class analysts would be able join such a conversation from a platform built by massive research grants.
Schooling invariably gets a part in any story about social mobility, usually as the bunny charged with doing what the rest of the social order doesn’t. In another new book, Exam Nation, schooling moves up from supporting cast to lead role. Sammy Wright is much less concerned with the access schools do or don’t provide to Oxbridge and/or the elite than with what the pursuit of access in the name of social mobility and equality is doing to schooling.
“The ranking and sorting of pupils… is not just an unfortunate but unavoidable by-product of school,” he argues, “it is the guiding principle.” What has long been the case has in recent years been taken to new levels by “reforms” that have ramped up competition between students and between schools. It’s not just unfair; it pushes students into deeply unrewarding study and pushes teachers and schools to work with the kids in bad faith.
There’s a kind of mass gaslighting going on, Wright says. “We tell kids to try their hardest, and that they can do it, and only afterwards do we admit that we only meant that for the top sets [classes].” And it’s warped the whole idea of school and education: “A competitive, marketised view of school, a transactional mindset exemplified by the prioritisation and proliferation of grades and the meritocratic ranking they feed has eaten away at the basic moral purpose of education.”
Can that purpose can be recovered? Wright is a teacher of many years’ standing, albeit not a typical one — he’s the son of an Oxford academic and an Oxford graduate himself, and was for a time a member of that peculiar institution the Social Mobility Commission (along with Born to Rule’s Sam Friedman). But when it comes to finding out whether and how the moral purpose of education might be recovered he thinks like a teacher not an academic. He takes a year off and talks to people, lots of them, students, teachers and others in an assortment of twenty schools dotted around England as well as to some of those “well-meaning people” who work in various branches of schooling’s HQ. He reads and writes and thinks as well as talks and listens, trying to find a way through the teeming complexity of it all.
“Every single type of school we have developed over [a] long history is still with us” he says. “The landscape of education today is like the landscape of our cities: ancient monument cheek-by-jowl with shining modernist towers, palatial mock-Tudor just streets away from cramped brick terraces.” And no school is an island, entire of itself; all are organised, in various ways by various agencies and above all by competition that pits these many kinds of schools against each other, with hugely complex consequences.
Wright never quite fights his way up to the clear air above the fog of detail. “If I’m honest,” he says at the end of it all, “in writing this book I have found myself caught up in a kind of dizzying paralysis. Every time I think I see something clearly, my focus shifts and it seems to be part of a bigger pattern…” Eventually, after a wealth of musings, penetrating insights, telling observations and revealing anecdotes he concludes that what England really needs is a better way of thinking about school.
Wright’s better way comes in the form of five “narratives” or principles: education is not a marketplace; school is at the heart of a community; knowledge is for everyone; school is for everyone; measurement is about improvement, not ranking. Yes, and yes again! But what is to be done? By whom? How? Wright has arrived via a different route at a point adjacent to Reeves and Friedman, intuiting that what’s really needed is a different set-up altogether, but not knowing whether or how it can be got, or even if he dares to say so. •
Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite
By Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman | Harvard University Press | $41.95 | 328 pages
Exam Nation: And a Better Way to Think About School
By Sammy Wright | Bodley Head | £22 | 288 pages
