Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and Capitalismcame to a surprising conclusion. In the space of just twelveyears, they said, there were ‘sharp falls in cross-generationmobility of economic status between the cohorts’ (ibid.:13). The researchers hypothesised that this was due to themiddle classes capitalising on the expansion of higher educationin the second half of the twentieth century. Theirfinding, they said, ‘flatly contradicts the common viewthat anyone can make it in modern Britain’ (Blanden et al.2002: i). This was hyperbole, but it certainly supported amore pessimistic view of social mobility than had previouslybeen held.Blanden et al. were subsequently funded and promotedby the Sutton Trust, a think tank which was founded topromote greater social mobility. In the academic debatethat followed, new research was brought to the table. Goldthorpeand Jackson (2007) found that relative mobility forboth men and women had remained ‘essentially constant’in the post-war era, and when Goldthorpe and Mills (2008)studied data from 1972 and 2005, they again found thatsocial mobility had not been declining. Much the sameconclusions were drawn by Paterson and Iannelli (2007),Lambert et al. (2007), Li and Devine (2011) and others.Some researchers found that relative mobility had actuallyimproved somewhat, such as Heath and Payne (2000),who concluded that there had been a ‘real, albeit small, increasein the openness of British society.’ Likewise, Li andDevine (2011: 9) found a ‘weakening association betweenorigin and destination classes over time’, with ‘increasingsocial fluidity over the period covered [1991 to 2005]even though the extent of the increase is rather small’. All170