Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and Capitalismduring the three-day-week of 1974 when incomes wereparticularly unstable. It has also been noted that only13 per cent of the people involved in the income surveysended up in the analysis of Blanden et al., thus weakeningits statistical power (Gorard 2008). As a result of theseand other methodological problems, such as excluding theself-employed from the analysis, it has been argued thatthe 1958 cohort showed an implausibly weak relationshipbetween the earnings of fathers and sons which made the1970 cohort look relatively less mobile even though therehad been no real change.Meanwhile, new evidence has undermined Blanden’shypothesis that higher education has become increasinglydominated by the middle class (Boliver 2011; Ianelli et al.2011). In fact, as Goldthorpe notes: ‘social class differencesin access to higher education, though wide, remainedessentially unchanged [in the late twentieth century]’(Goldthorpe 2012: 9). In response, Blanden has arguedplausibly that the contrasting findings for class mobilityand income mobility are not necessarily incompatible, butcan be explained by wider earnings gaps within the sevenoccupational classes studied by sociologists (Blanden et al.2013).There is, then, a legitimate academic debate about whyBlanden’s findings on income mobility are at odds with thebulk of the social mobility literature. Much of this debatehinges on technical and methodological issues that eludethe average pundit and politician, but it should be notedthat none of the academics involved claim that movementbetween occupational classes has become less fluid over172