Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and CapitalismTable 1Relative mobility in the UKParent’sincomeSon’s income(bottom)Son’s income(second)Son’s income(third)Son’s income(top)Bottom 0.38 0.25 0.21 0.16Second 0.29 0.28 0.26 0.17Third 0.22 0.26 0.28 0.25Top 0.11 0.22 0.24 0.42A number of factors were responsible for the pessimisticview of social mobility becoming the conventional wisdom.John Goldthorpe attributes it to the media savvy of the SuttonTrust (Blanden herself has written of the ‘quite extraordinarymedia reaction’ to her research (Blanden 2013)), aswell as the political opportunism of both the Labour Party,which wished to portray its predecessor’s term in office as atime of declining prospects for the poor, and the ConservativeParty, which used the narrative of falling social mobilityto condemn Labour’s supposed failure to turn the tide.Peter Saunders (2012: 29–30) argues that the complexity ofthe evidence, combined with the inclination of politiciansto encourage a culture of despair, and the long-standingportrayal of Britain in film, television and literature as an‘unfair, class-ridden country’ also played a part in feedingthe narrative. Whatever the reasons, the outcome was, asGoldthorpe (2012: 7) says, that once the Sutton Trust[had] successfully got across the idea of declining mobilityto the socio-political commentariat, any differentview had little chance of serious consideration. Commentatorsapparently read each other rather than takingnote of new research developments.176