Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

If you’re born poor, you die poorTowards a meritocracyLeaving aside the debate about relative income mobility,certain established facts should be emphasised. Noserious academic claims that class mobility has declinedin the past fifty years, nor does anyone deny that Britainexperienced a great expansion in absolute mobility whichhas slowed, but not retreated, in recent years. And, whileJo Blanden stands by her work, she has complained that ithas often been misrepresented, writing that it ‘is certainlynot true that mobility has “ground to a halt” or “fallento its lowest level’’ ’ (Blanden 2013). As for Alan Milburnclaiming that ‘invariably, if you’re born poor, you die poor’,he is simply wrong. As we saw in Chapter 5, every generationhas been significantly wealthier than the last for twohundred years or more. The poor get richer.It may be that Milburn was not talking about the poorgetting wealthier in absolute terms, but rather abouttheir position relative to others. If so, the relative mobility(fluidity) figures show that he is wrong about this too.Even if we rely only on Blanden et al.’s income data for the1970 cohort who came of age during the supposed declinein mobility, we see that there is still extensive movementbetween the classes (see Table 1 – taken from Saunders(2010b: 38)). In a perfectly fluid society, we wouldexpect 25 per cent (0.25) of the people born into any ofthe four income brackets to stay there, while the otherthree-quarters would be evenly spread across the otherquartiles. The data above show that this is roughly whathappens most of the time. There is a great deal of upward177