Income mobility has been rising fastest in Britain | Hacker News Reader

Income mobility has been rising fastest in Britain

gavinkellyblog.com

56 pointsrandomname225 comments

It's just really difficult to understand what this means.

The first big caveat is that 1990s to 2010s stops at the financial crisis. Due to austerity the UK has since then seen the greatest period of wage stagnation of all the advanced nations except Greece. But employment has remained high. So whilst the report is a picture of time before the crash its not clear to me what has happened since.

Second - Yes I think I do care more about the overall level of poverty and inequality. I'm not happy if people are moving in and out of destitution.

Third - I really don't understand how to square this analysis with the obvious fact that half as many people own their own home now as in the 80s. For 25-34 year olds its gone from 65% to 27% during the period of this study . What's that downward income mobility? I sthat a good thing? Or does that not count as it's not income?

.. I just don't really know what this is saying..?

> 25-34 year olds its gone from 65% to 27% during the period of this study

back then people used to be in full time work from 16-21. Education has assumed the role work once had. Most people I know are in Education untill mid to late 20s. 1/15 into their 30ies on and off. further to that 100 years ago home ownership was in the 15% area. Standards of living where "worse" by modern metrics (of course that's not true per se IMHO).

The jobs that are available now for 16-21 are subsistence jobs. It makes more economic sense that they spend the time in school and get out of the sub livable wage jobs.

Old Rich people like to point to income as a definition of "rich". They say "I'm poor", despite someone on £70k/year being unable to afford their lifestyle because of housing

It helps keep the taxation on the workers, not on the leachers

It looks like countries with greater inequality may provide more motivation for people to move up. Of course, there are countless other factors (regulation, societal norms, etc.), but if I'm a generally content person living in Finland or Sweden, and I'm relatively (but not remarkably) poor and still have what I need, I can focus on self-improvements that make me happy/fullfilled. If I'm in the USA, it'd be hard to divorce the idea of self-improvement from how I can monetize it. In countries where the poor feel more threatened (talking degrees, not absolutes), there's real urgency to distance yourself from that class.

I also wonder if the higher mobility among countries like GB, Japan, the US, and Turkey suggest societies that create more zero-sum scenarios. I'd be interested in other explanations.

The article doesn't touch upon education much at all, which I believe is a central part of social (im)mobility. Problems arising in society later on will simply stem from the early life of members of society, not afterwards. It's a common principle that education is the key to societal equality, in some way.

All I can offer is my story on this. I've lived in the UK all my life in all sorts of regions from those of lower working class (my hometown) to my recent years where I've lived in rather upper-class "lawyer-doctor-business owner" regions. The difference in education between the lower and upper classes is stark. Let me explain.

Upper-class children are enrolled in schools of like-minded high-achievers full of entrance exams and interviews (provides a non-zero floor to student "intelligence/quality" at the school), and strict rules/discipline. They are further pushed towards degrees leading to higher paying careers - Finance, Medicine, Law, by their families and the schools themselves. Their families purchase extra tutoring, they have smarter parents (this is a positive feedback loop across generations!) to guide them, and so on...

Compare this to lower-class children, who, in the UK (and i'm pretty sure everywhere else essentially) are enrolled in "state schools" (free). These schools have no entrance requirements (there is zero floor for student quality), the families almost never purchase extra tutoring, and are much less pushed towards "meaningful" degrees. The schools offer equal environments to the best and the worst of students.

This imbalance in education (and by extension upbringing in general) is what seeds everything else. And indeed, in the past few years the UK government has recognized all the above. How they plan of solving it? The reintroduction of "Grammer Schools"! These are state schools (still), but _do_ have enterance requirements, thereby allowing lower-class students of high intelligence/quality a chance to separate from the worst students in state schools and enroll in a more challenging education. There is much debate in the UK whether this will work, or will simply just allow children of rich families to more-often/further separate themselves from poor families. Time will tell.

That's my 0.02c anyway: Education.

If grammar (you spelt this incorrectly) schools were effective at improving society as a whole, you'd be able to measure an effect in the places in the UK where they were retained. Especially Northern Ireland.

Instead you have to address what happens to the 50% of people who don't get into the selective schools. You can't improve overall quality through rejecting students, because there's no "away" to reject them to!

People who are actually involved in education are more likely to tell you that the key factor for most of the lower-achieving students is obstacles, especially out of school; are they getting enough sleep and 3 square meals a day? Do they have at least one parent around who's engaged in their education? What obstacles does that parent face? Is the child being bullied at school or home? etc.

you'd be able to measure an effect in the places in the UK where they were retained.

I live in a very rural area where a grammar school has been maintained (which my wife attended) and most of the people who go there end up at good universities and then move away for good careers in distant cities. Meanwhile, the people at the comprehensives usually end up staying in our area on lower paid jobs.

Does this lead to be a better society? It certainly provides a way for poorer but smarter people to find a way 'out' of a humdrum rural location, but I don't think it makes our area any better in and of itself.

I find it interesting that the non-Grammar "comprehensive/secondary modern" schools in areas with Grammar Schools actually perform better than Comprehensive schools (such as the one I attended) in areas where Grammar Schools have been abolished.

Does this mean that such schools apply more focus to issues such as the ones you list in order to better compete?

Possibly. The key issue is the politics; selective public schooling allows the schools to be treated unequally by the resource allocation system, where the one with the worse performing pupils gets less resources and is less preferred by staff, reinforcing the cycle.

If I understood correctly, you are taking the opposite view from the parent post?

One way of avoiding any exams or interviews is to have your child start at a private school at nursery level - it's only if you transfer in later that they do the interviews/exams (NB not all public schools work like that though).

Mind you my son transferred between private schools at age 16 and the interview was mainly about rugby...

[NB Both my wife and I went to very humble state schools but we could afford private schools and, to be honest, the quality of teaching and facilities at private schools is vastly better to state schools so I've never regretted it].

Your own experience may be of better quality teaching in the private schools but that's not borne out by the evidence, what little there is. For reference, there's the recent publication of "Posh Boys: How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain" by Robert Verkaik, which explicitly states there is no demonstrably better teaching.

My own personal experience is of State, Grammar (selective) and Private. It's all about the intake, I feel. The quality of teaching isn't really different. If anything the Private school teachers are lazier because they don't have to try as hard. They also seemed more arrogant to me.

Intake is key. I positively hated school through to 16 when I then went to a separate Sixth Form College to do my A-Levels - and suddenly all the knobheads were gone and I could actually enjoy myself for the first time.

You always get knobheads, no matter the intake. If 3% of people are knobheads, with a class of 30 there's a 60% chance of having at least one knobhead. With a class of 20 it's 46%, with a class of 15 it's 37%.

You seem to be assuming that admissions is based on a lottery and expulsion cannot occur.

You might note that at what are considered "good schools", not only are neither of those things true, but trying to implement either would cause the school to be quickly abandoned.

you get knobheads whatever the admission policy. And the number of expulsions from schools is pretty much zero

One thing that stood out to me, I went from a private school with a class of 16 to a state (grammar) school with a class of 28. That does have an affect on teaching.

However also anecdotally a friend taught at a private school for a couple of years. Parents made it quite clear that it was his responsibility to ensure their angels passed the exams, no matter how thick they were. He didn't stay for long due to that attitude.

I went to private school for a couple of years from age 9 to 11, we all had to take and pass the exam to get into the senior division

I'm not sure where you get your experience of state education, but with two kids in state primary and now a comprehensive in working class East London, that's been far from my experience. Yes these schools are non-selective, but do excellent work with differentiated curriculum to ensure that children of all levels are pushed. When it came to choosing GCSE's there was explicit guidance as to which mixture of courses would be most attractive to "Russell Group" universities.

I have friends who moved down to Kent so that they could get their kids into selective grammar schools. There's little evidence that these schools provide better educational outcomes in terms of progress. They skim the most able from the system at the beginning of the secondary school process and at the end, they are still the most able, though not measurably better educated than the most able who go to non-selective comprehensive schools.

It’s also worth mentioning “selection by postcode”. My daughter goes to a state school but our area is comparatively wealthy, so the intake is biased towards wealthy families.

From available data it is not possible to show that education has any positive influence on economical growth. What it seems happens is that economical growth bring prosperty that allows parents to send their children to high schools and universities. The book [1] shows that very convincing.

Moreover, as money spend on high education in many cases is essentially unproductive tax, sending more people to universities may even harm the growth.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Experts

Gavin Kelly is associated with Downing Street. It's in the conservative government's interest to downplay social issues caused by its policies.

I smell a conflict of interest.

He worked at Downing Street until 2010, under the Labour government at the time.

Reads like an opinionated piece which is cherry-picking it's stats.

The report he's citing most heavily is indeed about social mobility, but social mobility isn't always "up", social mobility measured by OECD is the state of flux and certainly by itself does not correlate at all with improvements in social class from the lower levels.

The author also talks about "more equal" not equating to "more mobile" and he/she is absolutely correct, however the way it's phrased makes me believe he/she is intending to change the mind of the reader as to whether more equal is a good thing.

Overall I'm not coming to the same conclusion as the author from the source material. Flux is bad if you're middle/working class are ending up in the poor class. Which is happening from what I can tell anecdotally.

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