Inter-cohort Trends in Intergenerational Mobility in England and Wales: income, status, and class (InTIME)

英国是一个开放、公平的社会吗？人们获得的工作和收入是取决于他们的努力工作和能力，还是取决于他们父母的财富和地位？对于出身卑微的人来说，现在比过去更难登上职业地位阶梯的顶端吗？或者，随着传统的阶级壁垒被打破，对权威的尊重似乎越来越成为过去式，我们是否正在成为一个更加“精英”的社会？在这项关于“代际社会流动”趋势的研究项目中，我们关注的正是这样的问题。“代际社会流动”研究的是，我们的生活机会在多大程度上受到我们出身的社会和经济背景的影响，以及这种情况是否会随着时间的推移而改变。近年来，英国政界人士对社会流动性非常感兴趣，左翼和右翼政党都认为，需要新的战略和政策，使英国成为一个更开放的社会成长之地。布莱尔和布朗政府发起了一些关于社会流动性的高调调查和报告，而现任联合政府则将增加社会流动性指定为议会的首要社会政策目标。然而，尽管政治共识是未来让英国社会变得更加开放和任人唯贤，但我们仍然不知道，在20世纪和21世纪的过程中，社会流动性发生了怎样的变化--如果它真的发生了变化的话。仅在过去的十年里，学术研究人员就得出结论，英国的社会流动性有升有降，几乎保持不变--这一结论显然不可能都是正确的。现有证据的不一致和矛盾性质对政策制定者没有帮助，因为如果我们甚至不知道最近发生了什么，就很难制定和执行能够使情况变得更好的政策。因此，虽然我们的研究必然是历史性的，但它很大程度上是为了为未来关于这一关键领域的政策发展的辩论提供信息。因此，我们在这项研究项目中的目标是澄清关于英国社会流动性最近趋势的辩论。我们将通过分析一个独特的数据源--国家统计局纵向调查(LS)--来实现这一点，该数据源包含1971年至2011年间英国200多万人的相关人口普查记录。与研究人员过去使用的数据相比，LS有许多显著的优势，它将使我们能够跟踪人们从童年到成年的过程，将他们在生活中不同时期的职业与几十年前他们父母的职业进行比较。我们将使用LS来计算和比较出生于20世纪50年代中期至90年代中期的人群的“流动性比率”。LS的样本量非常大，这意味着我们将能够就社会流动性的趋势得出非常细粒度和强有力的结论，不仅针对整个人口，还针对按出生年份和社会出身类型定义的子组。重要的是，我们将根据三个不同的衡量标准计算流动性：职业地位、社会阶层和收入，以确保我们的研究结果解决了人们社会和经济地位的关键方面，而不是像现有研究通常那样只关注一个方面。我们项目的一个显著特点是，它从一开始就与政策制定者和利益攸关方联系在一起，以确保我们的研究结果在政策制定领域产生影响，而不仅仅是在学术辩论中。

Is Britain an open and fair society? Are the jobs people obtain and the incomes they earn down to hard work and ability, or to the wealth and status of their parents? Is it harder now than it was in the past for people from humble origins to rise to top of the occupational status ladder? Or are we becoming a more 'meritocratic' society as traditional class barriers break down and deference to authority seems increasingly to be a thing of the past? It is questions such as these that we are concerned with in this research project on trends in 'inter-generational social mobility' - the study of the extent to which our life chances are determined by the social and economic context of our origins and whether this is changing over time. In recent years, politicians in the United Kingdom have become very interested in social mobility, with parties of both left and right arguing that new strategies and policies are needed to make Britain a more socially open place to grow up in. The Blair and Brown governments initiated a number of high profile enquiries and reports on social mobility, while the current coalition government has specified increasing social mobility as its number one social policy objective for the parliament. Yet, despite the political consensus on the desirability of making British society more open and meritocratic in the future, there is much that we still do not know about how social mobility has changed - if it has changed at all - over the course of the 20th and 21st Centuries. In the past ten years alone, academic researchers have concluded that social mobility in Britain has gone up, down, and stayed pretty much the same - a set of conclusions which clearly cannot all be correct. The inconsistent and contradictory nature of the existing evidence base is not helpful for policy-makers, because it is difficult to develop and implement policies which will change things for the better, if we do not even know what happened in the recent past. Thus, while our research is necessarily historical in perspective, it is very much intended to inform the debate about the development of policy in this crucial area in the future. Our goal in this research project is, therefore, to bring clarity to the debate about recent trends in social mobility in the UK. We will do this by analysing a unique data source - the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Survey (LS) - which contains linked census records for over two million people in Britain between 1971 and 2011. The LS has a number of significant advantages over the sorts of data that researchers have used in the past, and will enable us to track people from childhood to adulthood, comparing the occupations they end up in at different points in their lives, to those of their parents decades earlier. We will use the LS to calculate and compare 'mobility rates' for cohorts of people born between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s. The very large sample size of the LS means that we will be able to draw very fine-grained and robust conclusions about trends in social mobility, not just for the population as a whole but for sub-groups defined by year of birth and type of social origin. Importantly, we will calculate mobility rates along three different metrics: occupational status, social class and income, in order to ensure that our findings address the key dimensions of people's social and economic position rather than focusing on only one, as has generally been the case in existing studies. A distinctive feature of our project is that it connects with policy-makers and stakeholders from the outset, in order to ensure that our findings have an influence in the world of policy-making and not just in academic debate.