Climbing a molehill

There’s been a lot of talk about the reduction in social mobility in recent years. But isn’t it really the case that it was the social mobility of the 30 post-war years that was a historical aberration, sparked by a one-off shift from manual labour to white-collar jobs, and we are now returning to more normal levels? It’s a simple fact that intelligence and capability are largely inherited traits (although obviously there are exceptions) and thus, unless there are changes in the structure of society, most children will end up in the same kind of station in life their parents occupied. Even if you took children away from their parents and brought them up in collective nurseries you would probably end up with similar outcomes.

And, while Gordon Brown says that in future there will be more “middle-class” jobs, many jobs in the “knowledge economy” are very vulnerable to both computerisation and offshoring. The real growth in jobs in the future is likely to be in those that require an actual physical presence to carry them out – nurses, care assistants, plumbers, hairdressers, gardeners, mechanics etc. Which are precisely the kind of jobs that are too often dismissed as low-status, and for which we are not doing enough to train our young people. The wealthy in the future will be more and more defined as conspicuous consumers of services rather than goods.