SOCIAL-MOBILITY IN BRITAIN - AN EMPIRICAL-EVALUATION OF 2 COMPETING EXPLANATIONS

Existing data on social mobility in Britain demonstrate a disparity of up to 4:1 in the relative chances of children from different social c lass backgrounds ending up at the top or bottom of the occupational cl ass system. In an earlier paper, it was argued that such disparities s hould not necessarily be seen as the result of social advantages or di sadvantages associated with different class origins, fbr they are also consistent with a model of meritocracy in which class differentials i n average levels of ability are reflected in the class destinations ac hieved by people from different social backgrounds. That paper has bee n criticised, both analytically and empirically, and this paper addres ses some of these criticisms through an analysis of data from the Nati onal Child Development Study. The analysis shows that ability is an im portant factor influencing social mobility chances, and through a seri es of logistic regression and multiple regression models, it demonstra tes that meritocratic factors (individual effort and ability) outweigh social advantage/disadvantage factors in predicting the occupational class achieved by over 6,000 men and women by age 33. The paper ends b y answering the analytical criticisms made against the earlier paper.