Hi everyone,
Here is a BBC article about the British class system and how it continues to survive.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160406-how-much-does-social-class-matter-in-britain-today********************
The UK is famed for the rigid distinctions between the different strata of society – but what’s the truth in the myth? And how does it compare to other countries?
“Class distinctions do not die; they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves,” the British sociologist Richard Hoggart once wrote. “Each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty.” A quick perusal of the foreign media would certainly paint a picture of a rigid class system, especially compared to places like the USA where ambition, talent and elbow grease are thought to be the only limits.
But although the structure of the class system may have changed since Waugh’s day, there are still very clear strata in our society, each with different levels of social, cultural and economic capital. Considering factors like education, salary, professions, and household ownership, the BBC’s own Great British Class Survey discovered seven distinct classes in total, with an elite (representing roughly 6% of the population) residing above a wide spectrum of working and middle classes.
One fascinating case study comes from the Up series of documentaries by Michael Apted. Picking 14 children of various backgrounds, who were all aged seven in 1964, he filmed them on a trip to London Zoo before following their progress every seven years after.
A few of the children have managed to change their circumstances through hard work and discipline. One boy, Nick, who grew up on a farm, is now a successful physicist living and working in America; another, Lynn, grew up in the less salubrious areas of London’s East End, but has forged a successful career as a university librarian. In general, however, the series has lacked any truly astonishing rags-to-riches tales. As the New Yorker concluded in its review of the latest edition, 56 Up: “The British class system has its protections at every level, but also – at least to American eyes – a built-in inertia. None of Apted’s subjects have become alcoholic or drug-addicted, but the predictability of most of the individual fates – working-class kids rising slightly, rich kids staying rich – makes one impatient.”
there had been a steady average rise in the population after World War Two, with each child expecting to be slightly better off than their parents. Unfortunately, this trend now seems to be reversing. “More men and women are experiencing downward mobility and fewer of them experience upward mobility than before,” says Erzsebet Bukodi at the University of Oxford, who calls it “the dark side of the Golden Age of Mobility” – with more people at the top, more have the potential to fall.
In other words, social class may be even less elastic than we thought – even if one generation pulls away, the next may be tugged backwards thanks to the broader connections of their family at large. “If you want to predict someone’s outcome, you don’t just look at their parents – but also their uncles and aunts, their grandparents and great-grandparents,” says Gregory Clark at the University of California, Davis. “They are all predictive.”
In fact, he found long-term social mobility to be very slow indeed, calculating that it takes around 10 generations for someone at the highest or lowest levels of society to reach the middle classes.
If these results appear to confirm the “inertia” of the British class system, it’s worth considering Clark’s studies of other countries, examining attendance at the USA’s Ivy League colleges and the State Bar Associations listings of attorneys or the American Medical Association, for instance.Despite perceptions of greater social mobility, he found that the rate of change was roughly the same as in Britain. The same turned out to be true for Sweden; although the overall differences in wealth do tend to be smaller between the rich and poor, you still find the same families occupying the more prestigious jobs – such as doctors, lawyers, or university professors.
Perhaps some families are just carrying the DNA that helps them succeed, he says. Such genetic determinism tends to be an unpopular idea among many scientists.
If he’s right, the British obsession with class isn’t so archaic. Whether you live in London, Beijing, New York or Stockholm, it can be surprisingly difficult to break free from the ties of the past.
**********************
I posted this because it is relevant to all of you here and may be of some interest. So...resist the temptation to start off about Indian caste system!
Cheers.
Sriram
