Title:
Income and Class Mobility between Generations in Great Britain: The Problem of Divergent Findings from the Data-Sets of Birth Cohort Studies

Abstract:
While recent research on class mobility in Britain has found no change in the association between fathers’ and children’s class positions, research on income mobility suggests that the association between parental income and children’s earnings increased between the birth cohorts of 1958 and 1970. In this paper we have started out from these divergent findings from analyses of the same data-sets. We show, first of all, that the contrasting findings are not the result of the researchers concerned working, on account of missing data, with different subsets of respondents from the two data-sets. Secondly, we have shown that for both cohorts alike there is a stronger association between father’s class and child’s class than between family income and child’s earnings, although this difference is much reduced from the 1958 to the 1970 cohort. Thirdly, we have examined the relationship between class and income, as present in the data that we have used in our analyses of mobility, and find that this relationship is generally stable except where family income is involved. For the 1958 cohort there is a much weaker linkage than for the 1970 cohort between family income, on the one hand, and father’s class, child’s class and child’s earnings, on the other. And, fourthly, we show corresponding relationships between father’s class, parental income and child’s highest education, Thus, rather than searching the explanation to the observed increase in the association between family income and children’ earnings in specific conditions for the 1970 cohort, we would rather focus on the weakness of this association in the 1958 cohort. In this regard, we suggest that it may be that the apparent decrease in income mobility is at least in some important part the result of the family income variable for the later cohort providing a better measure of permanent income than that for the earlier cohort.