A new study by Oxford researchers has suggested that an individual’s place in the British class system is closely linked to the position of their grandparents, not just their parents.
Working in cooperation with sociologists from the University of Durham, the researchers have found that social advantages and disadvantages can be transmitted across multiple generations. Even where the influence of parents had been taken into account, the odds of grandchildren reaching managerial positions are at least two and a half times greater if their grandparents were themselves employed in managerial roles.
The researchers reached their conclusions after collecting more than 17,000 responses from three nationally representative surveys of Britons born in 1946, 1958 and 1970. For the purposes of the study responders were asked to reveal their occupation as well as the occupation of their father and grandfathers.
Using this information researchers calculated that among men with both parents and grandparents in the professional-managerial class, 80 percent stayed in those advantaged positions. But among men with upwardly mobile parents (those with grandparents in unskilled manual occupations and parents in professional-managerial occupations), only 61 percent managed to stay there.
Dr Tak Wing Chan from Oxford’s Department of Sociology said, “The ‘grandparent effect’ in social mobility is found to operate throughout society and is not restricted to the top or bottom of the social class structure in Britain. It may work through a number of channels, including the inheritance of wealth and property, and may be aided by durable social institutions such as generation-skipping trusts, residential segregation and other demographic processes.
“Further investigation needs to be done to establish the precise mechanisms by which the grandparent effect endures, but our study of 17,000 Britons reveals that grandparents have a substantial effect on where their grandchildren end up in the British class system.”
The report also concluded that today’s older generation are now healthier, wealthier and more likely to assist with childcare, as well as passing on financial advantages to grandchildren in the shape of property and savings. Beyond the influence of the grandchildren’s formative years, wealthy grandparents might make financial transfers to help pay for their grandchildren’s education, and well-connected grandparents might use their networks to help secure jobs for their grandchildren.
In response to the results of the research, one second-year Keble historian said, “The really interesting results will only come when we start to look at the social mobility of our generation, i.e. people now in their teens and early-twenties. They’re the first generation in modern history who face the very serious prospect of being materially worse off than their parents.
“It seems almost certain that if nothing changes then the major political divisions of the future won’t be ideological or class-based, but rather intergenerational as the young and the old compete for increasingly strained resources.”
