Inequalities

Tag: social status

  • Is there really a ‘glass floor’? Or can the children of the elite be genuinely downwardly mobile?

    In the previous post I explained why, in order to get a full picture of downward mobility in Britain, we need to consider the prestige of people’s occupations. I asked whether people who had apparently been downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds might, in many cases, have actually fallen sideways into highly prestigious jobs. In this…

  • The missing piece of the social mobility puzzle

    This is the first of a pair of posts about a project I’ve been working on looking at downward social mobility. In this first post I’m going to talk about why we should care about downward mobility, and what might be missing from our current understanding of it. You can find the second post here.…

  • Do people always create the same status hierarchies?

    Do people always create the same status hierarchies?

    It’s been a while since we talked about the inequality hypothesis on this blog. It’s also been a while since I’ve seen any coverage of it elsewhere. For certain politicians and commentators on the left it seems to have settled into the status of fact (“we know that inequality causes all sorts of social problems”),…

  • Is it OK to let people trade in their employment rights for shares?

    Is it OK to let people trade in their employment rights for shares?

    Last October, the UK Chancellor George Osborne announced a new scheme to allow employees to trade employment rights for shares in their company. The idea is that, in exchange for signing away their rights to unfair dismissal, redundancy pay, and (the right to request) flexible working hours, employees would get a few thousand pounds worth…