2017-12-05
37 分钟Welcome to LSE IQ,
a podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science where we ask leading social scientists and other experts to answer an intelligent question about economics,
politics or society.
Climbing the social ladder by entering an elite profession or earning lots of money is something
that many of us aspire to.
Yet in Britain today, how far you will progress largely depends on how well your parents did.
Younger people are also facing the very real prospect of achieving less than their parents.
In this episode, Joanna Bale asks why is social mobility declining?
Rich thick kids do better than poor clever children and when they arrive at school the situation
as they go through gets worse.
Those were the words of Michael Gove when he was Education Secretary in 2010 as he cited research which showed
that children of low cognitive ability from wealthy backgrounds overtake children of high cognitive ability from poor backgrounds before they even arrive at school.
His former Prime Minister David Cameron at the 2015 Conservative Party Conference echoing those concerns.
Now if we tackle the causes of poverty, we can make our country greater.
But there's another big social problem we need to fix.
In politicians speak, a lack of social mobility.
In normal language,
people unable to rise from the bottom to the top or even from the middle to the top because of their background.
Listen to this.
Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world.