Might Britain be a Meritocracy?

Abstract

Most research on social mobility in Britain has found high absolute rates of upward and downward mobility but has emphasised the apparently low relative rates as measured by disparity and odds ratios. The assumption has been made that disparity ratios as high as 4:1 and odds ratios as high as 36:1 cannot be reconciled with the existence of equality of opportunity and that the meritocratic hypothesis has, therefore, been disproved. However, this research has never collected data on differences of ability and effort which may exist between members of different social classes, so the meritocracy hypothesis has never been properly tested. When a model of `perfect mobility' is fitted to John Goldthorpe's data on class origins and destinations, an extraordinarily close fit is obtained. It is clear that the meritocracy thesis is entirely consistent with the data reported in recent mobility studies and that it has not been disproved after all.