All Things Being Unequal
If you believe that society is more meritocratic than ever before, that anyone can work hard, climb the ladder and and reap the (financial) rewards, then you wouldn’t be alone. In fact, belief in meritocracy has been steadily growing across the West since the 1980s and has reached around 90% amongst Britons.
Yet in Britain alone the top 10% of households take home around a third of all income and own around two-thirds of all wealth.
Strikingly, the data indicates that as inequality has grown from the 1980s onward, so has the percentage of people who believe that economic success is the result of individual hard work and merit. — The gulf between the rich and poor is widening — we just can’t see it, Jonathan Mijs
The problem, it seems, is that the top 1%, where most of the income gains have been concentrated, just don’t mix with the likes of us; we just don’t get to see how rich they really are. As a result, the perception of income inequality is far lower than the reality.
Paradoxically, the more unequal our society grows, the less we experience it in our daily lives.
And it isn’t just that the rich are hiding themselves away. The stratification of society by income band means that most of us are unaware of just how many people are working but still unable to afford the basics, with the poorest 10% getting into debt just to fund day-to-day spending.
“Intergenerational elasticity”, which is the correlation between a parent and their adult child’s socioeconomic status, is at about 0.5 in the UK and US, whilst being much lower in Scandinavian countries (at 0.2). A higher number means lower socioeconomic mobility and indicates a less meritocratic society. Surprisingly, this figure has actually risen over the past century, meaning the connection between earnings and parental income has strengthened.
There’s no more striking example of this than Italy, which has a similar intergenerational elasticity to the UK (of around 0.5), but where “descendants of the wealthiest 33 percent of families in 1427 were likely to have above-average wealth in 2011”.
Currently only “15% ‘agree strongly’ that ordinary people do not get their fair share of the national wealth”, a figure which needs to change if the idea of a meritocracy is ever to be realised.
