intergenerational inequality goldthorpe and erikson

7/27/2019 Intergenerational Inequality Goldthorpe and Erikson

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American Economic Association

Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological PerspectiveAuthor(s): Robert Erikson and John H. GoldthorpeReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer, 2002), pp. 31-44Published by: American Economic AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3216948.

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Journal of Economic Perspectives?Volume 16, Number 3?Summer 2002?Pages 31-44

Intergenerational Inequality:A Sociological Perspective

Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe

When

economists are concerned with the inheritance of inequality, theytypically focus on the intergenerational transmission of income orwealth. In contrast, sociologists are more likely to analyze intergenera?

tional mobility between (and immobility in) different class positions.One immediate consequence is that while economists usually work with inter?

generational correlations of income or wealth treated as continuous variables, soci?ologists more often work with intergenerational patterns of association between classpositions that are treated categorically. The standard data array takes the form ofa contingency table in which class origin is crossed with class destination. Theformer variable is usually indexed by class of father or other household head atthe time of a child's?that is, the survey respondent's?adolescence; the lattervariable, by the child's (respondent's) present class or class at time of inquiry. Thereliability with which father's class can be established in survey interviews has beensubject to a good deal of investigation with reasonably satisfactory results (Hope,Schwartz and Graham, 1986; Breen and Jonsson, 1997) and is in any event moreaccessible than father's income. The child's, or respondent's, class at time ofinquiry is not of course fixed, and significant worklife or intragenerational mobilitydoes occur. But it is known that the frequency of such mobility falls off rathersharply after around age 35, and intergenerational mobility tables are thereforesome times restricted to respondents over this age.

The difference in approach between sociologists and economists is not, how-ever, absolute. Sociologists have studied intergenerational social mobility on thebasis of correlations of parents' and children's socioeconomic status scores (Blauand Duncan, 1967; Featherman and Hauser, 1978). Following the pioneering work

? Robert Erikson is Professor of Sociology, Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm,Sweden. John H. Goldthorpe is Offcial Fellow, Nujfield College, Oxford University, Oxford,United Kingdom.


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32 Journal of Economic Perspectives

of Atkinson, Maynard and Trinder (1983), several other economists have of lateadopted contingency table methods in analyzing intergenerational income mobil?ity, using income quantile groups as their categories (for example, Dearden,Machin and Reed, 1997; Hertz, 2001). Bjorklund and Jantti (2000, p. 24) have infact recently called for further work of this kind, applying more flexible measuresof association in place of correlation (or regression) coefficients, on the followinggrounds: There are, a priori, no good reasons to believe that the associationbetween fathers' and sons' incomes is the same throughout, over e.g. the incomerange of fathers. Atkinson, Maynard and Trinder (1983, p. 180) also make theimportant point that a contingency table approach is able to bring out importantasymmetries in mobility patterns?for instance, long-range upward movementsbeing offset by more gradual trickling down processes ?that correlation or re?gression coefficients cannot capture.

Operationalizing Class

If the inheritance of inequality is treated in terms of class mobility, an obviouslycrucial question that arises is that of how the concept of class is to be understoodand made operational. As an initial point here, we would distinguish the conceptof class from that of socioeconomic status, which has been widely used inAmerican social science?and sometimes as the basis for constructing occupationalcategories rather than an interval-level scale.

We would regard class positions as being determined by employment relations(for more detailed statements, see Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992, chapter 2;Goldthorpe, 2000, chapter 10). Thus, a primary division is that among employers,self-employed workers and employees. However, employees, who make up the largemajority of the workforces of modern societies, require further differentiation,which can, we believe, be provided in a theoretically consistent way by reference tothe mode of regulation of their employment. The problems employers face,ultimately on account of the essential incompleteness of employment contracts andmore immediately in regard to work monitoring and human asset specificity, leadto contracts of significantly differing form being offered to employees who areengaged to carry out different kinds of work. These range from the labor con?tract, a simple recurrent spot contract for the purchase of a quantity of labor onthe basis of piece or time rates, via various modified or mixed forms, through to the

service relationship, an exchange of a longer term and more diffuse kind in whichcompensation for service to the employing organization involves important pro-spective elements, such as salary increments, expectations of continuity of employ?ment or at least of employability and promotion prospects and career opportunities.

A class schema, using employment status and occupation as indicators ofemployment relations, can then be drawn up on the general lines shown inTable 1. Versions of this schema have in fact been widely applied in studies ofintergenerational mobility, and in other sociological research, since the 1980s, and


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Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe 33

Table 1The Class Schema

Class OccupationalGrouping/Employmenttatus Regulationof EmploymentI. Professionals, administrators and managers, higher-gradeII. Professionals, administrators and managers, lower-grade;technicians, higher-gradeIlla. Routine nonmanual employees, higher gradeIllb. Routine nonmanual employees, lower-gradeIVa. Small employersIVb. Self-employed workers (nonprofessional)rVc. Farmers

V. Technicians, lower grade; supervisors of manual workersVI. Skilled manual workersVlla. Nonskilled manual workers (other than in agriculture)Vllb. Agricultural workers

service relationshipservice relationship (modified)mixedlabor contract (modified)

mixedlabor contract (modified)labor contractlabor contract

the schema is now attracting increasing interest from national and internationalstatistical agencies as a basis for official social classifications.1

It is important to note that since the schema aims to capture qualitativedifferences in employment relations, the classes distinguished are not consistentlyordered according to some inherent hierarchical principle, such as, say, the gen?eral desirability of the positions they comprise. Their members may be relativelyadvantaged or disadvantaged in different ways. Thus, routine nonmanual employ?ees in Class Illa may have lower average incomes than do small shopkeepers in ClassIVb or technicians and foremen in Class V, but more stable levels of income thanthe former and better chances of promotion than the latter.

However, so far as overall economic status is concerned, individuals in ClassesI and II, representing the service class or salariat, could in fact be regarded asgenerally advantaged over individuals in Classes Illb, VI and Vlla and Vllb, repre?senting the working class, in at least three ways that follow directly from the modeof regulation of their employment and that, together, we would see as being of atleast comparable importance to current income alone. Members of the salariat areadvantaged over members of the working class in that they experience i) greaterlong-term security of income through being less likely to lose their jobs and tobecome unemployed; ii) less short-term (week-to-week or month-to-month) fluctu-

1The schema has become known as either the EGP (Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero) or CASMIN(Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in lndustrial Nations) schema, the latter being the name of aproject directed from the University of Mannheim by Walter Miiller and John Goldthorpe from1984-1990. Since 2000, a new instantiation of the schema has in fact been adopted as the official Britishsocial classification under the (somewhat unfortunate) name of the National Statistics Socio-EconomicClassification, and active consideration is presently been given to the use of the schema as the basis fora general European Union social classification. One valuable spin-off of such official interest is thatresources have been made available to test the validity of the schema: that is, the extent to which, asimplemented via information on employment status and occupation, it does in fact capture the kinds ofdifferences in employment relations that it is conceptually supposed to capture. The results of such testshave been generally encouraging (for Britain, see Rose and O'Reilly, 1997, 1998).


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ation of income through being less dependent on piece rates, shift premiums,overtime payments and less exposed to loss of pay on account of absence or illness;and iii) better prospects of steadily increasing income over the life course?intotheir 50s rather than their 30s?through having employment contracts that areconducive to an upward-sloping age-earnings profile (Lazear, 1995) with in turnbetter prospects for the accumulation of wealth.2

One last point that needs to be made here is the following. Sociologists areinterested in class and class mobility not only as dependent, but also as indepen?dent, or explanatory, variables: ones that can be set in competition with othervariables, including income and income mobility, in their capacity to account forvariation in a wide range of life chances (say, health) and life choices (like politicalpartisanship). Empirically, class effects on such outcomes tend to persist even whenincome is controlled. It is possible that class, as operationalized on the linesindicated above, serves as a good proxy for permanent income. In addition,though, we believe that its explanatory power stems from the fact that it is able tocapture important aspects of the social relations of economic life.

Analyzing Class MobilityTo measure the association between class origins and class destinations, soci?

ologists most often use the odds ratio. For the simplest possible mobility table, thatwith only two classes of origin and destination, say class 1 and class 2, the onecalculable odds ratio is given by

AA f /ll//l2odds ratio = -?77- ,721 /22where /n is the frequency in cell (1,1), that referring to immobility within class 1,f12 is the frequency in cell (1,2), that referring to mobility from class 1 to class 2,and so on. So in this case, the odds ratio gives the chances for an individualoriginating in class 1 being found in class 1 rather than in class 2, relative to thesame chances for an individual originating in class 2. An odds ratio with the valueof 1 thus indicates the absence of association between origins and destinations (ortheir statistical independence).

The odds ratio is attractive because it is a margin insensitive measure ofassociation (Bishop, Fienberg and Holland, 1975), which means that it is invariantto the multiplication of any row or column of a contingency table by a (nonzero)constant. In an intergenerational mobility table, what might be called the grossassociation between origin class and destination class will be conditioned by differ?ences in the overall distributions of these variables?the marginal distributions of

2 Moreover, even insofar as the classes cannot be perfectly ordered, we do not believe that this makes thequestion of mobility between them irrelevant to issues of equality of opportunity and social justice. Fordiscussion of this point, see Marshall, Swift and Roberts (1997, appendix E).


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Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological Perspective 35

the table?that reflect changes in the proportions of individuals found in differentclass positions across generations. For example, in the course of economic devel?opment, fewer children than fathers will become farmers, but more will becomemanagerial and professional employees. Thus, some intergenerational mobility willof necessity occur in the form of outflow from the class of farmers and inflow to thatof managers and professionals. For many purposes, this mobility will be of interestin itself.3 But odds ratios provide a measure of the association of origins anddestinations that is net of the effects of such class structural change and that cantherefore remain constant even when such change is extensive or, conversely, thatcan alter even when such change is absent.4

In mobility tables with more than two categories, more than one odds ratio willbe calculable?in fact, one for every possible pair of origin categories considered inrelation to every pair of destination categories. Thus, the number of odds ratiosimplicit in a square mobility table with k categories will be given by [(k2 ? k)2]/4,al though it can be shown that a basic set of (k ? 1)2 odds ratios can be specifiedthat will determine the remainder (Goodman, 1979).

The full set of odds ratios implicit in a mobility table is taken to constitute theendogenous mobility regime or, alternatively, the underlying pattern of social

fluidity. For testing substantive hypotheses about endogenous mobility regimes,loglinear or logmultiplicative models, the parameters of which are odds ratios orfunctions of odds ratios, are chiefly used (Hout, 1983; Erikson and Goldthorpe,1992). Such models can serve to represent particular hypotheses?for example,that odds ratios are unchanged in a society over a period of time or are the sameacross a number of societies, or that they change or differ in particular ways?andthe fit of selected models to the actual data of mobility tables can then be assessedvia standard statistical procedures.

When the main empirical features of endogenous mobility regimes have beenestablished and attention shifts to the actual processes of mobility that underliethese regimes, loglinear models for the grouped data of mobility tables can berewritten as multinomial logistic regression models for individual-level data (Lo-gan, 1983; Breen, 1994). Class position is the dependent variable, and class originfigures as one of a set of independent variables also including, for example,measures of individual IQ, effort, educational attainment and other relevant vari?ables. It thus becomes possible to examine how far the inclusion of such variablesin the analysis leads to the dependence of class of destination on class of origin

3 Sociologists do in fact analyze outflow and inflow rates in simple percentage terms: that is, byconsidering the percentage distribution of all individuals of a given class of origin across all destinationclasses or, conversely, the distribution of all individuals in a given class of destination across all originclasses. But it is important to distinguish these absolute mobility rates from the relative ratescaptured by odds ratios.4 The motivation here could be thought of as somewhat similar to that behind the Galton measure ofintergenerational correlation in income, which normalizes for changes in the mean and standarddeviation of the income distribution over time. When intergenerational income mobility is studied viaa contingency table approach, using income quantile groups as the categories, the problem of control?ling differing marginal distributions obviously does not arise.


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being reduced or, in other words, how far mobility regimes may be thought of asmeritocratic.

Results

Measuring intergenerational economic mobility through correlation or regres?sion coefficients, as economists most typically do, leads to results that can be veryconcisely expressed. Sociologists' results relating to the mobility regimes thatoperate within class structures are more complex, since it is supposed that theassociation between class origins and destinations may vary in strength across thecomponent cells of the mobility table?that is, from one intergenerational transi?tion to another. This supposition turns out in fact to be fully warranted, so what islost in parsimony is gained in realism. With, then, some degree of simplification,the main findings from recent sociological research could be summarized asfollows.

First, in all modern societies, significant associations between class of originand class of destination prevail. For men, at least, there is a broad similarity inendogenous mobility regimes across societies.5 This represents an interesting par-allel with the cross-national similarities in estimates of the extent of intergenera?tional income mobility noted by Bjorklund and Jannti (2000, p. 4, n. 4). Somenationally specific variation in mobility regimes is also apparent; but, within thisvariation, differences in the overall level of the origin-destination association, asopposed to its pattern, is only one?in fact rather minor?element. Consequently,no nation or nations stand out as showing decisively more social fluidity oropenness than the rest. The idea of American exceptionalism in this regard is amyth (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1985, 1992, chapter 9). Among economicallyadvanced societies, Sweden appears as the most open, but has still to be seen asmarking one end of a quite limited range of differentiation rather than being inany sense sui generis.

Second, the main features of the cross-national commonality in mobilityregimes are the following. There is a general propensity for intergenerational classimmobility through the operation of what might be called class-specific inheritanceeffects. These effects are relatively strong within Classes I and II, the salariat, andClasses IVa and IVb, small employers and self-employed workers, and strongest ofall within Class IVc, that of farmers. In addition, there is a general propensity formobility to be reduced by hierarchy effects deriving from the overall advantagesand disadvantages associated with different class positions (as discussed above).These effects especially operate between Classes I and II, on the one hand, andClasses Vlla and Vllb, the nonskilled division of the working class, on the other. To

5Although it has not so far been demonstrated, we would think it highly probable that such a result willhold for women, also. The mobility regimes for men and women within particular nations haverepeatedly been shown to differ little?apart from the fact that odds ratios for women overall tend to beslightly lower than for men.


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give some indication of the importance of class inheritance and hierarchy effectstogether, the odds of a man originating in the salariat being himself found in thesalariat rather than in the nonskilled working class, relative to the same odds for aman originating in the nonskilled working class, would, across modern societies, beof the order of 15:1.6

Third, within particular societies, mobility regimes show a high degree ofconstancy over time, and in some cases, such as Great Britain (Goldthorpe, Payneand Llewellyn, 1987; Goldthorpe and Mills, forthcoming) or Japan (Ishida, 1995),for periods extending back to the first half of the twentieth century. Loglinearmodels that postulate no change in odds ratios reproduce the empirical dataremarkably well, usually misclassifying less than 5 percent of all individuals in themobility tables analyzed. In societies where trends in the overall level of fluidity canbe discerned, these are more often in the direction of increasing fluidity?oddsratios moving generally closer to 1?than of decreasing fluidity. But such trends, aswell as being slight, would seem more often to be episodic as, say, in the UnitedStates (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992, chapter 9) or Sweden (Jonsson, forthcom?ing) than sustained, as in France (Vallet, forthcoming). The idea of a worldwideand secular movement toward greater societal openness has been mooted (Ganze-boom, Luijkx and Treiman, 1989), but this is scarcely borne out by the evidence sofar accumulated. An alternative hypothesis is that the level of social fluidity willinversely relate to the degree of economic inequality between classes (Erikson andGoldthorpe, 1992, chapter 11; Goldthorpe, 2000, chapter 11). This hypothesis doesin fact find support from one of the very few studies of trends in intergenerationalincome mobility so far carried out (Blanden et al., 2001).

Fourth, educational attainment is a major?probably the major?mediatingfactor in class mobility (Ishida, Muller and Ridge, 1995; Marshall, Swift and Rob-erts, 1997), al though this is more apparent when education is measured by highestlevel of qualification achieved (academic or vocational) rather than by number ofyears of education completed, as is the usual American practice.7 In the Britishcase, the tradition of birth cohort studies provides data sets that allow for the effectsof IQ and of effort (in the sense at least of academic motivation as measured onstandard psychological scales) to be reliably compared with that of education. Thelatter proves to be clearly stronger, and further, the effects of IQ and effort appearto operate largely via educational attainment, at all events so far as the mediationof early life mobility (up to around age 30) is concerned (Breen and Goldthorpe,1999).

Fifth, modern societies are not meritocracies in the sense that, once educa?tional qualifications and other merit variables are controlled, class of destination

6 Sector effects, operating between the classes of farmers and agricultural workers and the rest, reducepropensities for mobility still more strongly than do hierarchy effects and were indeed a major featureof the mobility regimes of many modern societies even up to the middle decades of the twentiethcentury, although they are by now of much reduced importance overall.7The standardized measure that is chiefly used here is the CASMIN educational classification (Konig,Luttinger and Miiller, 1988; Brauns and Steinmann, 1999).


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is no longer dependent on class of origin. To the contrary, a significant and oftensubstantial dependence remains (Marshall, Swift and Roberts, 1997; Breen andGoldthorpe, 1999, 2001). In some cases, for example, Sweden, the persisting effectof class origins has been shown to extend to income, also (Erikson and Jonsson,1998). Thus, as Breen and Goldthorpe have put it (1999, p. 21): Children ofdisadvantaged class origins have to display/#r more merit [as indicated by educationalattainment or by IQ and effort] than do children of more advantaged origins inorder to attain similar class positions.

Sixth, the mediating role of education varies significantly in its importancefrom one type of intergenerational transition to another. Thus, educational qual-ifications have been shown to be of no importance at all in mediating intergenera?tional immobility (for which there is a high propensity) within any of the subdivi-sions of Class IV: that is, among small employers, self-employed workers or farmers(Ishida, Miiller and Ridge, 1995). What appears crucial here is the direct intergen?erational transmission of going concerns or of economic capital in otherforms?a factor that Bowles and Gintis in this issue also find important for theintergenerational income correlation. Further, several studies now in progresssuggest that educational qualifications are of greater importance in long-rangeupward mobility?as, say, from working-class origins into the salariat?than they arein intergenerational immobility within the salariat (for example, Guzzo, 2002).Here in particular, the advantages of a disaggregated, contingency table approachcan be seen. Effects that bear on mobility from specific origins to specific destina?tions can show up in a way that would not be possible if the same regression ruleswere simply assumed to apply across the board.

Problems and Prospects

There are at least two outstanding problems, in part related, that we wouldrecognize, along with Bowles and Gintis.

The first is what Bowles and Gintis call the black box problem. More thanhalf of their preferred coefficient for the intergenerational transmission ofincome remains unaccounted for even when all conventional explanatory vari?ables are included in the analysis. We in fact believe that the situation is lessclear?and possibly worse?than Bowles and Gintis suppose, since we wouldquestion whether their efforts to disentangle the relative importance of heredityand environment and also of direct transfers of assets warrant such preciseestimates as they venture.

For example, a key assumption underlying their estimates is that thedifference in the intergenerational correlations of earnings or income betweenidentical and fraternal twins will be indicative of the importance of geneticeffects, since twins of both kinds share the same environmental conditions.Bowles and Gintis do acknowledge that environments may in fact be somewhatmore similar for identical than for fraternal twins; but, we would argue, there is


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more to it than that. The often symbiotic relation between identical twins willlead them to strive to keep together, while fraternal twins may actively seek todistinguish themselves from each other. Thus, identical twins may follow thesame education, not because their genetic make-up leads them both to chooseit, but simply because they do not want to be separated; and the same wish maylikewise influence their family life, place of residence and other factors.8 If oneidentical twin gets a job offer, he or she may not take it in order to avoidseparation, geographic and/or social, from the other twin. Now the more equalconditions, including in income, that are thus likely to result among identicaltwins are certainly linked to the fact that they have the same genes. But how canthe effect in question be generalized to the population at large?9

However, we would not wish to claim that sociologists are any better placedthan economists as regards to the black box problem?that is, as it arises in theirunderstanding of the association between class of origin and class of destination.Indeed, in one respect, the problem appears even more embarrassing for sociolo?gists. Of late, a number of studies have indicated that the part that is played inmediating intergenerational class mobility by educational attainment?our mostimportant conventional explanatory variable?is if anything, declining (for Sweden,see Jonsson, 1992; for Britain, Breen and Goldthorpe, 2001; and Goldthorpe andMills, forthcoming; for France, Vallet, forthcoming; and for Ireland, Whelan andLayte, 2002).10

We are, then, led strongly to agree with Bowles and Gintis that if the black boxproblem is to be overcome, we will need to examine the possible importance in theinheritance of inequality of a wider range of individual attributes than has so farbeen considered and, in particular, to be less exclusively concerned with cognitiveabilities and with skills, at least as usually understood. We find much of interest intheir suggestions regarding group membership effects on economic success andwhat they elsewhere elaborate as the effects of incentive enhancing preferences(Bowles and Gintis, 2001). However, we would also want to take further than Bowlesand Gintis a more direct, demand-side approach: that is, asking just what are theattributes of potential employees that employers are looking for and how thesedesiderata might be changing.In modern economies, there would appear to be, at virtually all levels of the

8Ashenfelter and Krueger (1994, p. 1159), on whose work Bowles and Gintis chiefly rely, do in fact notethat identical twins far more often studied together and were also somewhat less often married thanfraternal twins.9 It could further be argued that models such as that used by Bowles and Gintis, in which the effects ofheredity and environment are treated as simply additive, are misspecified. Evidence is now available(Maccoby, 2000) of interaction effects between hereditary factors and parental childbearing regimes,analogous to those that have for long been demonstrated between genes and environment in the caseof various plants, fruit flies and so on.10When such results are reported, economists usually react with some surprise or even skepticism on thegrounds that earnings returns to education are tending to increase. However, apart from the fact thatthere is no necessary inconsistency here, for at least some of the countries referred to in the text, theevidence of such increasing returns is not all that compelling. For example, for France, see Baudelot andGlaude (1989); and for Britain, see Chevalier and Walker (2001).


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class structure, an increasing range of what have been referred to as people-processing or, somewhat more cynically, high-touch occupations?obviousgrowth areas being in the leisure, entertainment and hospitality industries, inpublic relations and the media and in the personalized selling of high-value goodsand services. In occupations of this kind, employers may well view cognitive abilities(above some threshold level) and conventional skills as being of less relevance thansuch attributes as physical appearance, dress sense, accent, self-presentation, life-style and savoir faire, along with related social or interpersonal skills.11 ForBritain at least, there is some amount of supporting evidence for this speculationfrom preliminary results from both the content analysis of job advertisements andorganizational case studies (Jackson, 2001; Jackson, Goldthorpe and Mills, 2002;Warhurst and Nickson, 2001).

Insofar as such a shift in the pattern of employers' requirements is in train, animportant implication follows. Increasing economic value now attaches to individ?ual attributes of a kind less likely to be achieved through the educational systemthan ascribed through processes of socialization within generally more advantagedfamilies and communities. In turn, a possible explanation is indicated for both the(apparently widening) gap that arises if we seek to account for the patterning ofmobility regimes solely in terms of education and for the fact that education playsa greater part in accounting for upward mobility into more advantaged classes thanfor intergenerational immobility within these classes.12 Men and women withadvantaged class backgrounds acquire, more or less as a matter of course, attributesthat help them maintain their position even if their educational attainments areonly modest.

The second problem that we share with Bowles and Gintis is raised by therather limited success of public policy aimed at reducing intergenerational inequal?ity and, more specifically, that of explaining why, even if education plays a lesserrole in mediating such inequality than is often supposed, the massive expansionand often radical reform of educational institutions in modern societies has nothad a more evident egalitarian outcome.

In addressing this problem, we would start from two further sets of empiricalresults and a conceptual distinction. The first set of results are those that show thatin most societies, class differentials in educational attainment have in fact provedhighly resistant to change, even across decades of educational expansion andreform, if these differentials are understood and modeled in terms of the relativeodds of children of different class origins making or not making the successive

transitions by which educational careers are defined (Blossfeld and Shavit, 1993;Mare, 1980, 1981; Breen and Jonsson, 2000).

11On this issue, we would add that the repeated references of Bowles and Gintes to good looks asgenetically transmitted seems to miss the point that good looks are, at least in some large part, a socialconstruct, modeled on the example of superior classes or status groups.12Other alternative or complementary explanations for this development could of course be proposed:for example, that, as a consequence of the expansion of educational provision and of the growingnumbers of individuals who have qualifications of some kind at all levels, the value of education in bothsignalling by potential employees and in screening by employers is reduced.


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The conceptual distinction, due to Boudon (1974), is between the primaryand the secondary effects that are at work in this regard. Primary effects are those,whether genetic or cultural, that create class differentials in demonstrated abilityearly in children's educational careers and in this way condition the optionssubsequently open to them. Secondary effects are those that later operate throughthe choices that children, together perhaps with their parents, actually makeamong the options they have available.

The second set of empirical results then serves to show that secondaryeffects do in fact play a significant role in the persistence of class differen?tials in educational attainment?and in turn represent an obvious focus forpolicy interventions. These results, from research undertaken within a varietyof national educational systems (for full references, see Goldthorpe, 1996),reveal that even when level of demonstrated ability is held constant, childrenof more advantaged class origins take more ambitious educational options?for instance, stay on rather than leave or choose academic rather than voca?tional courses?than do children of less advantaged origins. For example, inSweden in the early 1990s, among children with average grades in primaryschool, about twice as many from Class I backgrounds as from Class VI and VIIbackgrounds entered academic tracks in secondary school (Erikson andJonsson, 1996, p. 77).

We are therefore entirely sympathetic to the argument put forward by Bowlesand Gintis that the intergenerational persistence of differences in educationalattainment results, at least in some important part, from actions taken by parentsand offspring under the influence of a range of subjective dispositions or traits,such as attitudes to risk, orientations to the future and sense of personal efficacy,that themselves tend to be intergenerationally transmitted. From such a position, anumber of sociologists have in fact developed models of educational choice (insome cases to a formal level) and of mobility strategies, in which ideas of riskaversion, the discounting of future rewards and belief in returns to effort andprobabilities of success all figure (Erikson and Jonsson, 1996; Goldthorpe, 1996;Breen and Goldthorpe, 1997; Breen, 1999, 2001; Goldthorpe, 2000, chapter 11;Jonsson and Erikson, 2000).13However, our class structural approach allows us, we believe, to give a rathermore detailed and differentiated account than Bowles and Gintis offer in this issueof the social grounding of these dispositions that help preserve inequality acrossgenerations. Bowles and Gintis observe that less well-off people may be more likelyto be risk averse, to discount the future and have a low sense of efficacy (p. 18)than the better-off. However, children from less advantaged origins may have good

13The model advanced by Breen and Goldthorpe (1997) has been subjected to various attempts atempirical testing, the most sophisticated of which, setting hypotheses derived from this model againstones derived from the linear social distance approach of Akerlof (1997), is by Davies, Heinesen andHolm (forthcoming). The development of this model by Breen (2001) is also of interest in suggestinga behavioral basis for the models of educational transitions proposed by Mare (1980, 1981), in responseto the critique of Cameron and Heckman (1998).


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reasons to avoid high-risk alternatives, even if risk aversion is equally distributedacross classes (Jonsson and Erikson, 2000 p. 364). We would emphasize in thisrespect not only differences in current levels of income but, further, the differencesin economic security, stability and prospects that we previously identified as themain sources of class advantage and disadvantage. It is notable, for example, thatchildren of Class Illa (routine nonmanual) families are regularly found to havelevels of educational attainment more similar to those of Class I and II families thanto those of Class VI (skilled working class) families, even though in average income,they are much closer to the latter.

In addition, we would see the specific educational and occupational goals thatyoung people pursue as being likewise best understood in relation to their classorigins, following the structural theory of aspirations initially set out by Keller andZavalloni (1964) and developed by Boudon (1974). From this standpoint, levels ofaspiration are to be assessed not in absolute terms but relative to the positions ofthose holding them. Instead of the emphasis being on class differences in aspira?tions, it comes rather to be placed on the shared priority within all classes thatchildren should achieve educational levels and class positions not less desirable thanthose of their parents or, in other words, should avoid downward mobility.14However, it may then be the case with children of less advantaged class back?grounds that the safest strategy to this end?for example, opting for a vocationalrather than an academic course that carries higher risks of failure?is not bestsuited to achieving upward mobility.

In sum, intergenerational inequality has important self-maintaining proper-ties. It creates conditions under which individuals in less advantaged positionschoose and act in ways that can in themselves be understood as adaptively quiterational (rather than, say, being the expression of dysfunctional subcultures) yetwhich, in aggregate, serve to perpetuate the status quo. Educational expansion andreform alone should not therefore be expected to serve as very effective instru-ments of public policy aimed at creating greater equality of opportunity in the senseof a more level playing field. Complementary efforts to reduce inequalities ofcondition, and especially class inequalities in economic security, stability andprospects, will also be required.? We are indebted to Tony Atkinson, Anders Bjorklund, Richard Breen, Adam Swift and theeditors for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

14One could alternativelytalk, as in Breen and Goldthorpe (1997), of equal relative risk aversion acrossclasses, and there is an obvious affinity with the prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979),according to which the slope of utility curves is greater in the domain of losses than in the domain ofgains.


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