ABSTRACT
This chapter shows politicians and commentators seriously misunderstood both the meaning of social mobility and the evidence about its changing patterns. It also focuses on changes in types of employment as the framework in which absolute mobility the total number of people experiencing intergenerational movement between social classes takes place. The recent period of Labour government was marked, inter alia, by a new, pessimistic, conventional wisdom about social mobility. On the basis of a selective reading of confusing and contradictory research findings, politicians, civil servants and media commentators asserted that upward absolute mobility had been sharply declining during the years since the 1970s; that mobility rates were very low; and upward mobility should be increased by social policy interventions. The implication of the conditional disparity ratio is that immobility becomes more significant. For the politicians this would pick up their fears of an emerging disaffected and dangerous underclass and threats to political stability.
