Sheilagh Ogilvie: recommendation

Transcript context

…What do you think of the Greg Clark hypothesis, that England basically has never had much real social mobility, and it just hasn’t improved over the centuries? It depends who your parents were, it might be genetic. You just cycle through the same families, the same surnames. Agree or disagree? On the whole, mostly disagree. I think many societies are a bit like that. You see certain countries who have presidential dynasties of various sorts. You see a lot, in fact, especially now that things like education matter so much. Insofar as education is influenced by your parents, you can end up getting an oligarchy of very educated people. It’s a big problem in any society. I think we need cross-country comparisons of social mobility because, even if you observe England having quite a lot of immobility over the long period, the question is, what’s the counterfactual? Shouldn’t you be looking at Germany? Shouldn’t you be looking at France? Shouldn’t you be looking at other comparable countries? My main research has been on German-speaking central Europe and points east. I think when you compare social mobility in those countries with that in England, England looks like an incredibly mobile society. [laughs] So, I’m not quite so gloomy about England when I look at what the alternatives were on the continent of Europe, which were even more immobile, and where legal social status was actually legally entrenched. There’s that famous scene in The Sorrows of Young Werther, where Werther, who’s an educated man but not a member of the gentry, has to leave the parlor before the dancing begins. He has to leave his lady that he would like to marry. He isn’t allowed to stay there because it’s the wrong legal social class. That’s the late 18th century. I don’t think that that would be happening in England at the time. You’ve now lived in England for well over 30 years. What’s been your biggest surprise about the place, if anything has stuck?…

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