Public Opinion

'social mobility' is tied to 'aspirational.' Stefan Collini in Blahspeak in the London Review of Books says:

There is now, according to some commentators, an ‘aspirational class’, rather uncertainly located within a traditional hierarchical social structure, but composed of people who probably had working-class parents, who hope to have professional or managerial-class children, and who want more of ‘the good things of life’. But they want, it is said, to attain these goals without taking on the trappings and snobberies that historically went along with moving into a higher social class. An edge of ressentiment lurks under ‘aspiration’, not the old ‘Jack’s as good as his master’ kind, which acknowledged social position while claiming it was not the whole of life, but a more relativist kind, confident that ‘no one has the right to say what someone else ought to do or think.’ Any other view of the matter is damned as ‘elitist’. As these attitudes assert and impose themselves, we are encouraged to talk not merely of an aspirational class but of an ‘aspirational society’ at once insistently egalitarian and aggressively competitive.

Collini adds that the emphasis on ‘aspiration’ is one symptom of the abandonment of what have been, for the best part of a century, the goals of progressive politics, since, as an ideal, the ‘aspirational society’ expresses a corrosively individualist conception of life.

Stefan Collini in Blahspeak in the London Review of Books says that social mobility:

The phrase ‘social mobility’ is now deployed to refer to one or more of the following: the trajectory of individuals away from a starting point defined by their parents’ socio-economic position; the changing patterns of advantage and disadvantage between social groups in comparison to patterns among the previous generation; the changing structure of employment or rewards in a society across generations such that a larger proportion of the population comes to be in ‘higher’ occupations.

He says that if more of those top jobs are filled by the children of parents whose social class practically never filled such jobs in the past, then, we are told, we have social mobility.

So what happens to the people who would have occupied these jobs but have now been pushed out by the upwardly mobile?

Swan appears to think that nearly everybody --those with ability--gets a better job and some people get a much better job. That is the ‘aspirational society’.

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