According to the the Grauniad,^* the OECD has looked at social mobility in the developed nations, except for Japan for some reason, and determined that the UK has the least generational mobility of any of these nations.

I don’t find that surprising. I tend to think of class strata when I think of British society, what is surprising, at least for some, I already knew this, is that the United States is almost as bad at providing opportunity to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Essentially, look at the graph pr0n, the US is not a, “Horatio Alger makes good,” kind of place: You get where you are because of who your parents are.

It’s an artifact of a war on unions, both in the US and UK, which makes the sort of decent working-class jobs that parents could use to create upwardly mobile lives for their children are increasingly rare.

Additionally, a war on the safety net, and on public education has done more to make it difficult for someone on the bottom to get a well enough grounding in the basics to outperform someone on the top, regardless of innate ability.

To conservatives, the idea that their children can succeed by virtue of who their parents are, is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

Me, I think of it as a deep flaw in society.

^*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”