From Free Life, Issue 27, September 1997
ISSN: 0260 5112

In this book Peter Saunders, Professor of Sociology in the University of Sussex, contends that in "modern Britain. . .we are much closer to achieving a meritocracy than pundits and public alike seem to suppose. A meritocracy is here defined as a society "which allocates people to occupational class positions mainly on the basis of ability plus effort".

The work begins with a partly autobiographical chapter on "What We All Think We Know About The British Class System". This points out that many of us have personal interests in believing what most of us seem to believe, namely, that "we live in a closed and rigid class system". That chapter is followed by a second showing that "For most of the last fifty years, the British sociological community" has presented this popular conviction as a supposed social scientific finding; a finding which, as overwhelmingly leftist, it had a strong political interest on promoting.

The falsity of this consensus was in fact decisively demonstrated by "what remains the single most important and most rigorous study of social mobility in Britain." This was done in 1972 by "Professor John Goldthorpe together with colleagues at Nuffield College, Oxford". They found that 49 per cent of their large sample ended up in a social class other than that into which they had been born. Furthermore, and to most more surprisingly, despite the increase in the number of high level positions between the time when the fathers entered the labour force and the time when their sons did, the researchers found that not only was there substantial movement down as well as up but also that long-range movement was common, including movement both ways across the putative white-collar/blue collar divide. Suspecting and perhaps hoping that these results might have been a peculiar product of the long post-war boom Dr Goldthorpe went on in 1983 to conduct further research. But he found that, instead of diminishing, the chances of social movement had if anything increased during the intervening decade.

So what to do? Well, how do the always unremittingly leftist researchers of the poverty lobby react if and when they are eventually and most reluctantly forced to admit that today even the poorest tenth of the population is substantially better off than were the members of that very different set of people which constituted the poorest tenth ten years ago? Those people - to borrow the phrase employed by General Lee to describe Union armies - regularly respond by protesting angrily that inequality, and hence relative poverty has increased; and calling for more and larger welfare handouts and still higher and more ‘progressive' taxes to pay for them.

Dr Goldthorpe appears to have taken this hint: "For him the acid test was not whether large numbers of people were upwardly mobile, but was whether working-class children had improved their chances of success relative to the chances enjoyed by children born into higher social classes". Granted this assumption, his researches apparently show that - in his words - "The reality of contemporary British society most strikingly and incontrovertibly deviates from the ideal of genuine openness".

It is at this point that Dr Saunders goes into truly radical opposition to his bigotedly (small) conservative sociological colleagues. For he points out that "this conclusion only follows if we neglect to consider the issues of talent and motivation - the very issues which should lie at the heart of any analysis of meritocracy.

The remaining much greater part of his book consists of his demonstration that, once we allow for class variations in average levels of ability and motivation, the relative mobility rates which have been reported in the sociological literature are remarkably consistent with what we should expect to find in a genuinely open and meritocratic society.

For Saunders the first step is to challenge what he calls The Great Taboo: "From the 1960's onwards there emerged in Britain and America the serious proposition that human beings are literally ‘born equal'". But he is mistaken in believing it was in the 1960s that professional social scientists first began to commit themselves to an assumption which every parent of more than one child must have reason to know is false. For, as students of Hayek may recall, the article on ‘Behaviourism' which first appeared in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in the later 1920s asserts without qualification that "at birth human infants, regardless of their heredity, are as equal as Fords".

It is this assumption which has been, and is, taken to justify extreme environmentalism, the doctrine that all differences in human behaviour are to be explained by reference to differences between the environments of those whose behaviour is to be explained. This doctrine has a dual appeal to most present day sociologists: a trades union appeal since it implies that all the explanatory jobs are jobs for them; and a political appeal since it conforms to their Procrustean ideals of equality of outcome.

The Great Taboo once challenged, Dr Saunders proceeds to present the evidence and to develop the argument for his revolutionary conclusion, that Britain today has come remarkably close to realising the meritocratic ideal - so close that he thinks it necessary to inquire in a final chapter: ‘Do We Really Want to Live in a Meritocratic Society?' That evidence and that argument are things which everyone who wishes to know the truth about this matter must study for himself.

But there are two further things which should, perhaps, be mentioned in the present review. First, that it was this extreme environmentalism, taught by her guru Franz Boas, which Margaret Mead was hoping to justify by the fieldwork reported in her all-time anthropological best-seller Coming of Age in Samoa. It should be much more widely known than as yet it is that Derek Freeman in his Margaret Mead and Samoa and later works has now shown beyond all reasonable dispute that her hugely influential best-seller is a tissue of falsehoods, which could have been known to be such simply by reference to evidence which was readily accessible at the time of its publication.

Second, Dr Saunders refers to "the infamous Cyril Burt and his influence upon psychological thinking about intelligence" and goes on to suggest that Burt's work "went uncriticized for many years despite clear evidence that the data were fallacious". Dr Saunders is apparently unaware that the case against Burt has been powerfully controverted in, for instance, Robert Joynson's The Burt Affair (1989) and Ronald Fletcher's Science, Ideology and the Media: The Cyril Burt Scandal (1991). But neither of these writers, nor any other contributor to the controversy except myself has, to my knowledge, ever referred to Johannes Lange's Crime as Destiny: A Study of Criminal Twins, a German work of which an English translation was published in 1931. Lange was able to examine all the twenty-nine pairs of twins at least one of which was held in a Bavarian jail, and he reported extraordinary similarities between his monozygotic but no significant similarities between his dizygotic pairs. As a control group Lange examined male criminals and their non-twin brothers. This work was presumably known to Burt, and it, like all later studies of twins, tends to support his findings.

Antony Flew