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The growing link between values and earnings may spell trouble

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Picture the scene: it’s 1990 and you’re in a British pub. Over your shoulder, you hear someone telling a racially insensitive joke to their friend. A moment later, that friend gloats about the lengthy sentence recently handed down to a local youth for possession of cannabis. The third member of their party then says they wish Britain still had the death penalty.

Listening to their conversation, it would be easy to gauge their social values. But working out how much they earn would be significantly harder: 30 years ago, the British Social Attitudes Survey reveals virtually no difference in average earnings between social conservatives and progressives, authoritarians and libertarians.

Today, however, the task would be much easier. By my calculations, in 2019, Britons with xenophobic leanings earned around a third less than peers with liberal views on race, traditionalists earned half as much as liberals, and proponents of the death penalty earned half as much those who supported continued abolition.

It’s a similar picture across the Atlantic. In the US in 1990, the National Election Studies show that white conservatives were about as likely to be in the top third of the income distribution as their progressive peers. By 2020, they were much less likely to be high earners compared with white compatriots who had liberal views on race.

What do these numbers tell us? After centuries in which personal beliefs were largely independent of socio-economic outcomes, the two unrelated axes have become increasingly aligned. Over the past three decades, people with a particular world view — one shaped by nature, nurture and everything in between — find themselves several socio-economic rungs below many of their former classmates.

There is no evidence that this tilt is the result of any conscious choice. Recent research suggests it is being mediated by the role of higher education as a sorting mechanism, sending those who are more open to new experiences and comfortable with difference into an engine of income and opportunity, while their schoolmates are left by the wayside.

For years, researchers have sought to disentangle the web of factors that result in university graduates being, on average, more socially liberal than non-graduates. Two new papers, one by Ralph Scott in June, and another by Elizabeth Simon earlier this week, find that most if not all the differences in world view are already locked in place long before a student sets foot on campus.

The implications are striking. As successive governments have expanded access to higher education, and employers have come to rely ever more on degrees as the passport to high-paying, high-skill, high-status careers, one unintended result has been the quiet division of societies into socially liberal high-flyers and socially conservative left-behinds.

Chart showing that higher education is acting as a sorting mechanism, sending socially liberal progressives on to more prosperous futures than conservatives

The mechanism is clear in the data. According to my calculations, between 1990 and 2019, the share of progressive Britons with a degree has surged from 23 to 66 per cent, while the increase among social conservatives has been much smaller, from four to 14 per cent. The gap between the two has therefore expanded from 19 to 52 points.

That in turn has boosted the share of working-age social progressives in managerial and professional roles from 20 to 25 per cent, while the share of more conservative Britons in such roles has fallen from 16 to 15 per cent.

With those of a more traditional worldview finding themselves increasingly squeezed out of the path to high-status positions — and in some cases reporting directly to their liberal peers — the recent trend in anti-expert rhetoric makes a bit more sense.

As Leonardo Carella, a political science researcher at the University of Oxford suggested earlier this week, this trend may have far wider implications. How many of the west’s recent political shocks and realignments, he asked, could be due to 40 years of sorting liberals into high-income positions and traditionalists into low-income roles?

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com
@jburnmurdoch



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