41st Geary Lecture

ESRI Media Release - 41st Geary Lecture - Social Mobility is no measure of Equality of Opportunity

"Social mobility cannot effectively measure equality of opportunity", according to Professor Richard Breen of Yale University, who will give the Forty First Geary Lecture at the ESRI on Thursday 11 March. Equality of opportunity is a principle that commands almost universal popular support and which many governments seek to promote. Social mobility - the degree to which people and families move between positions of social and economic advantage and disadvantage - is sometimes proposed as a way of assessing the extent of equality of opportunity. Professor Breen will argue that, once we pay close attention to how social mobility is defined and measured and how equality of opportunity is conceptualized, we find that there is, in fact, no straightforward relationship between them. And so, despite claims to the contrary made by politicians and sometimes by social scientists, social mobility cannot be used as a measure of equality of opportunity. Richard Breen, who was on the research staff of the ESRI from 1980 to 1991, is now Professor of Sociology at Yale University. He is an internationally renowned researcher in the field of social stratification and inequality. His recent publications include Social Mobility in Europe (Oxford University Press 2004) and Non-Persistent Inequality in Educational Attainment: Evidence from Eight European Countries, co-authored with Ruud Luijkx, Walter Müller and Reinhard Pollak, which appeared in American Journal of Sociology, March 2009.