So I try to be very professional and only blog about numbers and Big Global Issues and the like. But, you know, I do have a life too and sometimes it intrudes. Like yesterday. For most of the day I was at home being quite delighted at the coincidence of two unlikely sources – the President of the USA and the OECD – bewailing rises in inequality. In case you hadn’t heard, the OECD wants to tax the rich and redistribute to the poor, and the President thinks that inequality ‘hurts us all’ and ‘distorts democracy’. Just a normal day at the office for us seekers after truth and light.
Then off I went in my Mummy guise to an exhibition in my daughter’s class at school, where each child had chosen a family member and written about their lives. We’re talking an ordinary state primary school in a pretty affluent part of North London, where the parents include journalists, a tv exec, bankers, a chef, a social worker and a dustman. Most of the children had written about their grandparents or great-grandparents, and I was AMAZED, really astonished, to be reminded of the different stories that had brought everyone to that place.
Children wrote about their grandparents who left school at 12 and went to work, or about relations who were post-war refugees in Europe and came here with absolutely nothing, or people who grew up in houses with no electricity or running water. These are children who now live in nice houses, assume they’ll go to university and get good jobs, and many of whose parents now run things. My own story is about a combination of migration and education: my grandfather was born in a village in Eastern Europe, and saved his family from extermination by the Nazis by migrating to South Africa. My father then travelled to the UK to study, and here I am.
People like me get to do the kind of great jobs and live the lovely lives we do thanks to pretty impressive social mobility. No one I know lives the same lives as their grandparents. Ours are better in every way – we have more education, more money, more health care, better jobs, better everything.
What the OECD report and the Obama speech reminded me was that the opportunities that opened up in recent generations are closing down as inequality rises. We are the lucky ones who have benefited from the good education, new jobs and the possiblity of migration open to our parents and grandparents. But the door is being closed behind us. Surely we owe it to the memories of our own families to do everything we can to keep it open for those who follow?
[Ahem. Thanks for indulging me. Back to normal service with facts and stuff shortly.]
