> They identified the ‘Irish’ in the records as individuals with distinctively Irish surnames.
That doesn’t seem that scientific to be honest. Practically everyone I knew at school had at least an Irish great grandparent, but not necessarily an Irish surname. Conversely, does it particularly follow that people with Irish surnames have more Irish heritage?
Perhaps in cities like Liverpool or Glasgow, the Irish were less likely to marry the English/Scottish? In that case aren’t you really saying that working class people from cities like Liverpool and Glasgow are less well off?
Why can’t everyone go into investment banking like rishi sunak?
All Craic addicts clearly.
Dey dooo lurv deh Craic.
[deleted]
And then the Guardian tells us we have “white privilege”!
Reminds me of that research that people with Norman surnames were still richer than people with ango-saxon surnames. One way to read this is that British social mobility is fucked.
I note this research is about the likelyhood people will be in the wealthiest 1%. That isn’t the top 1% of incomes – it is the people with the most wealth. Those are two very different groups.
The top 1% in terms of wealth have about £4 million. The top 1% for earnings make £120K per year.
You can get a top 1% income by doing well in school and becoming a GP or banker or something, but it takes more than two working lifetimes for an average top 1% GP to enter the top 1% of wealth. That kind of wealth is generally inherited – hence the lack of mobility.
Incidentaly, I don’t believe the ONS figure for top 1% wealth in the first place – anyone with several million is going to be doing the kind of multi-national tax stunts that make counting this kind of thing very difficult.
Because wealth is more unevenly distributed than income, wealth taxes should be easy electoral math for any government. Such taxes would fund public services with the lowest average pain, and recycle wealth to create a more socially mobile, dynamic society. The fact they are very rare shows governments everywhere are captured by the wealthy.
What this kind of research hides is that this isn’t really a race issue – you either have a millionaire grandad or you don’t. The assumption that this research is based on – that we should expect some kind of social mobility that would enable people to enter this category and lack of entry evidences lack of oppertunities that can be corrected by policy is just false – unless you are going to randomly assign people rich grandparents the only policy to fix this is to attack the intergenerational transmission of wealth accross millenia.
7 comments
Dearie me… Anyway.
> They identified the ‘Irish’ in the records as individuals with distinctively Irish surnames.
That doesn’t seem that scientific to be honest. Practically everyone I knew at school had at least an Irish great grandparent, but not necessarily an Irish surname. Conversely, does it particularly follow that people with Irish surnames have more Irish heritage?
Perhaps in cities like Liverpool or Glasgow, the Irish were less likely to marry the English/Scottish? In that case aren’t you really saying that working class people from cities like Liverpool and Glasgow are less well off?
Why can’t everyone go into investment banking like rishi sunak?
All Craic addicts clearly.
Dey dooo lurv deh Craic.
[deleted]
And then the Guardian tells us we have “white privilege”!
Reminds me of that research that people with Norman surnames were still richer than people with ango-saxon surnames. One way to read this is that British social mobility is fucked.
I note this research is about the likelyhood people will be in the wealthiest 1%. That isn’t the top 1% of incomes – it is the people with the most wealth. Those are two very different groups.
The top 1% in terms of wealth have about £4 million. The top 1% for earnings make £120K per year.
You can get a top 1% income by doing well in school and becoming a GP or banker or something, but it takes more than two working lifetimes for an average top 1% GP to enter the top 1% of wealth. That kind of wealth is generally inherited – hence the lack of mobility.
Incidentaly, I don’t believe the ONS figure for top 1% wealth in the first place – anyone with several million is going to be doing the kind of multi-national tax stunts that make counting this kind of thing very difficult.
Because wealth is more unevenly distributed than income, wealth taxes should be easy electoral math for any government. Such taxes would fund public services with the lowest average pain, and recycle wealth to create a more socially mobile, dynamic society. The fact they are very rare shows governments everywhere are captured by the wealthy.
What this kind of research hides is that this isn’t really a race issue – you either have a millionaire grandad or you don’t. The assumption that this research is based on – that we should expect some kind of social mobility that would enable people to enter this category and lack of entry evidences lack of oppertunities that can be corrected by policy is just false – unless you are going to randomly assign people rich grandparents the only policy to fix this is to attack the intergenerational transmission of wealth accross millenia.