The social elevator is stuck

Sticky floors

The post-war Europe, with its political consensus on a welfare state and mild state intervention in the economy, was presented as the natural place for social mobility. In practice, education, work, and social welfare could balance people’s starting points—and indeed, the top 13 countries in the world in terms of social mobility are all in Europe, with Denmark at the top and the Scandinavian countries serving as an international model. Behind this impressive statistic, however, lies a dysfunction: it seems that the social elevator has stalled. Incomes have stagnated, while more than 20% of Europeans currently live at risk of poverty or social exclusion. At the center of this are young people aged 25–34, who are at the peak of a lack of dynamic social mobility, with them now having less chance of surpassing their parents financially than any previous generation.

More than one-third of Europeans face significant barriers to professional development directly related to their parents’ economic background. Data show that this socioeconomic factor determines a child’s future in at least four areas: education, academic performance, access to employment, and access to highly skilled positions. Already in 2018, before the pandemic, data from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) estimated that it would take around five generations for children born into the lowest income bracket to achieve the average income, revealing the fallacy of the system. Beyond the obvious political consequences of this intergenerational immobility, or as the OECD calls it, “sticky floors,” it is particularly acute in Southern and Eastern Europe, where the 2008 crisis burdened already weak systems of social mobility.

Ηermetically sealed floors

All evidence suggests that the upper echelons of society have begun to close themselves off; rather, locked as they were, possession of the keys is recycled among those already residing there. The upper strata no longer make room for new residents; the top of the income and professional pyramid has become almost hereditary. OECD data show that the richest 10% of households now own more than 50% of the total wealth in the organization’s countries, while children in this group are five times more likely to reach high-income positions than children of workers with the same educational qualifications, possibly revealing a lack of cultural symbolic capital where the advancement system requires—and is not codified in children from lower social strata, regardless of whether they possess the formal qualifications.

Examples that reinforce the above can be found both in the United Kingdom, where only 15% of board members in the 350 largest companies come from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and in Germany, where the children of executives are 17 times more likely to reach management positions than their peers without a “family network.” The issue of the wide inequality gap, of course, does not only concern senior or top-level hierarchical employment relationships, but also salaried employees, where workers from disadvantaged backgrounds earn 20% less on average than their colleagues performing the same tasks, even when they have the same qualifications.

The historical backbone of European mobility, the middle class, appears to be crumbling, wealth inequality is becoming increasingly pronounced, with 10% now owning almost 60% of assets. However, beyond the standard of living in terms of everyday life, the really critical factor is that these data reveal a concentration of power that translates into political capital and influence at the expense of the underprivileged, while in the emerging order of things, this new order that is emerging cannot articulate a discourse that serves it, finding itself at a historical crossroads. Meanwhile, it is interesting to note the difference in understanding of the phenomenon between north and south, where in the south it is treated as almost a natural state of affairs and is linked to questioning of institutions and accusations of corruption in the system, while in the north the issue is considered solvable through political will and institutional pressure.