Born to rule: the making and remaking of the British elite | LSE Event

In Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s new book, which they launch at this event, they provide a uniquely data-rich analysis of the British elite from the Victorian era to today: who gets in, how they get there, what they like and look like, where they go to school, and what politics they perpetuate.

Think of the British elite and familiar caricatures spring to mind. But are today’s power brokers a conservative chumocracy, born to privilege and anointed at Eton and Oxford? Or is a new progressive elite emerging with different values and political instincts? Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman combed through a trove of data in search of an answer, scrutinizing the profiles, interests, and careers of over 125,000 members of the British elite from the late 1890s to today. At the heart of this meticulously researched study is the historical database of Who’s Who, but the authors also mined genealogical records, examined probate data, and interviewed over 200 leading figures from a wide range of backgrounds and professions to uncover who runs Britain, how they think, and what they want.

Speakers:
Professor Sam Friedman
Hashi Mohamed
Professor Aaron Reeves
Professor Lauren Rivera
Dr Faiza Shaheen

Chair:
Professor Suzanne Hall

#Cronyism #Events #London

To turn on captions, go to the bottom-right of the video player and click the icon. Please note that this feature uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, or machine generated transcription, and is not 100% accurate.

[monicaaparecidaoliveira]

Excellent work and superb presentation. What a shame it was not possible to watch the slides projected before 24:28.

[davemaher]

I enjoyed the discussion, my experience of higher education having studied at Conted, OU and BBK is that they are colonised by the middle class students. Even though they were created to bring HE to working people and improve social mobility. I felt at times as soon as I spoke and people heard my accent I was being judged. I still have the occasional panic attack and imposter syndrome even with two good degrees.

[sophiemedlar]

Please show slides on YouTube recording.

[abody]

51:18 This is an excellent point, and I think it gets right to the very core of the required focus for transformative change - critical consciousness raising. When we dig into it, we find that, as mentioned here, it's "really real" among elites, but when it comes to the rest, it's actively discouraged from the top down and in fact the system - from public education, to the messages received via media etc - is designed and used to stymie its existence and development among non elites.

So it's primarily a project in raising critical consciousness that is required to facilitate solidarity as a starting point to better organisation of opposition and transformation, instead of reproduction, of the hierarchical social structures that perpetuate the existence of elites.

[melissaraven]

Did the study attempt to separate the effects of attending an elite school/university (quality of education, prestige of degree) from the effects of the connections/networking that occur in such schools/universities?
Becoming school/university friends with peers from elite families can be beneficial much later in life (e.g. providing an elite dating/marriage pool; increasing employment opportunities, business ventures; references, introductions, credibility...)

[futures]

It's amazing when you consider the utter randomness that is fundamental to everything including the distribution of resources, intelligence, opportunities along with the complexity of environment and genetics and how anyone believes they are responsible for any of it. It seems the fundamental element of sharing that we teach children is thrown out once adulthood is reached and the rich influence systems of neoliberalism that brings out the worst of human capacity

[misomiso]

Some timestamps would be greatly appreciated!

[Peterskovtvermoes]

An important subject, no doubt. However, and this may be due to my Danish roots, I thought it was common knowledge That the elite was self sustaining in staying in power.

[TheGreekGodOfWallStreet]

“Restrict the number of privately educated students at Russell Group Universities to 10%” is a misguided solution. The students make the university, not the other way around. As is universities offer some a path upwards. Increasing access in this way would increase the participation but severely decrease the value.

[stevenlewisking]

You are all fired due to the fact, that no one has given me what I wanted. Everyone employeed by the royal crown.

[abody]

25:50 -there's a well known amphibian that I can think of who utilises this and-

29:08 ok never mind. carry on

[kinngrimm]

Inheritance i came to the conclusion is a concept that needs to be overcome. Not just because it causes to give the following generation an advantage compared to others, but these i have seen are often spoiled in many ways with a sense that they deserve it and as they deserve it they are automaticly those with merit. There are those where this might be true, due to their parents having paid attention to their upbringing and trying to give them the lessons they themselves had to learn when they tried to establish the family wealth for the first time, but more often that seems not the case or i just didn't meet often this mythical creature of wealth, power and inherent progressiv ideals for fairness and equality.
I am willing to accept special circumstances to a degree, but nothing below 70% inheritance tax as it was once in many places around the world before the 1920. The differance between 100% and 70% would need to be earned by deeds done for society.

[TheGreekGodOfWallStreet]

“Property, and Finance and Hedge Funds, and these are jobs that are not producing good outcomes for the economy, are not creating lots of jobs”. Another point I have to disagree with. Property (Collateral), Debt and Equity form the backbone of an economy and therefore play a significant role in creating ALL of the jobs.

[davidwilkie]

In the truest context of holography-quantization Actuality, every single person learns, relearns the process of information In-form-ation substantiation of coherence-cohesion objectives positioning as measures and rulings proportioning probability-wave integration navigation through the Singularity-point Aether relative-timing reference-framing containment positioning.

The map that is the Observable constant past is negotiated in coordination with the functional worldwide ecology. Fundamentally it's a voluntary participation, "do or die", you're IT.

[jamesnaughton]

They seem unable to even conceive that different outcomes are anything but the result of discrimination. They were so close when they identified that the share of wealth among the top one-percent had declined but achievement had not, but they couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge that the elite is culturally superior and that this explains their success.

I have no trouble in saying that Asian-American culture is in many respects superior to my own. The way in which that culture instils industriousness and respect for tradition in their children has resulted in the proportion of Asian students at MIT, the most prestigious engineering and sciences university in the world, being close to fifty percent, despite Asians making up less than ten percent of the American population. This astonishing record of success is not a fluke or the product of a skewed system. It’s the result of cultural attributes that are extremely valuable in society, and it completely confounds the authors’ conclusions.

The simple fact is that the children in the UK who went to disciplined schools, who were made by their parents to delay gratification, who were brought to the theatre…are better prepared to make a success of life. There are some advantages that it is right to adjust for – private school children being given greater assistance in applying to university, for instance – but other advantages like having a greater capacity for work are a brute fact of life that we must accept or be driven to despair.

The part of the presentation in which they argue elites rough themselves up to deflect hostility is bizarre. They tell us they performed an experiment (in the loosest possible sense of the word) which finds elites are trivially less likely to cite high-brow books and music if they have been primed with a question about disadvantage. This they conclude supports their claim of ‘performative ordinariness’. But maybe the respondents whose choices are influenced in this way (a very small proportion) are recognising that expressions of adoration for high-brow art are alienating to minorities (i.e. a sympathetic motivation), or maybe they are deciding on reflection that their instinctive affection for high-brow art is the real performance and that they really prefer the Beatles – or maybe the findings can’t be replicated, like so much else in the social sciences! It’s so obviously wrong to assume that the change in stated preference must indicate an attempt to disguise true preferences. The authors likely put a great deal of work into that part of their research and felt compelled to give it an airing, but it’s such an odd and feeble line of enquiry.

On a final note, the three policy recommendations are ludicrous. A tax on super-wealth woukd easily be avoided (and would have no effect anyway), a cap on private school admissions would lead to a mass exodus to state schools in wealthy catchment areas that perpetuate the same advantages, and randomly assigning Oxbridge places based on an A Level grading system that is notoriously undiscriminating achieves nothing but weakening one of the UK’s very last world-leading institutions.

[renzo]

BEIJING – China has seen an increase in suicides among young people in recent years.

The number of children aged five to 14 years old who died by suicide jumped nearly 10 per cent annually from 2010 to 2021, according to a recent study from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

Children and adolescents have faced severe mental disorders and elevated suicide risks from intense competition to do well at school. Half of people suffering from depressive disorder in China are students, according to a 2022 national survey.

[ARTISTUPTOWN]

lollipop yumm who else here from sociology

[renzo]

Does everyone know what LSE stands for?

[charliefasurf]

God they beat around the bush… chat gpt, summarize in 5 sentences, thx

[futures]

So depressing to have working class cabinet to the right of conservatives