1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/london-mayor-election/mayor-of-london/10480321/Boris-Johnsons-speech-at-the-Margaret-Thatcher-lecture-in-full.html.
2. ‘Minister Demands End to “Spiralling” Pay for University Chiefs’, Financial Times, 21 July 2017; https://www.ft.com/content/5bed5b04-6c98-11e7-b9c7-15af748b60d0.
3. C. Young, C. Varner, I. Lurie and R. Prisinzano (2016), ‘Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite’, American Sociological Review 81, 421–46; C. Young (2017), The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich, Stanford University Press.
4. Speech by Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (2010), ‘Welfare for the 21st Century’; https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/welfare-for-the-21st-century.
5. R. Chetty, N. Hendren and L. Katz (2016), ‘The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New evidence from the Moving to Opportunity experiment’, American Economic Review 106, 855–902.
6. J. Waldfogel and E. Washbrook (2011), ‘Early years policy’, Child Development Research 1–12; J. Waldfogel (2006), What Children Need, Harvard University Press.
7. B. Hart and T. R. Risley (University of Kansas researchers) (2003), ‘The Early Catastrophe: The 30 million word gap by age 3’, American Educator Spring, 4–9.
8. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html.
9. https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/12-01-2017/sfr242-student-enrolments-and-qualifications.
10. http://oecdinsights.org/2014/12/09/is-inequality-good-or-bad-for-growth/.
11. Miles Corak, ‘Social Mobility and Inequality in the UK and the US: How to slide down the Great Gatsby Curve’; https://milescorak.com/2012/05/22/social-mobility-and-inequality-in-the-uk-and-the-us-how-to-slide-down-the-great-gatsby-curve/.
12. R. H. Tawney (1931), Equality, Collins.
13. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/13/decades-of-educational-reform-no-social-mobility.
14. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7468506.stm.
15. https://scholar.harvard.edu/hendren/publications/fading-american-dream-trends-absolute-income-mobility-1940.
16. For US evidence on the decoupling of growth of median wages from productivity, see J. Bivens and L. Mishel (2015), ‘Understanding the Historic Divergence between Productivity and a Typical Worker’s Pay: Why it matters and why it’s real’, Economic Policy Institute; and A. Stansbury and L. Summers (2017), ‘Productivity and Pay: Is the link broken?’, paper presented at the Peterson Institute for International Economics conference on ‘The Policy Implications of Sustained Low Productivity Growth’, 9 November 2017. For evidence of decoupling from Britain, see P. Gregg, S. Machin and M. Fernandez-Salgado (2014), ‘The Squeeze On Real Wages – And What It Might Take To End It’, National Institute Economic Review 228, R3–16.
17. https://d2ufo47lrtsv5s.cloudfront.net/content/early/2017/04/25/science.aan3264.full.
18. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/interview-with-lawrence-katz.
19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher.
20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele.
21. https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1996/kroto-bio.html.
22. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/oct/15/comedy.drama.
23. A. Eyles and S. Machin (2015), ‘The Introduction of Academy Schools to England’s Education’, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, Discussion Paper 1368.
24. A. Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2011), ‘Accountability and Flexibility in Public Schools: Evidence from Boston’s charters and pilots’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, 699–748; R. Fryer (2014), ‘Injecting Charter School Best Practices into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from field experiments, Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, 1355–1407.
25. D. D. Goldhader, D. J. Brewer and D. J. Anderson (1999) ‘A Three-way Error Components Analysis of Educational Productivity’, Education Economics 7:3; http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09645299900000018.
26. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/our-work/projects/promising/.
27. Sutton Trust (2013), ‘NFER Polling of Teachers’; https://www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/nfer-poll-results-teachers-spending-pupil-premium/.
28. http://ftp.iza.org/dp2204.pdf. Note: If the world is more equal, then education can prove its worth. Just one social mobility study has demonstrated an impact from education reform. The creation of comprehensive schools in Finland during the 1970s reduced the country’s intergenerational income correlation, or beta, by several percentage points.
29. London’s education turnaround prompted one education leader to proclaim: ‘There’s a potential model here for a more equal, socially mobile society.’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/10475000/London-schools-are-a-UK-education-success-story.html.
30. http://www.centreforlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Lessons-from-London-Schools.pdf.
31. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/184093/DFE-RR215.pdf.
32. J. Blanden et al. (2015), ‘Understanding the Improved Performance of Disadvantaged Pupils in London’, Social Policy in a Cold Climate Discussion Paper 21; http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/spcc/wp21.pdf.
33. S. Burgess (2014), ‘Understanding the Success of London’s Schools’ Centre for Markets and Public Organisation, Working Paper 14/333; http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmpo/migrated/documents/wp333.pdf.
34. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/14/london-schools-immigration-children-education.
35. By 2015/16 average family income in the capital was just under £1,000 a week, around twice the national average.
36. B. Bell, J. Blundell and S. Machin (2017), ‘Mind the Gap: The role of demographics in explaining the “London effect” ’, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, unpublished paper.
37. Source for figures 7.1 and 7.2: own calculations from Labour Force Survey and Households Below Average Income data.
38. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/347915/Elitist_Britain_-_Final.pdf.
39. Young coined the term ‘meritocracy’, a term adopted in a positive light by Tony Blair and subsequent leaders, much to Young’s chagrin. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment.
40. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3732184.stm.
41. ‘Britain, the Great Meritocracy’: Prime Minister’s speech, 9 September 2016; https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/britain-the-great-meritocracy-prime-ministers-speech.
42. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Oxford_people_with_PPE_degrees; https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain.
43. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jun/19/mondaymediasection2.
44. L. MacMillan (2010), ‘Social Mobility and the Professions’, submission to the Panel for Fair Access to the Professions; http://www.bris.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/other/socialmobility.pdf.
45. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/judges-are-out-of-touch-says-furious-blunkett-104765.html.
46. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9976400/Judges-lead-sheltered-lives-warns-Britains-most-senior-female-judge.html.
47. https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-theyre-more-cognitively-diverse.
48. K. Steven, J. Dowell, C. Jackson and B. Guthriw (2011), ‘Fair Access to Medicine? Retrospective analysis of UK medical schools application data 2009–2012 using three measures of socioeconomic status’, BMC Medical Education 16, 11.
49. https://www.graham-center.org/dam/rgc/documents/publications-reports/monographs-books/Specialty-geography-compressed.pdf.
50. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-3869720/Support-drama-schools-working-class-actors-says-Michael-Sheen.html.
51. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/IfG_All_change_report_FINAL.pdf.
52. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/IfG_All_change_report_FINAL.pdf. Incidentally it was Wolf’s mother Alison whose review found that nearly half of all students in England had failed to achieve a C grade in GCSE in English or maths by age 16.