The juxtaposition of several reviews in today's newspapers set me thinking about the familiar issue of class in Britain. In the Financial Times, John Lloyd has a thoughtful books essay on social inequality, mobility and class. One of the books he reviews, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class,
by Owen Jones, is also reviewed by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. (She herself wrote a terrific book on working class Britain, Estates.)

Lloyd concludes that the books he reviews greatly overdo the miseries. In many ways working class life has improved. Hanley makes a similar observation about the lack of texture in Chavs – she finds that it refuses to admit that working class people are not mere helpless victims: class hatred is a “collusive, often subtle, process which demeans everyone. In fact, a
great deal of chav-bashing goes on within working-class
neighbourhoods, partly because of the age-old divide between those who
aim for “respectability” and those who disdain it.” But again, as Lloyd writes: “[T]he
dangers are real enough. Even if neo-fascist explosions fail to
materialise – and it is not idle to warn of the possibility – still the
waste of lives and the harm that the underclasses do to themselves and
to surrounding society deserves a passionate advocate.”

The salience of these new books is the context of great income inequality and a more static society than we have had for decades (see the recent review here of The Labour Market in Winter). Just recently, I was discussing the word 'chavs' with a friend who says he uses it specifically to mean people from low-income backgrounds who do not work, have never worked, and are benefit-dependent – rather than as a general term of class hatred or snobbery. That is a large and intractable social problem which has appeared in the past generation. It's a sign of the times that a Conservative columnist, Max Hastings, argues in an article elsewhere in today's Financial Times that British society will not tolerate for much longer the large and rapidly-rising paypackets of bankers and executives, when low and also middle income earners are suffering a lengthy decline in living standards.

So it's all the more paradoxical that Britain's obsession with the aristocracy and stately homes continues too. In the Guardian Review Blake Morrison looks at their role in our literature, from Brideshead Revisited on. The salience of the stately home in the countryside of southern England is a marker of the degree of tension in Britain's class system. And in our national identity too. Hilary Mantel once wrote a brilliant essay noting that the construction of national identity around this narrow class and geography made it difficult for others – in her case a northern English, Catholic, working class female – to know in what way they belonged to their country. With the greatest income inequality since the 1920s and the forces for devolution on the rise again, it's no surprise that social alienation is a question of huge interest once again.

As I write this, my husband is picking out 'Jerusalem' on the piano downstairs…..very apt!

In economics as in any other academic field, it's becoming ever harder to keep abreast of all the research outside one's own speciality. Survey articles are invaluable – AEA members get the Journal of Economic Literature and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Another journal, the Journal of Economic Surveys, is celebrating its 25th birthday and to celebrate is giving access to the Editors' pick of articles – something here for most macroeconomists and econometricians, and some other nuggets as well.

The first edition of The State of Working Britain was published in 1999, and this third volume, The Labour Market in Winter edited by Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wadsworth, continues the tradition of careful, comprehensive analysis of the labour market in the UK. (Volume 2 was The Labour Market under New Labour.) The issues covered include employment and unemployment, job quality, and the trends, causes and consequences of income inequality. Each chapter is written by leading experts on the specific subject – and labour economics is a field in which British economists are particularly strong. So the quality of the research is consistently high, and all the underlying data are available online – no danger of slapdash econometrics here.

The range of material is too wide for me to review it all. The migration chapters – one by Steve Nickell and Jumana Saleheen on the overall labour market impacts of high migration and one on second generation immgrants by Christian Dustmann, Tommasso Frattini and Nikolaos Theodoropolous – were of particular interest to me. (Co-editor Jonathan Wadsworth is a colleague of mine on the Migration Advisory Committee.) The first of the two finds some evidence that high levels of immigration have borne down on wages at the bottom end of the income and skill scale – but the effect is surprisingly small, perhaps, in the context of the size of the inflows. The chapter concludes that the more salient impact for existing UK residents may lie in the implications of faster population growth for housing, school places, transport and so on – although as they note: “Developed land in England occupies some 8.5% of the total land area. In contrast, some 54% of the people surveyed in 2005 think that urban areas take up more than 50% of the land area.” Even if we're not, this feels an overcrowded land. The chapter on second generation ethnic minority migrants reveals that tehy tend to be better educated than their white native peers but have lower employment rates and lower wages on average. However, there are significant differences between different minority groups, and between the sexes in come cases. Black Caribbean and Chinese women and Indian men fare relatively well, Black African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani women particularly poorly, by comparison with white native peers.

I also found the chapter on regional labour markets interesting (its authors are Peter Dolton, Chiara Rosazza-Bondibene and Jonathan Wadsworth). Some of the results were familiar – the north-south divide narrowed during the boom, but employment rates and wages are lower in the north than the south, and the north depends more on public sector jobs. Mobility between regions is at its lowest for decades, moreover. The chapter also maps the skills distribution of the UK, which is as uneven as the wage distribution implies. The regional divide has plagued the UK for decades and is unlikely to alter, the chapter concludes, without a significant shift of capital to the North. As British banks don't like to lend to business, and certainly not to businesses outside the home counties, there seems little prospect of that happening.

To pick out a third area, inter-generational mobility has become a policy concern – witness the recent focus on unpaid internships and their possible role in perpetuating privilege. The chapter here by Jo Blanden and Lindsey Macmillan suggests that intergenerational social mobility has stopped declining, while so far investments in Early Years schemes have not reduced the shadow family background casts over early achievements – but family background inequalities are starting to narrow by the end of secondary school. I must confess to having mixed feelings about the policy focus on social mobility per se, as it glosses over the fact that there must be as many downwardly mobile as upwardly mobile. A direct focus on distribution of adult employment and wage outcomes seems preferable.

All in all, this is an essential book for anybody with an interest in the UK labour market. It's also a model of good empirical economics with practical policy implications. I hope it's already being widely read around Whitehall and Westminster.

There is a fascinating essay by Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books covering three recent books about the impact of the internet on human thought processes. They are World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines and the Internet by Michael Chorost, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser and You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Halpern notes that all these books address an underlying reality, namely our growing dependence on the internet and its growing influence on our thoughts and actions. Referring to Ray Kurzweil's 2005 idea, The Singularity is Near, the moment of internet consciousness, she writes that it seems a silly idea, but it would be even sillier to dismiss it given how much our thinking and behaviour has already changed. Indeed one of the three books reviewed, The Filter Bubble, seemingly documents the way that searches for the same subject by different people produce different results depending on their preconceptions:

'…[B]y having our own ideas bounce back at us, we inadvertently indoctrinate
ourselves with our own ideas. “Democracy requires citizens to see
things from one another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more
enclosed in our own bubbles,” he [Pariser] writes. “Democracy requires a reliance
on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate
universes.”'

This is the central concern of course of Cass Sunstein's earlier book, republic.com.

There are many books at the moment offering assessments of the wider impact of the internet on politics and protest, on society – and now on humanity itself. None of them will be the last word, not least because the effects of the technology are still unfolding. But what does seem undeniable is that the technology – like any general purpose technology – is having profound effects on society, and – unlike previous technologies almost certainly having profound effects on humanity too.

The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey is part way through a monumental book project, The Bourgeois Era. There's an interesting new review (by James Seaton in The Weekly Standard) of the first of a planned six book series, the 2006 The Bourgeois Virtues. I reviewed the second, Bourgeois Dignity, in the New Statesman earlier this year.

Prof Seaton's review is interesting because he is preoccupied with how to categorise Prof McCloskey politically – whereas one of the most appealing things about her writing for me is that she is impossible to pigeon hole. The review notes and agrees with the argument of The Bourgeois Virtues, that left-wing intellectual thought in the west has on balance done people more harm than good in resisting market capitalism, and he reviews the book very positively. However, he concludes, uncomfortably, that “now the differences between her view of the movements of the sixties and
that of most neoconservatives has narrowed to the vanishing point.”

This is the final sentence of the review, and we are left dangling. What does Prof Seaton think about this? Are conservatives in all western economies right in their view that left-wing social liberalism and economic interventions from the 60s to at lease the Thatcher/Reagan era inadvertently caused damage to the fabric of society and the functioning of the economy? Can left-of-centre intellectuals even now bring themselves to agree with Deirdre McCloskey and admit it? This is unfinished business since 1989, and a pressing question at a time of financially essential cuts in public spending and the scope of the state. If the left wants to rebuild a credible and persuasive political narrative, it will have to address this so far taboo question of morality.