Middle age is a good time for retrospection. Passing half-time in our lives offers us the opportunity to reflect and catch a glimpse of the wood through the trees. A bit like Thought for the Day.
Social Trends, the Office for National Statistics’ annual survey into British life, is forty years old this year. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/socialtrends/ It is now, officially, middle-aged and its latest publication, weighing in at 243 pages, gives a refreshingly cool and reliable picture of how we have changed over the last 40 years…
There are more of us (61 million today compared with 56 million in 1971) living in more houses (25.9 million up from 18.8 million) – despite that fact that we are choosing to have fewer children and to have them later. 25 per cent of 2008 babies were born to mums under 25 compared with 47 per cent in 1971.
We live longer. Infant mortality, defined as deaths under the age of one, has fallen from 18.5 per 1,000 births in 1970 to 4.7 in 2009. Girls born in 2008 can expect to live seven years more than those born in 1970, and boys nine years more. We also smoke far less (surely not disconnected).
We live more fluid and isolated lives. The number of first marriages has fallen precipitously and the number of single person
households, divorces, and children born outside marriage has risen steadily. The number of teenagers getting pregnant has fallen from 134,000 in 1970 to 106,000 in 2007, while the number who gave birth has fallen far more steeply, from 117,000 in 1970 to 63,000. No prizes for guessing what happened to the difference.
We are richer. Real household disposable income per head is 2½ times more today than it was in 1970. We spend a smaller proportion on necessities like food and non-alcoholic drink, and more on recreation and housing. We save less. Households squirreled away 6.6 per cent of their total annual resources in 1970. In 2008, it was 1.7 per cent, although the financial crisis and economic downturn have forced it up a bit since then.
The workplace has changed. The proportion of “economically inactive” women has fallen from 40 per cent in 1971 to 26 per cent today, while that of economically inactive men has risen from 5 per cent to 16.5 per cent. Social security benefit expenditure in real terms has increased from £68.6 billion p/a (at today’s prices) in 1978 to £152.4 billion in 2008/9.
We are more unequal. The accepted measure of economic inequality, the Gini co-efficient (calculated between 0 and 100, with 0 representing complete equality and 100 representing complete inequality) increased from 26 in 1977 to 34 in 2008. Even if the poor aren’t actually poorer (at least in absolute terms), because the rich are so much richer, the poor certainly feel poorer.
We are more mobile. The proportion of households without regular use of a car fell from 48 per cent in 1970 to 22 per cent in 2008, the proportion of households with two rose from 6 to 27 per cent in the same period, and the proportion of journeys made by car increased from an (already high) 73 per cent to 84 per cent. We holiday abroad much more often, making on average 45 million holiday trips today compared with 6.7 million in 1971. Oh, and the prison population has more than doubled.
How to explain this spaghetti junction of trends?
Societies rarely undergo uniform or predictable change and are never amenable to single, simple explanations. The best we can hope for is to tell stories that encompass and enlighten what is going. Here is one.
Life is better for me today. I can expect to live longer, earn more and travel further. But it is worse for us. We are less likely to live together, stay together or maintain some measure of genuine equality. Our fixation on autonomy and choice may make us richer and more independent, but it does so at the cost of eroding the bonds of trust, responsibility and perseverance that make sustained, loving relationships possible.
The possibilities before many of us today are something to celebrate. We are a long way from the anarchy, social chaos, devil-take-the-hindmost individualism which supposedly characterises a decaying society. Social jeremiads miss the mark.
But social Jeremiahs still demand attention. Politics is the difficult business of balancing the claims of me and the claims of us, the claims of today against those of tomorrow. Right now, the balance is tilted towards the former. That is sustainable, for a time, if we have capital – environmental, social, moral – to draw on. But when that runs out, things could change. Social Trends 80 may yet tell a different story.
