In 2011 the BBC ran an online questionnaire about people’s incomes, tastes and social contacts. Over 160,000 people filled it in, making the Great British Class Survey one of the largest exercises of its kind ever conducted in Britain. Mike Savage, professor of sociology at the LSE and co-director of the project, wrote this book to set out what the data showed. His starting point is that the familiar upper/middle/working triad no longer describes how British society is actually stratified — only a minority of people now recognise themselves in it — and that a better model has to account for more than what job someone does.
The core argument
Savage’s central move is to borrow from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and treat class as the accumulation of three distinct kinds of capital rather than a position in the labour market. Economic capital is income and, crucially, accumulated wealth. Social capital is the range and status of the people you know. Cultural capital is the tastes, knowledge and habits that mark you as belonging — and Savage distinguishes “highbrow” cultural capital, the classical-music-and-literature repertoire of older elites, from an “emerging” cultural capital of contemporary and digital tastes held by the young and educated. Run the analysis across all three axes and seven groupings appear rather than three. His larger claim is that Britain has become a more, not less, class-divided society, with the sharpest breaks at the very top and the very bottom: an elite of roughly six per cent, pulling away on every measure at once, and a precariat of around fifteen per cent, low on all three capitals. The middle, he concedes, is much blurrier.
Key ideas
- Class as capitals, not occupations. Two people with the same job title can occupy very different social positions once wealth, networks and cultural fluency are counted.
- The elite is the real story. Savage argues the most consequential division in Britain is not between middle and working class but between a small, self-reproducing elite and everyone else — a group with wealth, connections and credentials compounding together.
- Wealth outruns income. Inherited and accumulated assets, especially housing, do more to fix people’s positions than salaries do, which is why mobility has stalled even as education has expanded.
- Emerging cultural capital. Distinction no longer requires opera and Proust; knowing your way around contemporary music, food and media does similar work for younger, educated groups.
- Geography and institutions. Elite formation is concentrated in London and the south-east and channelled through a handful of universities and schools, which Savage treats as machinery for reproducing advantage.
Who it’s for
Good for anyone who wants a data-grounded account of British inequality that goes beyond income statistics, and it is written for a general reader rather than for sociologists. Savage’s stance is plainly egalitarian; he thinks the concentration of advantage at the top is a problem, and readers who disagree should know that framing is present throughout. The book has attracted real methodological criticism worth taking seriously: the headline survey was self-selecting, skewing heavily towards the affluent and badly under-sampling the precariat, and a separate representative survey had to be used to correct it. Sociologists including Danny Dorling argued the seven-class model reifies categories that are fuzzy in the data, and Guy Standing objected publicly to Savage’s use of his term “precariat”. Savage engages with much of this in the book, and is notably more cautious about the middle five classes than the BBC’s class calculator ever was.