Wealth, class and inheritance- the role of inter vivos gifting in social reproduction

Social mobility has been of longstanding interest to sociology; however, it has often been argued that the purview of class-analysis has been too narrow to understand the complex mechanisms and experiences of individuals movements through social. Over the last thirty years, mobility research has been predominantly concerned with journeys between occupational classes, with cultural capital and education being explored as the main driver of divergent mobility outcomes between various groups).

However, the staggering growth of wealth, inheritance and wealth has triggered an abundance of quantitative research which have resolutely proven wealth and parental wealth to be a key driver of divergent mobility journeys between individuals across numerous outcomes today. These outcomes include educational attainment, occupational trajectories homeownership and wealth.

Social mobility research's single-capital reliance has resulted in its failure to respond to this rise in wealth and inheritance, and its failure to understand the mechanisms by which wealth is used to produce these divergent life-chances and produce social inequalities over generations today. Given the remarkable growth of wealth and inheritance, and these recent insights into their power to shape mobility trajectories, it now becomes imperative to forge a new approach to mobility that revives the position of wealth and intergenerational transfers in social mobility research.

This need to renew social mobility's attention to intergenerational wealth is made even more urgent given the UK's racial wealth divide . As ethnic minority groups have divergent relationships to wealth and inheritance, it is crucial that we understand the implications of this rise of intergenerational giving in mobility strategies for racial inequalities today.

A particularly powerful form of inheritance that is rising in incidence, especially amongst the wealthiest families, are intergenerational inter-vivos transfers These wealth-transfers are made during the lifetime of the grantor and are generally received during a recipient's twenties and thirties. This makes inter-vivos transfers a particularly powerful subset of inheritance as this wealth is available to recipients when it can be most effectively used in shaping future outcomes and in facilitating major life-choices, such as in gaining educational qualifications, home-buying and labour market risk-taking.

As mobility journeys become longer and more complex, and as educational capital is devalued by educational expansion, the reliance of younger generations on parental transfers grows, with younger generations relying on parental wealth for longer periods of adulthood today.

As wealth and intergenerational wealth-transfers grow, the urgency to revive the position of wealth and inheritance in social mobility research grows. I hope to provide the first systematic study of the significance of wealth and inheritance to mobility journeys today and understand how wealth-based mobility mechanisms constitute class-relations which allow advantaged individuals to access privileged routes, while denying others the same destinations.

Further, I hope to explore the social and political repercussions of the rising significance of wealth-based strategies of mobility, and critically, given the racial wealth divide, I aim to explore the consequences of the rising power of intergenerational wealth-transfers for racial inequalities today.