The existing evidence base
The polling evidence suggests that only about one in three Britons think we live in a meritocracy. However, meritocratic assumptions are more widely ingrained into society than this would suggest.
Many people have a belief in social mobility that belies the facts. Fewer people support redistributive policies than we might expect. Few people want to redistribute or equalise good luck, because most people believe that success is earned. Ipsos found that successful people are more likely to think it is down to merit, while less successful people see a much bigger role for circumstances. But as well as differences in attitudes depending on life circumstances, many people’s attitudes are contradictory; people often think in structural terms about their own bad luck and others' good luck, and in individual terms about their own good luck and others' bad luck, but they sometimes think in individual terms about their own bad luck and (often) about others' good luck!
People are less worried about the existence of a gap between rich and poor than by the existence of unfairness.
People typically prefer fair inequality to unfair equality, and are more interested in eliminating poverty (and ensuring that everyone has the means to lead a good life) than in achieving equality. Yale University discovered that in a situation where everyone is equal, many people become angry or bitter if hard workers are under-rewarded or slackers are over-rewarded. Most people are less exercised by the existence of the wealthy than by the fact that the wealthy are able to play by different rules from everyone else. Research by Newcastle University suggests that most people believe that inequalities linked to merit or effort are more acceptable than those caused by luck. Opinium found that 81% of Britons agree that fairness is about making sure that everyone is given an equal opportunity to achieve, while 70% believe that fairness is about making sure everyone gets what they deserve.
Public attitudes research suggests that most people think that Britain is unfair, although one in three believe that we live in a fair society.
The Webb Memorial Trust found that 94% of people think that fairness is important to a good society, but only 36% think that society today is fair. This echoes an Opinium poll showing that only 30% agree that “British society as a whole is fair”; 71% say it’s “one rule for some and a different rule for people like me”, while 69% agree that “rich people get an unfair advantage”. British Social Attitudes (BSA) found that 64% of people think that “ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth". The Sutton Trust found that just 35% think that people have equal opportunities to get ahead in life, that 47% of people think that today’s youth will have a worse life than their parents, and that 34% believe that coming from a wealthy family is important to success in life, with 54% citing "knowing the right people".
Views differ about which forms of inequality are most problematic.
King's College London (KCL) found that inequalities between more and less deprived areas, along with disparities in income and wealth, are seen as the most serious forms of inequality, and that attitudes to other forms such as racial inequalities are much more divided. Our Unequal Kingdom report in January 2024 found that 75% of people are worried about wealth and income inequalities, closely followed by health and educational inequalities, while 62% also worry about social and political inequalities. Looking at inequalities between groups, people are most concerned about class, disability and ethnicity, as well as region, with less concern about gender, age, religion and sexual identity. Recent Ipsos research for the IFS Deaton Review found that 53% of people say that levels of inequality are rising, particularly in relation to people being treated differently because of their social class, how much money they have or because of their race, while around three in five say they are concerned about issues such as many people not having enough money to live a comfortable life and that people in poorer areas tend to die at a younger age. Fewer people support government intervention to tackle inequality than are concerned by the level of inequality, and fewer still support more income redistribution by government (48% according to KCL, although BSA found that only 30% actively opposed it).
Opinions are also split on what level of inequality in society is acceptable.
The general preference for 'fair inequality' is based on a belief that hard work (and talent) should be rewarded. JRF found that people are not opposed to high incomes linked to high-level ability, performance or social contribution. KCL also found that most people believe both in the principles of meritocracy - that hard work and ambition should be linked to success - and that we live in a meritocratic society. BSA found that 39% of people believe that people generally ‘get what they deserve in society’, while 35% disagree. The IFS Deaton Review into inequality suggests that people's perceptions of inequality can differ from actual levels of inequality, and that they are coloured by their values and beliefs, including whether they consider existing inequalities to be fair or unfair. But most people underestimate the level of both income and wealth inequality in the UK, and the vast majority of people are opposed to the level of economic inequality that exists today. Our polling with Opinium on attitudes to wealth inequality in 2023 found that even those people who are less concerned about wealth inequality in principle are worried about its practical consequences, while our polling with Ipsos in the same year found that 85% of Britons are worried about inequality in the UK.
Our new polling on attitudes to luck
What do people think about the impact of luck on their and other people’s life chances and outcomes? And do they think about luck in its narrower sense (e.g. falling under a bus or winning the lottery), or do they have a broader definition of luck that encompasses factors outside people’s control, such as the circumstances into which someone is born? How do these attitudes vary based on the issues under consideration and based on the characteristics of the respondent?
To find out, we commissioned Opinium to run a nationally representative UK poll of 2,060 adults from 24-26 January 2024, weighted to standard demographic criteria and political criteria. The full data tables are here.
We plan to use the results of this polling to inform the design of some qualitative research on public attitudes to luck and merit – and what lies behind them – later this year.
KEY FINDINGS
KEY STATISTICS
- People aged 50-64 are among the most likely to say that they have suffered from bad luck (59%), despite that group having benefited from stable employment and strong economic growth and asset price inflation over their lifetimes. Older people are also the least likely to think that luck has had a positive impact on their lives (6% of over 65s, and 10% of those aged 50-64).
- People on low incomes (8%) and 2019 Conservative voters (10%) are the next least likely to say they have benefited from good luck (compared to 14% of high earners and 15% of Labour voters).
- Half of people (53%) think bad luck outweighs good luck in shaping their personal circumstances, while only one in ten (11%) say good luck is more important. More people say that luck has had a small impact on their life (46%) than say it has had a large impact (39%).
- 33% of people in higher-income households think that salary levels are more influenced by factors within people’s control, compared to 20% of people in lower-income households. By contrast, people across the income spectrum believe that levels of wealth accumulation are mostly influenced by factors outside people’s control.
- More think that physical health (39%) and educational outcomes (36%) are within people’s control than outside factors, but more think that mental health outcomes are outside people’s control (29%) than within (21%).
- People are more likely to associate issues like their own talent (what you are good at) (45%), education (47%), family wealth (30%) and productivity (56%) with merit than with luck.
- More than twice as many people think we need to do more to reduce the impact of luck on people’s lives (29%) than think that we have gone too far already in doing this (11%).
Q1: Thinking about your own circumstances, what impact, if any, have factors beyond your control had on your life?
We gave respondents eight options (a large, moderate or small positive or negative impact, no impact, and don’t know). It is immediately striking that vastly more people think they have been affected by bad luck than by good luck; however, there is a range of views on how big a role luck has played in people’s lives, with Conservative voters more likely to say it has had a small impact, and other party voters evenly split. Most people consider themselves either unaffected by luck or struggling against it, including richer respondents. The groups most likely to recognise good luck are Londoners (20%), followed (all at 16%) by people with household incomes of £40-60,000, graduates, Lib Dem voters, 18-34-year-olds, people from AB social grades and people from ethnic minorities. Those most likely to say that luck has had a negative impact on their lives are those aged 50-64 (59%) followed (at 58%) by people from the North East and women. Men are more likely than women to say that they have had good luck rather than bad luck, but also to downplay the role of luck in their lives.
Q2: Thinking about society in general, do you think that the following life outcomes are more influenced by factors within people’s control or outside their control?
More than one in three respondents think that each of the six life outcomes presented are influenced by an even mixtuhre of factors within and outside people’s control (alongside 5-15% in each case who say that they don’t know). In two of the six areas, a larger number of people err on the side of factors within people’s control than those who focus on factors outside people’s control (with physical health 24 points ahead and education 18 points ahead), perhaps reflecting strongly held individualistic and meritocratic views about people bearing responsibility in these spheres. However, the reverse is true for the other four outcomes, with factors outside people’s control leading those inside people’s control by eight points for mental health and wellbeing, and by smaller margins for salary or income, wealth and social status. Political variations are neither enormous nor unexpected, with Labour voters generally more likely than Conservative voters to focus on factors outside people’s control (most noticeably on education, wealth and social status). Differences by gender and age are relatively minor.
However, when we look at differences in views based on respondents’ household income, and focus purely on their views about wealth and income, an interesting trend emerges. Views about luck and wealth are almost totally unaffected by household income, but views about luck and income are strongly correlated with it. People are much more likely to think that income is influenced by factors within rather than outside people’s control as their own income increases (moving from 14 points behind to 10 points ahead).
Q3: Considering the factors below, do you think that they have more to do with luck or merit?
These answers highlight the dominance of meritocratic thinking in the UK, even among those who are likely to think in ‘structuralist’ ways about society and the economy (such as many Labour voters). It is unsurprising that merit outstrips luck by 54 percentage points on hard work, by 48 points on productivity, by 38 points on ambition and by 34 points on education, but it is more striking that merit is still in the lead by seven points on family wealth and by 11 points on parents’ education.
One explanation is that the deliberately open wording of the question allowed people to interpret the categories in a more meritocratic way than might be expected (for example, interpreting ‘merit’ in relation to family wealth or parents’ education as including the merit of parents or other ancestors), which in itself provides a useful idea of how people think about merit and luck in relation to personal circumstances. Another is that there is limited awareness and understanding of the structural drivers of life chances and outcomes.
Differences by political allegiance are reasonably large, but Labour voters still plump for merit over luck in all but a couple of areas. Younger respondents are more likely to choose luck than older groups: on family wealth, 33% of 18-34-year-olds choose luck compared to 13% of over-65s. Variations by gender, ethnicity and household income are less pronounced.
Q4: When it comes to reducing the impact of luck on individuals' lives, would you say the UK has gone…
More than twice as many people think we need to do more to reduce the impact of luck on people’s lives than the number who think we have already gone too far, but even together they make up a minority of the population. Four in ten say they don’t know, and another two in ten think the balance is about right. This of course partially reflects the difficulty of asking such a broad and abstract question, and highlights the value of carrying out qualitative work to follow up on all of the issues covered in this survey. However, the not far enough / too far proportion is broadly in line with the usual 70 / 30 split that arises when people are asked if we live in a fair society.
What is harder to fathom (and needs to be explored through qualitative research) is how this relates to the responses to the earlier questions. If many people think that we need to do more to counter the impact of luck, why do so few people say that luck is more important than merit in influencing life outcomes? What factors make people more or less aware of the impact of luck on their own lives, and on the lives of others? What role is played by the way in which people conceptualise luck, in other words how narrowly or broadly they define it? How much should we read into some of the variations above (for example, younger respondents are more likely than older respondents to say that we have gone both too far and not far enough), and where would most of the ‘don’t knows’ end up, given the opportunity to debate and discuss the issues? People’s perception of the impact of luck on their own lives (the last four categories above) clearly has some impact on their views; what more can we learn about the link between perceptions and views?