In a section called 'The Death of Social Mobility', Curtis describes how the theory of the free market was applied to education. In the UK, the introduction of school performance league tables was intended to give individual schools more power and autonomy, to enable them to compete for pupils, the theory being that it would motivate the worst-performing schools to improve; it was an attempt to move away from the rigid state control that had offered little choice to parents while failing to improve educational standards, and towards a culture of free choice and incentivisation, without going as far as privatising the schools. Following publication of the school league tables, wealthier parents moved into the catchment areas of the best schools, causing house prices in those areas to rise dramatically—ensuring that poor children were left with the worst-performing schools. This is just one aspect of a more rigidly stratified society which Curtis identifies in the way in which the incomes of working class Americans have actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s, while the incomes of the middle class have increased slightly, and those of the highest one percent of earners (the upper class) have quadrupled. Similarly, babies in the poorest areas in the UK are twice as likely to die in their first year as children from prosperous areas.