Zoe Williams has written an exceptional article on social mobility in the Guardian this morning. I strongly recommend reading it all but the kernel of her idea can be found in the following edited highlights. She says:
Social mobility sounds unarguable, but like so many other ideas that are apparently self-evident — the primacy of the "hard-working family", the ubiquity of "generations of worklessness" — its apparent simplicity is a cover.
[E]ven if social mobility was achieved, what is so great about a society in which the outliers of each class can move relatively freely up and down the hierarchy? What's so great about being able to escape the gutter, when the bulk of people are still in it?
Part of the reason that class has become so ossified is that, in this time of great inequality, the consequences of dropping from any given class to the one below it are severe — you would move heaven and earth to prevent your children fetching up in blue-collar employment when wages at the bottom are no longer enough to live on. No wonder people try to lock in their privilege by paying for education. The only rational solution to that is to work towards a time when there is less difference between the classes.
This new-soft-left alternative, where you fix it to fast-stream the clever kids out of deprivation, leaving the rest to blame themselves for their shabby prospects because they turned out not to be clever enough … well, obviously it's not what any sensible person would call communism. It's not what you'd call socialism either. It's not liberal egalitarianism, or any of those more fine-tuned theories that make it possible to be a leftie and still own a house. It's not left wing and, fundamentally, it doesn't make anything any better.
Even if the waters of the social fountain were in perpetual motion (and you can bet that Clegg doesn't mean that by "social mobility" — he's talking about other people's kids having the freedom to rise, not his own having the potential to fall), you'd still have to accept, even embrace, the idea of some people living and dying in the sludge. Who could ever line up behind such a laughably shoddy vision of the future, a world in which everything looks roughly the same, but each class has had a very slight reshuffle in personnel?
This debate, as it's framed by the coalition — do you believe in social mobility, or do you believe in sink or swim? — is bankrupt (like so much else). I don't believe in either.
I agree.
I don't want opportunity for a few to get rich and so change their individual fortune at cost to everyone else.
I want opportunity for all. And that does not come from mobility. That comes from serious redistribution. Nothing else will do.
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This is surely what Ed Milliband should be saying, what should be at the heart of any rational left wing agenda or manifesto. Why is it so hard for him to come out and say, loud and clear, people are more important than the draconian effects of inequality, excess profit and excess reward?
Haven’t read the full Guardian article (yet), but going on the edited highlights above, I can’t help thinking that the whole idea of ‘social mobility’ is a bit of a meaningless red herring of a phrase. I understand what is being got at, objectively, but when you consider (and translate!) the basic ‘general concept’ it is surely one and the same as people being ‘happier’ – more contented with their lot regardless of how that relates to past and future generations. Happiness and contentment has little to do with ‘moving up a ladder’ or raw money and material stuff. It is about people being encouraged to live in harmony, pursue their individual strengths, and respect the diversity of others and their abilities and/or limitations – whatever they may be – once the basics of enough food and shelter have been sorted I should add!
I think you would enjoy The Courageous State (see right)
Equal excellence should be the goal in the 21st century, nothing else should be acceptable.
She hits the nail on the head with, “… just as privatised medicine leads to the over-treatment of the rich and under-treatment of the poor, private schools over-educate the rich. This leads to many of them being educated beyond their intelligence.”
The economic cost of having such people in controlling positions is vast — more like trillions than billions — but is acceptable because the alternative would threaten established interests.
After all, the director is always going to prefer a system that leads to her/his dopy off-spring coining it in while mismanaging a PLC than subsisting on the National Minimum Wage producing widgets in a successful factory managed by the foreman’s child.
The American philosopher John Rawles realised that people’s ideas are influenced -consciously or unconsciously-by their own position in society. He proposed, not a set of answers, but a question. If we knew we would live in society but didn’t know whether we would be rich or poor, male or female, able bodied or disabled,of what race or class; what sort of society would we design? If you believe in reincarnation then this IS the situation (but polls suggest only about 25-30% do).
However, I suspect most of us would want a society that is tolerant and compassionate. One where people are given opportunities to develop their talents whatever they are. But this would be less about winners and losers and those who are disadvantaged would be entitled to have their needs (not their wants) met and that all would contribute to the common good.
I don’t think many would really opt for where a few have most of the wealth and the many have little.
You make a similar point page 114 of the Courageous State–“The achievement of potential is, I suggest, the goal of economic entities.” People matter more than status or money.
I am pretty Rawlesian in many ways!