Blimpish || a Tory

Matthew Taylor makes a good point about the potential negative consequences of seeking to increase social mobility.  You should read it because you won’t hear much about arguments against social mobility in the years ahead, as all three parties (Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and the Government) have started competing in a meritocracy arms race.

Fitting nicely with my previous post, Matthew implies that the Left’s concern with social mobility is a function of the case for redistribution having become politically embarrassing.  An example of this in action is Kitty Ussher’s comment here (p.32 onwards), who describes her belief in terms of “breaking the link between class and the access to a fair outcome in life,” and then goes on to frame the argument against inequality in instrumental terms (p.35): “in a society with large wealth inequalities, resentment is bred and communities are undermined by feelings of marginalisation and and separation.”  No attempt is made to argue for equality, as a matter of justice.

But anyway.  A White Paper is due tomorrow, which will I’m sure unleash a new wave of social mobility.  Or so will be the promise.  As Matthew says, Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne has said that it’s a “classic liberal error” to view any gains in upward mobility (i.e. born poor but die rich) as being at the expense of downward mobility (i.e. born rich but die poor).  All have won, and all must have prizes.

Well, possibly.  Mobility can expand without simply creating a churn of people winning and losing over and over (which, as Matthew says, carries a big social cost).  But it’s difficult – it was a helluva lot easier in the 1950s and 1960s because of the rapid expansion of the economy created by technological innovation flowing from (but not fully used in) the 1930s and 1940s; this created a steady flow of new higher income jobs to absorb the products of improved educational opportunity.  There was also a lot of immobility to remove back then – for people generally, and especially for talented women – which explains the seemingly greater fluidity of those times.  Those conditions though – a coincidence of very fast skill-biased technological change with expanding educational opportunity and improved openness to merit above breeding in business and government – are probably not about to recur.

The problem I think is that many of those arguing for mobility, as Matthew implies, because they can’t argue for redistribution, seem to assume that mobility will achieve equality.  But they’re different things.  We could have an extremely mobile and indeed meritocratic society already; the increased inequality in income might be in part a reflection of that (as well as a range of other factors – dissolving family forms, collapse of institutionalised pay determination, technological change).  Personally, I think there’s some truth in this – although, as David Goodhart argues here, there are still those at the very top and very bottom not included within that society.

That’s because, as I think most of us know, there’s only so much Government can do to counteract the inequalities we have in our (cognitive and non-cognitive) abilities.  Some of us are good at maths, have a great work ethic, and have great people skills.  Some of us have difficulty with basic logic and can’t manage our temper.  A mobile economy will reward the first more than the second, all other things being equal.   And the problem is, a lot of our ability is inherited – not so much in our genes, but in our family and community environment.  The phenomenon of assortative mating (clever boy reproduces with clever girl) only serves to enhance this difference.

If you want to affect greater social mobility in that context, you either increase the churn – making life chances more a lottery, making them less meritocratic – or you have to ameliorate the underlying source of unequal talents.  This will not only take a lot of money, but (and people on the Left are never patient) a lot of time too.  The reason for this is that by the time we reach adulthood most of our ability is already determined between our genes and our upbringing.  That’s the motivation behind Sure Start, and school reform, and even by the effort to tackle child poverty.  What I do find amusing (and tragic) is that people on the Left seem to have become so allergic to making judgements on ‘the family’ [shudders] that they can’t see that maybe, possibly, influencing choices about family formation and dissolution might be a valuable tool in effecting early human capital formation - and cheaper than having full-tim nursery for every child, which seems to be the only offered alternative.

But that brings us back to the question of how genuinely committed people on the Left are to improving social mobility.  A bit more honesty from some would be nice, but not all.  A true liberal quite properly seeks to forge a meritocracy as the just society; within whatever schema of redistribution is necessary to please Rawlsian sensibilities, a liberal should want a less talented person to be ‘poorer’ than a rich person.  It’s the social democrats who are most confused on the Left these days - signing up to the liberals’ agenda, but knowing there’s something wrong, knowing that a society which condemns somebody as ‘less talented’ to a life at the bottom seems… wrong.  Byrne’s statement is part of that problem - excess social mobility (up and down) is a potential means to a more equal society, but tending to meritocracy raises some serious issue; although as Matthew says, a bit more equality along with some social mobility might actually work better.  (As should be obvious, there are liberals and social democrats in both the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.)

Now to my own side.  Why are we concerned with promoting social mobility to the extent we now seem to be?  On reading recent Right-wing commentary, conservatives apparently now take social mobility as their driving creed.  I think this is at once poor reasoning and bad political strategy.  (I leave aside again the fact that there are liberals in the Conservative party.  One of them ran it for 15 years.)

It’s bad political strategy because most voters will follow social democrats in conflating social mobility with equality, and in that sense a Conservative party in Opposition or in Government will never come close to satisfying expectations.  The problem is that, as much as social mobility is worth pursuing, there will be losers as well as winners – and the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties will always there to point out to the losers how they’ve not been helped.  Unfortunately, as any marketing type will tell you – losers care more, and work harder to do damage, than winners will give you back.

On the poor reasoning, really.  It’s not that conservatives should be against social mobility (not at all), but they should – as with all such concepts – keep it very much in perspective.  Given the rhetoric we sometimes hear, one could be forgiven for thinking that British conservatives now believe in social mobility as unalloyed good, such that even the upward-downward churn would be good, to keep society fresh.  Let’s deal with that one first: being a conservative means you accept the world as it is, and in this case, accept that there is natural inequality – the task of our institutions is to make sure the best are at the top.  So social mobility, yes – but only insofar as it helps the best be recognised.

Second, conservatives should recognise that there’s a trade-off in all such mobility.  Meritocracy still admits of some change, because the world changes.  Technology, the global balance of power, changing tastes and preferences – all these mean that different people will benefit at different times.  As well as the general problem of churn there’s a specific one – if our institutions don’t give the successful some degree of security, then they will never make their contribution to society.  Too much mobility can cut against social capital, and raise transaction costs – there’s a balance between benefits and costs.  Peregrine Worsthorne put the balance thus thirty years back: “to the Conservative the problem is to ensure enough stability and continuity to prevent tomorrow’s aspirants to power pushing themselves upwards so fast that nobody can rule in an orderly and civilized fashion”

Third, there’s a trade-off in another way.  The particular flow of social mobility working at any time will never be complete, because some people win and some people lose, and some people haven’t got much chance (because they’re limited in ability).  Such a situation creates opportunities for those who wish to undermine support for our economic and social arrangements, by playing on people’s envy.  Therefore, as well as making sure people have access to opportunity, we also need to make sure that those arrangements overall work to their benefit.  That means ensuring that those arrangements not only reward economic success but other forms of service.  We can’t just ask people to know their place; we need to make sure their place typically isn’t that bad either.  And in this sense, every conservative should give a few moments’ thought to Kitty Ussher’s concerns over the effects of large wealth inequalities.

Conservatives’ asset is that they are not as ideologically constrained in removing the blockages to opportunity which constrain mobility.  Michael Gove can propose reforms to break the State monopoly in schooling and be criticised for not going far enough.  Iain Duncan Smith and the Centre for Social Justice can propose changes to family policy to improve child development and barely raise a murmur of protest.  Conservatives generally are more comfortable with promoting competitive individualism and implementing conditional welfare.  All this is good.

Conservatives’ liability is that we seem to think, because we’re still fighting the last war, that any concession on addressing excesses of income inequality is tantamount to supping with Tony Benn and Michael Foot.  Consequently, we are hampered in considering how financial barriers themselves can sometimes constrain income inequality, but also in creating the conditions in which the right amount of social mobility is seen as legitimate by the majority.  In Opposition, this is easy; we’re in favour of all social mobility.  But we’ll soon run up against some that we (correctly) feel is too much.  But if we say that there are never conditions in which there is too much inequality, we will never get to the point of tackling real problems that concern us, not just of social mobility but of society more generally.

Incidentally, the assets and liabilities for social democrats are in partly reversed but also too much entwined.  Their asset is that they are willing to tackle inequality by distribution, even if they are scared to admit it – it is a good thing that they now won’t take it too far, because inequality isn’t in itself a bad thing.  Their main liability is that, because they are so weighed down by existing commitments to ideas and to client groups (e.g. the educational establishment), they are not prepared to tackle all of the constraints on social mobility – when for them, probably excess social mobility is a good defence against meritocracy.  And the liability is made worse by the asset of being willing to redistribute - because, why annoy a client group, when you can give the losers a bung?