Richard Reeves: Why RSA’s Matthew Taylor has got it wrong (2/2: ‘Social mobility’)
The coalition government has made the pursuit of greater social mobility the “principal goal” of its social policy. A set of short term indicators of progress has been established. A new, independent statutory commission has been created, under the chairmanship of Alan Milburn, to evaluate both child poverty and social mobility. Leading the charge, Nick Clegg heads a new cabinet committee devoted to tackling barriers to a more mobile society.
Increasing rates of social mobility between generations – loosening the ties between birth circumstances and life chances – is of course a cross party ambition. But Clegg has made it his own, and tied social mobility to an explicitly liberal idea of social justice.
The strong attacks on the social mobility agenda by the RSA’s Matthew Taylor and Patricia Kaszynska therefore warrant a response.
Let’s start with the problem. Rates of intergenerational social mobility are low by international standards, as previous work by the government’s ‘Social Mobility Strategy’ demonstrates. If you are born into a household in the top quarter of the income distribution, you are more than three times as likely to end up in the top quarter as an adult than someone born into the bottom quarter.
Of course, genetics matter. But it is unlikely that genes have more influence in the UK and US than in other nations with higher levels of mobility. A wide range of transmission mechanisms – from parenting to school choice to economics – ensure that advantages and disadvantages are passed on, parent to child.
There are clearly limits to how far public policy can or should act to alter these patterns. But it is equally clear that we are very far from those limits. The UK is almost unique in having a school system that actually results in wider gaps in attainment at the end than at the beginning. (We share that dubious honour with the US.) Bad parenting is not fixed: a range of interventions have been shown to improve the quality of parenting. And early years provision can help to offset the disadvantages of birth. Universities that take into account social and education background in admissions find that they end up with smarter students.
Taylor and Kaszynska’s view is that “there is something unhealthy about the prominent consensus on social mobility in current political discourse in the UK.” One criticism they make is that the current government’s measures to promote social mobility are too modest. Which is fair enough, but since they mainly seem to be arguing against promoting social mobility, I think this criticism can be left to one side.
The “unhealthiness” of social mobility as a policy or political goal seems, in their analysis, to consist of four main elements:
1) The idea of meritocracy is used to legitimize – rather than challenge – existing inequalities
2) Social mobility is positioned as an alternative to the greater redistribution needed to equalize incomes
3) Removing talented individuals from poor communities weakens those communities
4) Social mobility rests on an “individualistic” notion of the self that risks undermining support for collective action
Let’s take each in turn.
1) The idea of meritocracy is used to legitimize – rather than challenge – existing inequalities
Taylor and Kaszynska usefully remind us that Michael Young’s ‘meritocracy’ was a dystopia in which inequalities are justified on the grounds of merit. They (correctly) summarise Young’s fears:
Meritocratically ‘selected’ rulers don’t owe anything to anybody; with no sense of debt, they feel no obligation to represent the interests of those lower down. The meritocratic Leviathan does not identify with its subjects. The verdict is passed: the lowly members of the underclass have only themselves to blame for not being talented and diligent enough to succeed.
[T]his form of meritocracy…provides cover for the existing elite who are able to conflate the society they advocate (in which the best get to the top) with the one we have (where most at the top, and their offspring, are there as much because of privilege as merit).
There is indeed a danger that a self-satisfied elite will preside over an unequal society, complacently blaming the poor for their plight and congratulating themselves on their innate talent.
But this is not what is happening. Nick Clegg in particular has constantly lambasted the low levels of mobility in the UK, describing it variously as a “national scandal” and a “moral crime”. He has attacked what he described as an “educational apartheid” between private and state schools. And he has assaulted the distribution of internships on the middle class grapevine. And while there are deep differences of approach, Michael Gove and Ed Miliband have voiced similar thoughts.
Clegg has also ensured that for the first time ever, the government will be held to account for the attainment gap between state and private schools. He has rewritten the advice to the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) to push elite universities harder to open their doors, and ensured the appointment of a strong pro-mobility OFFA director, Les Ebdon.
To say that in these have been controversial would be an understatement. Clegg has been accused of being a “communist” by the head of Magdalen College School; of being a hypocrite by the press for addressing the sore subject of internships; of engaging in “class war” through OFFA; and by insisting on Milburn as chair of the new commission, he has infuriated right wing Tories and papers.
This is not to claim that Clegg is some kind of hero. It is to show that even the fairly modest moves he has made in government – more, it should be said, that Labour ever did on most of these fronts – have exacted a political price. Of course those with a vested interest in the status quo don’t like it. But it is false to claim, as Taylor and Kaszynska do, that the politicians leading the charge on social mobility are using it as a figleaf to maintain the status quo. The opposite is the case.
2) Social mobility is positioned as an alternative to the greater redistribution needed to equalize incomes
It is true that Clegg and co reject a “narrow egalitarianism” that sees fairness as lying in a lower Gini coefficient alongside low levels of mobility. The coalition has consistently attacked Labour for an approach to fairness that relied on redistribution, often via tax credits, rather than an approach based on life chances.
The first point to make is that there is neither an automatic link nor a necessary antagonism between income equality and intergenerational mobility.
If we truly want meritocracy the best route is greater equality as this reduces the gaps between the rungs of the ladder going up and makes it less terrifying for some people to come down (necessary to achieve greater relative social mobility).
This makes intuitive sense. The trouble is, it’s not true. As my colleague at Brookings Scott Winship shows the link between income inequality and mobility is simply unproven. Nations with similar levels of income inequality have very different rates of mobility: consider Australia and Canada alongside the UK and US.
This is not just a theoretical point. Especially when money is tight, governments will face hard choices between raising the incomes of poorer families and investing in services that will reduce their children’s chances of being poor. Instead of investing in early years education for 2-4 year olds, the government could have put the money into tax credits, lowering income inequality and child poverty. But there is no evidence that this would have done very much to improve the life chances of the children, and quite a bit of evidence that early years education does.
This, then, is an honest difference of opinion about the relative importance of cross-sectional income inequality and cross-generational opportunity inequality. If Taylor and Kaszynska had £3 billion to spend, they’d presumably put it into the pockets of lower income households. I’d put it into early years, the pupil premium or university scholarships.
3) Removing talented individuals from poor communities weakens those communities
Taylor and Kaszynska are really worried about the fact that greater social mobility will take talented people out of disadvantaged communities. They mention this danger repeatedly:
For advocates of social mobility, people being able to move up the social ladder and, if they so choose, to “leave their communities” behind is precisely the point. Here, then, is a sharp conflict between a communitarian world view and a liberal one.
The implication of the Taylor and Kaszynska communitarian approach is that talented people should be encouraged to remain in their communities, rather than, say, taking up a scholarship to go to a good university and on to a good job somewhere else, or following a successful career to another city or borough. So, Milburn should have stayed in Stokesley, rather than getting above his station and coming to London; John Prescott in Prestatyn; Hazel Blears in Salford; Alan Sugar in Hackney, and so on.
It is almost certain that if these talented people had “stayed put”, their home communities would have been better for it. But is that really what we should be advocating? Do we think community trumps the individual in such a strong way? (I don’t. That’s why I don’t live in Peterborough.)
The Taylor/Kaszynska version of communitarianism – that says poor talented people should stay put for the sake of their communities – is in fact deeply conservative and wildly anti-egalitarian. It would worsen the social divides that exist in our society. If I understand the point correctly, people like Milburn and Blears are supposed to stay put, while those born to affluent professional families in London and expensively educated, are “unencumbered” and therefore free to take the jobs that the upwardly mobile northerners would otherwise have come and stolen off them. Surely you don’t mean that? But if not, what do you mean?
Nor do I think it’s true that people who move on and up in the world feel their backgrounds to be have been “unworthy”. Most seem to me to have pride in their roots, not “disdain” for them.
4) Social mobility rests on an “individualistic” notion of the self that risks undermining support for collective action
A related concern, especially of Kaszynska, is that social mobility, by promoting an individualistic model of success, will undermine support for collective action:
While there is a sense that this line of thought has become ideologically appropriated to legitimise the principles of free markets and the trickle-down effect, the allure of the view comes from the fact that, deep inside, we fall for the Romantic conception of Prometheus “unbound” – we want to think of ourselves as sovereign individuals.
At some level, this is again simply a difference of world view. Liberals tend to think that individual sovereignty is the main achievement of the enlightenment: that we can each chart our own course rather than having it charted for us by priests, peers or presidents.
This is not the place to re-run the old liberal v communitarian arguments. So just three quick points…
First, social mobility does indeed rest on and reinforce individual agency, often at the expense of institutional and community stability – and so in the end a judgement has to be made on which is more important.
Second, there is no linear relationship between a desire for individual agency and support for collective endeavour: after all, the 60s were an era of both greater individualism and consistent support for welfare and employment policies.
Third, the individualist genie is out of the bottle, and politics and policy simply have to adjust to that fact rather than lamenting it.
Richard Reeves is associate director at CentreForum and former director of strategy to the deputy prime minister. You can read the prequel to this article here.
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