Greater equality of opportunity and social mobility will not end poverty
July 22nd, 2009 by Bill Kerry Posted in Equality
One of the enduring myths that governments of unequal countries, like the UK and US, are keen to promote is that whilst we may be unequal our societies are somehow dynamic and allow the poor to rise out of poverty and ascend the social scale. This is useful to centrist governments on many levels.
It means that the gap between rich and poor can pretty much be ignored and that we can all join Peter Mandelson in being intensely relaxed about the very rich getting even richer as long as there’s a bit of fiddling at the edges and the poor (hopefully) also get a little bit richer. It also propagates the subtle yet insidious message that the poor, if they fail to rise, must be the authors of their own misfortune since we are clearly living in a land of boundless opportunity. They must just not be trying hard enough. This leads to a further public and political slackening of concern for those at the bottom of society – one which often spills over into outright contempt towards the relatively disadvantaged, be they young people from poor backgrounds, prisoners, asylum seekers or immigrants.
The problem is that the available evidence suggests that the UK and the US are not very dynamic societies in which ever widening equality of opportunity leads to great upward social mobility as the arch-New Labourite, Alan Milburn, seems to have realised. Most inconvenient of all, it seems that the much maligned, sclerotic societies of continental Europe, burdened (as we are constantly told) with high taxes and massive welfare budgets, do best of all in terms of social mobility. Interestingly, more equal societies also tend to gain more patents per head than more unequal societies showing that inequality is no spur to greater innovation either.
How has this come about? In a word: inequality.
Where the income gap between rich and poor widens to the extent that it has in the UK, it is clear that relative poverty and deprivation, re-cycled over generations, has simply swamped all the various initiatives designed to address poverty by promoting greater equality of opportunity and encouraging social mobility.
Take education. Everyone seems to agree that the best way to create a better society is to invest in education and to widen the opportunities for those from poorer backgrounds to study. However, studying in a vastly unequal society seems to make it an overwhelming uphill struggle where low social status relative to others often damages performance. Those societies that have a narrower gap between rich and poor have simply flattened out the hill somewhat, reduced their status differentiations, and their educational performance is much better as a result.
It seems clear that in more equal countries the whole nature and tone of society is kinder, gentler and more inclusive – and certainly more conducive to studying and learning. This context clearly has a profound impact on children and to its immense shame the UK is known as perhaps the worst place in the developed world to be a child. It takes no great leap of imagination to understand what an enormous drag effect this must have on educational performance in the UK and on our children’s ability to exploit any small increase in opportunities that the government might be able to squeeze into the system.
The conclusions are obvious. Whilst the modest gains from existing targeted schemes need to be protected from spending cuts, a massive and sustained re-distribution of income from the richer sections of society to the poorer sections of society is needed. The UK has to move decisively and urgently towards Scandinavian or Japanese levels of equality at the least. Only this will alter the nature of our society and improve the overall quality of social relations that all of us experience. Only this will allow us to begin to address the ingrained problems of relative poverty and deprivation. Nothing less will do. Everything else is mere tinkering.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oxfam GB.
