We have to demand equality, not greater social mobility

Stop focussing on equality of opportunity and simply focus on equality

Your start in life should not define your outcome. We often hear this sentiment, but the specifics of what it means can vary depending on who is saying it. For some people it might mean that starting as a shelf stacker should not prevent them from rising to CEO, for others it might mean that their parents’ wealth should not give them an unfair advantage when starting their own business.

Social mobility measures the elasticity between our parents’ outcomes, and our own. It also measures how quickly we depart from our beginning. The further and faster we move upwards from our starting point, the happier we’re all supposed to be.

This is a useful narrative for the political elite as it minimises their role in the structural processes that reproduce power and emphasises the role of free markets to promote competition in order to access upwards mobility.

Does a fair and egalitarian society need to measure inherited advantage? Is social mobility a politicised metric, and if so, who benefits from discussing our society in these terms?

In this article I want to examine why governments measure social mobility and offer what I believe is a more valuable alternative to hold governments accountable for how their policies affect measurements of inequality.

Why do we measure social mobility?

There is no single reason why governments around the world measure social mobility. However, a common theme across many economically developed nations is the focus on missed economic opportunity. How much extra GDP can be generated by having more productive economic actors in a society and, crucially, can expenditure on social benefits be reduced if fewer citizens require support?

While these are the most commonly provided reasons for measuring social mobility, I believe the primary benefit of measuring social mobility is to quantify how much resistance there is to the transfer of wealth and status in a society. If there is little social mobility in a society, it tells us that there is a systemic issue that preserves inequality. Those at the top stay there, and those at the bottom do too.

Some people have more than others; how easy is it for those that started with less to gain a larger share? It’s easy to think of that share in purely monetary terms, but it’s far more than that. How easy is it to gain a larger stake in society? Gain more status, value, power or importance? The implicit conceit is that experiencing upwards social mobility means that you matter more in your new state of being than your original one.

I think it’s important to conceptualise social mobility as a finite resource in the same way as a commodity such as copper. Imagine if one person controls 50% of all the worlds copper and the rest of us have to split the other half. To experience upward mobility, shares of that copper need to be transferred from one person to another.

Can we say that social mobility is taking place if the person with the majority stake gets to keep all their resource while the rest is transferred between the minority stakeholders? Even if we account for the endless economic growth that capitalism demands, are we able to also guarantee that cultural capital will grow equally in proportion?

Social mobility as it’s currently measured fails to consider where value is being transferred from. The implied answer is that value is passed on through trickle down economics, or from capital investment that creates jobs. It’s not a Robin Hood process that takes from the rich and gives to the poor, because the rich aren’t getting any poorer.

Who deserves social mobility?

Picture two people waiting for a bus. One is a single father in his forties who works 60 hours a week for minimum wage. The other is a 19 year old high school dropout on her way to score. Which one deserves upward mobility?

The potential benefits of social mobility are an ideological and political issue. Is the point of social mobility to reduce levels of inequality by having a fairer distribution of resources across society? Or is it a system designed to increase competitiveness across an economy?

In the second example, social mobility is a distinctly neoliberal ideology. We aren’t granted the right to experience upwards social mobility just by the very fact that we exist. You have to be seen earning it. This line of reasoning concludes that if you aren’t making a visibly concerted effort to improve your economic status, then you’re unworthy of reaping the benefits of upward mobility.

We’ve ingrained this culture into the way we value ourselves. The entrepreneurs, hustlers, go-getters, influencers and passive income stream makers are all applauded and idealised; prized as deserving examples of what you should do to accumulate more of what matters.

By prizing economic effort above all else, we fail to acknowledge all the privileges that join together to form a broader picture of socio-economic advantages and hindrances. In recent years we’ve seen this meritocratic narrative internalised by the largest companies in the world, but the point I want to emphasise is that effort and outcome are not directly proportional.

Equality of opportunity instead of equality of outcome

When institutions focus on measuring social mobility, their attention is often centred on ensuring that everyone has a fair chance to improve their lives — we’re aiming for equality of opportunity.

However when social mobility is stagnant, as it has been in the UK since 2014, and we also have significant inequality in a society, we run into the crippling problem of relative deprivation. This happens when:

• A person does not have something.

• That person knows other people who have the thing.

• That person wants to have the thing.

• That person believes he or she has a reasonable chance of getting the thing.

That last point (egoistic relative deprivation) can be one of the most psychologically damaging aspects of focusing on equality of opportunity and expecting equality of outcome.

Believing that you have the same chance of achieving your desired outcome as anyone else, when in reality the compounding effects of privilege and your starting socio-economic status have far more impact on your outcome than any amount of effort you put in.

When we spend effort to get poor kids into top private schools we feel good about ourselves because we’ve ‘levelled the playing field’. This only acknowledges that private schools have better outcomes than public ones. The latent benefits of being born into a higher strata of society aren’t diminished or transferred by sitting next to a poor kid.

Celebrating the rare occasions where we do enjoy quality of opportunity is like saying The Hunger Games are fair as long as all the tributes have weapons. The ensuing economic battle royale is a free market wet dream with very few winners.

Let’s measure inequality instead of social mobility

Without radical measures to remove an overabundance of hereditary privilege we can’t create an egalitarian society where everyone has a chance to live any life they choose.

Measuring social mobility helps us identify we have a problem, but it doesn’t show us the scale of the problem anymore than it indicates a solution. Social mobility is very low in Sweden, but inequality is far less than nearly all other economically developed countries.

More equal societies have better outcomes for everyone.

In their seminal work on inequality, Dr. Kate Pickett and Dr. Richard Wilkinson present compelling evidence that more equal societies experience less negative externalities than more unequal ones. Their research shows that more equal economically developed countries will experience lower homicide rates, fewer instances of mental health problems, better physical health, fewer drug addiction issues, lower incarceration rates and lower levels of obesity.

The most commonly used measurement of inequality is the Gini coefficient, which The Equality Trust define below:

“The Gini coefficient measures inequality across the whole of society rather than simply comparing different income groups.

If all the income went to a single person (maximum inequality) and everyone else got nothing, the Gini coefficient would be equal to 1. If income was shared equally, and everyone got exactly the same, the Gini would equal 0. The lower the Gini value, the more equal a society.

Most OECD countries have a coefficient lower than 0.32 with the lowest being 0.24. The UK, a fairly unequal society, scores 0.35 and the US, an even more unequal society, 0.38. In contrast, Denmark, a much more equal society, scores 0.25.”

Most of us experience the effects of living in unequal societies everyday, but beyond our own experience, it’s difficult to quantify if things are improving across a society. An indexed figure like the Gini coefficient makes it far easier to conceptualise the scale of inequality, and it’s also very simple to understand. You don’t need to have the full knowledge of how it’s calculated, just that a smaller number is better.

Focusing on promoting social mobility as the primary indicator for how tenacious inequality is throughout a society is not working. It’s an intangible, poorly defined, nebulous umbrella term for complex sociopolitical issues. It’s a term that’s open to abuse from the whole spectrum of political ideology, that places the onus on the individual to unlock their economic potential rather than the system to support equal outcomes.

Imagine if a government faced as much scrutiny over their country’s Gini coefficient as they do their GDP? That’s a powerful way for voters to hold their elected representatives accountable. It’s a way to measure the efficacy of policies beyond the spin of politics.

If we want our societies to be fairer for everyone, then it’s critical that we use metrics that are valuable and transparent. Let’s make measuring inequality part of the mainstream discourse of social democracy and ask our politicians to be accountable for how they tackle the problem.