Horner's Corner

 

 

The most equal countries also have the highest social mobility

Once more following in David Cameron’s footsteps, Nick Clegg is delivering tonight’s Hugo Young memorial lecture. A preview of his speech appears in today’s Guardian, in which the Lib Dem leader suggests that increasing social mobility, not achieving income equality, should be the ultimate goal of progressives.

He writes:

Social mobility is what characterises a fair society, rather than a particular level of income equality. Inequalities become injustices when they are fixed; passed on, generation to generation. That’s when societies become closed, stratified and divided.

The problem with Clegg’s argument is that the countries with the highest levels of social mobility are those with the lowest levels of inequality. As the graph below (from the excellent book The Spirit Level) shows, countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Canada, where income inequality is low, have far higher levels of social mobility than the United States and the UK, where income inequality is high. This is hardly surprising: greater inequalities of outcome make it easier for rich parents to pass on their advantages to their children. Clegg’s suggestion that progressives must prioritise either social mobility or income inequality is empirically unsound.

Social mobility

The data on equality and social mobility also undermines his argument against the 50p tax rate. He attempts to characterise Ed Miliband as an “old progressive” due to his support for a permanent 50p rate. But it is no coincidence that the most equal countries in the world are also those with the highest rates of income tax. Japan, the most equal country in the world, has had a top rate of 50 per cent for many years, Sweden, the second most equal country in the world, has a top rate of 56.6 per cent. The correlation continues: Denmark has a top rate of 55.4 per cent, Norway a top rate of 47.8 per cent and Finland a top rate of 49.6 per cent.

Clegg’s refusal to acknowledge all of the above reveals either his ignorance or his disingenuity. Until he accepts that the most socially mobile societies are also the most equal, no one should take his “progressive” claims seriously.

Posted by George Eaton

See also my Injustices of Merit -Chris Horner

via New Statesman – What Nick Clegg doesn’t know about equality.

The view of equality that was reflected in the first phase of Cold War liberalism could be summed up in a sort of koan: equality is one of the necessary goals towards which any good society strives. At the same time, the failure to attain equality is a necessary structuring principle that makes the good society possible.

Among the canons of Cold War Liberalism, no text was clearer about this double bind than Rawls’ Theory of Justice. In no other area of political philosophy was the difference between Cold War liberalism and its classical predecessors so significant. The experience of the devastating wars of the twentieth century, and the Great Depression, had destroyed the old gentleman’s liberalism for which Hayek pined. In its place was a liberalism that ceded, and promoted, an interventionist state. But, in continuity with the old anti-egalitarian thematic, the CW Liberals saw the danger of perfect equality from two perspectives. From the economic perspective, while conceding the performance of the mixed economies of the developed world, that performance would be endangered if positional incentives were wholly removed from the picture. Thus, the people on the bottom would be peculiarly hurt by a totally equal society, for those were the people who benefited most from the technological innovations of the private sphere. The second danger was political. To maintain equality required some body, some institution, some party. But the enforcers of equality would not only destroy liberty, but would themselves simply recreate inequality in terms of other goods. The administrator whose pay, in a capitalist society, put him well above the wealth of a worker on the assembly line, was matched by the party administrator whose perks and power, in a communist society, permitted him access to a lifestyle far above that of the workers for whom he supposedly spoke.

More via news from the zona: republican virtue and equality.

What Matters

Walter Benn Michaels Reviewing Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson

In the US, there is (or was) an organisation called Love Makes a Family. It was founded in 1999 to support the right of gay couples to adopt children and it played a central role in supporting civil unions. A few months ago, its director, Ann Stanback, announced that, having ‘achieved its goals’, Love Makes a Family would be ceasing operations at the end of this year, and that she would be stepping down to spend more time with her wife, Charlotte. Our ‘core purpose’, she said, has been ‘accomplished’.

It’s possible of course that this declaration of mission accomplished will prove to be as ill-advised as some others have been in the last decade. Gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, where Love Makes a Family is based, but it’s certainly not legal everywhere in the US. No one, however, would deny that the fight for gay rights has made extraordinary strides in the 40 years since Stonewall. And progress in combating homophobia has been accompanied by comparable progress in combating racism and sexism. Although the occasional claim that the election of President Obama has ushered us into a post-racial society is obviously wrong, it’s fairly clear that the country that’s just elected a black president (and that produced so many votes for the presidential candidacy of a woman) is a lot less racist and sexist than it used to be.

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing.

More: via LRB · Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters.

Sarko: victim of liberal ideology

Sarkozy, the President of the French Republic, says that the burka has no place in France because it represents the oppression of women. For this, liberals have applauded him for defending secular values in France.

But he has no plans to ban veils on nuns or legislate to force the Catholic church to allow women priests. This might be because there are more Catholic voters than Muslims ones in France;  or that he wants to look strong on an issue where he doesn’t have to spend money. But perhaps that is too cynical.

There is another issue I’d like to raise in connection with Sarko’s pronouncement. Sarko’s view seems to be that even if a woman says she wants to wear a burka, it is still somehow not a free choice. This is because of ideology, or to be cruder, ‘brainwashing’ – the notion that the mind has been so externally affected that apparently free choices are in some sense forced.  This may be true.

So: a liberal (male) politician is going to tell a woman she can’t wear what she likes because she is being told what to wear by (muslim) men.  It’s hard to be sure where this approach will end: a dress code  like they have in Saudi Arabia but with different rules, perhaps.

But Sarko knows what’s best for them, and wants to make them do it. This is paternalism, of course, something liberals are supposed to be against. I wish some of my liberal friends would consider this  before inveighing against so-called patriarchal islamic ideology. Not liking the burka can’t be a liberal justification for banning it.  Or perhaps their ‘tolerance’ for diversity means only: ‘you can be different, but not too different;  if you are  too different  we’ll make you conform’.

An alternative might be to drop the idea that freedom is revealed by the choices people actually make. I’m quite ready to go along with this, provided it isn’t restricted to the choices made by Muslim women. How many of our choices are truly ‘free’? The main ideological driver in ‘the liberal west’ is surely capitalism – with consumerism as the classic example of the addictive lifestyle which, unlike the burka, is regularly described as an unfree state by its victims. For a ‘liberal’ to  focus on sartorial choices that don’t harm others, while ignoring the real status of our abstract  ’freedoms’ is to act in bad faith. Or to be the victim of ideology – which is it, M. Sarko?