Monday 16 April 2007

Social mobility will eat itself

Social mobility will eat itself

There is a consensus in mainstream British politics that meritocracy is a desirable thing: that individuals should have, as far as possible, equality of opportunity (primarily through access to education), and that their chances of success in life (in terms of their career and income) should be based on ‘merit’, which seems to mean a combination of intelligence, skills and work ethic.

It is assumed that the extent to which a country is a true meritocracy can be determined with reference to the degree of social mobility – the percentage of those born into the bottom income quartile that move to the top income quartile by the age of 40, or some similar measure – because those born into low-income, working-class families, but possessing plenty of merit, can use the crampons of opportunity to scale the cliff-face of class.

In this context, the apparent decline of social mobility in the UK [1] tends to cause a fair bit of concern, as it is generally taken as evidence of a shift away from equality of opportunity. While it has been pointed out (by Jamie Whyte in the Times [2], for example) that before arguing that we have too little social mobility we should consider how much of it ought to be expected in a meritocracy, it seems intuitively reasonable to say that if there’s less of it than there used to be then we must be less of a meritocracy than we were.

However, discussing this issue the other day I managed to talk my way round to the idea that following the conditions for meritocracy first being in place you might expect to see social mobility increase initially only to decline again a few generations later, without any necessary reduction in opportunity. The key assumption here is that the components of merit (intelligence, skills, work ethic) are, through a combination of nature and nurture, somewhat hereditary, so that people who themselves possess the tools to succeed in a meritocracy are more likely to produce similarly well-equipped children. This would result in the following sequence of social changes as a meritocracy develops:

1) Pre-meritocracy
Society has a rigid class structure and extreme inequality of opportunity. Social mobility is low as those born with merit at the bottom of the social scale lack the necessary crampons to climb to a higher ledge.

2) Early meritocracy
Expansion of (principally educational) opportunities and decline of other barriers (e.g. discrimination) sees social mobility increase as people whose merit would have been wasted in previous generations are now able to use it to their advantage.

3) Established meritocracy
With consistent access to broader opportunities people have sorted themselves into reasonable merit order, so that those with more merit are now mostly to be found in the top half of the social scale. Given that merit is hereditary, those born with merit don't move into a higher class bracket between birth and middle age as they were in the correct one to start with – the quantity of social mobility (as defined earlier) is lower than in early meritocracy, even if the opportunities for social mobility are the same.

I'm not necessarily arguing that public policy has not, through factors such as (to take one preferred explanation from each side of the spectrum) the decline of grammar schools or greater income inequality, increased inequality of opportunity in the UK – just that an observed decline in social mobility does not prove this on its own.

[1] http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTrust_report.htm
[2] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article729481.ece