The shining jewel of liberals and progressives has taken some bad hits recently in the UK. If there is one thing that liberals and progressives have concurred upon it is the fight against income and social inequality. This has meant different things in each camp: for liberals, the struggle has become one of equality of opportunity; for progressives, the struggle has concentrated upon the narrowing of income and wealth disparities between classes. Policies have ranged from increased availability and access to education (lower and higher) in the hopes of increasing social mobility to income redistribution via progressive taxation, regulation of wages and implementation of labour laws and the social welfare state in the hope of narrowing income disparities. However, both groups have generally argued that the narrowing of disparities between classes is a generally good thing.
So, I am interrupting my regularly scheduled diary on classical economics with this discussion. I will resume the diary next Tuesday and Thursday.
Income and Wealth Inequality:
Given the fact that income and wealth inequality has increased from the time of Thatcher and under New Labour as they actually abandoned economic policies that attempted to achieve a narrowing of income between classes, this has left education as the main vehicle for improving social mobility between classes.
Here are two spreadsheets: The first is a comparison between Britain and other advanced capitalist countries and the second is an historical examination of the levels of poverty in Great Britain (as well as a Gini coefficient examining income inequality) from the Institute for Fiscal Studies:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/...
Education and Social Mobility:
And yet, these education policies have not achieved their hoped-for results and this has become evident in a recent report on social mobility in the UK dated July 21st 2009 from a government appointed panel chaired by Alan Milburn (MP) (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/...) The purview of the panel (http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/...) was an examination of access to higher professions to assess the possibility of social mobility between classes:
Social mobility relates to the degree to which people’s social and economic
status can change throughout their life or between generations of their family.
There are two aspects of social mobility:
• First, social mobility can be facilitated by the creation of more high
quality professional and other jobs (i.e. an absolute measure)
• Second, social mobility can be facilitated by promoting fairer chances
for all to realise their potential (i.e. a relative measure)
The review was not in the least encouraging. In fact, as reported by the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...), it was found that
There are, it reveals, more students of black Caribbean origin at London Metropolitan University than in all the 20 Russell Group universities put together. Only 60 of the 250 schools that run cadet forces, feeding leaders into the army, are in the state sector. The vast majority of graduate recruiters target 20 or fewer university campuses, although there are 109 universities in Britain. While only 7% of pupils are educated privately, 75% of judges went to independent schools, 70% of finance directors, 45% of top civil servants, 32% of MPs – and many journalists, too. It is uncomfortable to be told such truths; behind its modern veneer, British society is determined by who you know, and who your parents are. Some things have improved, of course. There is more gender equality (although not enough); more racial equality, too. But effort and merit are not rewarded as they should be. In some regards, poor children born in 1958 had better prospects than those born five decades on. This was, of course, one of the problems that Labour won power to tackle.
According to Polly Toynbee (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...), this stratification has not been deliberate and the Labour government has tried several different policies and has poured money into education programmes:
But on Labour's watch, class has become more rigid, destiny for most babies is decided at birth, and the incomes of rich and poor families have drawn further apart. Labour didn't mean that to happen and has tried to reverse it. Tax credits, Sure Start, nurseries for all, much better schools, many more university places and apprenticeships almost certainly stopped inequality growing far worse. Since Labour's babies are still only 12, the long-term good effects of these programmes should prove deeper than current figures show: Milburn says he sees signs that the decline in social mobility "has bottomed out". At last GCSE results are becoming less closely tied to parental income than before. But all the same, in Labour's time the haves have accumulated more and made even more certain that their children would be haves too. The ladders up from bottom to top have grown steeper. The barriers preventing the rise of interlopers have grown higher, while the safety net preventing even the dimmest privileged children from slipping downwards has grown stronger.
Hopefully, she is correct, but what about those who are working class and poor and who wanted to attend university during New Labour’s term in office? Has their situation improved? Unfortunately, not really ...
Inequality and Electability:
John Denham’s speech at the Fabian society (July 1st 2009) addressed poverty and inequality and popular attitudes towards the problem (http://www.fabians.org.uk/...). He addressed policies by New Labour that have gone towards addressing the problems of poverty and inequality unsurprisingly these are the same policies that Polly Toynbee mentions above:
We have been in power for twelve years, we can point to an enormous amount that we have achieved, whether it’s in investment in new opportunities through Sure Start, to the expansion of the NHS, to the improvement of tax credits, child tax credits, and efforts we have taken that have had a tangible difference, yet we are obviously still in a position where inequality is highly marked in our society, and where (as the research shows) we don’t necessarily have a public consensus for doing some of the things that could be proposed to do more about poverty and inequality.
However, he concluded that according to research conducted by the Fabian society that people no longer had the sympathy and willingness to tackle poverty using the approaches of the past (e.g., income redistribution, social welfare policies to assist the poor). Moreover, as people were not in tune with these ideas, electability must be a prime consideration:
But I think there’s a few things now we need to say about this debate that come from research. I think we have got to accept that we perhaps have come to the end of that period of time where the purely needs based approach to fairness and inequality, which has dominated much left-liberal thinking since the 1960s, is the best way, and the best framework, to which we tackle these inequality issues. I think that the type of egalitarianism that defines fairness solely in terms of society’s response to those in greatest need, is simply out of step with the majority of popular sentiment. The group of people who sign up to a traditional egalitarian view of society (only 22% according to this research) tends to be older and more traditionally working class. In other words, a demographic that is actually shrinking in our society. And it doesn’t look as though it is big enough to build the sort of electoral coalition on which those traditional responses to poverty are going to be successful.
He argued that the discussion needs to be more inclusive, essentially because those in the middle do not see themselves as affected by discussions of poverty and inequality:
If you think you are in this middle group, policies and language aimed at 'the poor' by definition exclude you. They intensify the sense that someone else is getting a better deal than you and your family. And if you in the middle, you are more likely to be concerned about whether 'the top' is doing better than you, than you are about the situation of those at 'the bottom' So our language needs to be inclusive; and to avoid defining - even inadvertently - the bottom against the middle. People in the middle - wherever they actually are - have an acute sense of others getting a fairer deal. So making the deal clear to them is essential.
In what appears to be a channelling of Denham, Milburn pitched his argument stating that these results do not only apply to the poor, but also to the middle class:
There is a chasm between where we are and where we need to be if Britain is to realise the social benefits of a huge potential growth in professional employment. This is more than an issue for those at the very bottom of society. It is an issue for the majority, not the minority. It matters to what President Clinton famously called the "forgotten middle class". If that growth in social exclusivity is not checked, it will be more and more middle-class kids, not just working-class ones, who miss out.
So what are the proposals advocated by Milburn and the panel to deal with this stratification? According to Polly Curtis, the solutions are to apply free-market principles by replacing low performing schools with academies, giving parents vouchers to buy their way into better performing schools and the idea of paying schools according to exam results. As she says, these are deeply controversial and are opposed by teachers as being inconsistent (http://www.guardian.co.uk/...).
Higher education and New Labour:
While Toynbee and Milburn stressed the positive educational policies at the University level such as the opening up of new places, the results at University level are not good either, and according to Polly Curtis, the social gap at universities is "substantially unchanged" since the 1960s. Moreover, access to the top 20 elite universities in the country is limited to only 16% of students from the poorest economic backgrounds. Given that employment recruitment is conducted primarily at these institutions we have a serious problem.
An additional problem has been the introduction of university fees which has especially hit students from the lowest incomes hardest and has also affected choices of study for those from the middle class downwards. Why would the suggested policy proposal of Milburn’s panel to give every 18-year-old a £5,000 voucher to spend as they wish on their training or higher education actually be seen as viable when university course fees are £3,225 for the 2009/2010 academic year? Grants are available, a Maintenance Grant or Special Support Grant - worth up to £2,906 and you can get loans to cover course fees and maintenance (but if you get a grant, that places limits on the loan available for maintenance).
Students who are faced with mounting debt will choose courses (there are no liberal arts degrees here, students choose a major and that is all they study essentially) like Business over Economics, Engineering over Sciences, where they think they have a possibility of finding employment upon graduation. This has lead to the evisceration of Humanities, Social Sciences and Science courses from universities that cater to middle and working class students due to insufficient numbers. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake has limited value for those who must borrow and work to attend university.
There is also limited financial aid for part-time students (not everyone can take off 3 years of their lives to attend university without working); According to the government web-site, for the most intensive courses, the maximum available through the Fee Grant and Course Grant combined is £1,435 for 2008/2009. For 2009/2010, the maximum is £1,470.
Milburn actually proposed that university fees be scraped for those students who live at home while attending university in an attempt to make it easier for poorer students to attend. One problem ... unless these students live in a city where there is an elite university, this will do little or nothing to help their social mobility; in fact, given the report, it will only further limit their choices.
The structure of the Research Assessment Exercise in which government money is given to those researchers with proven records dependent upon the number of publications in internationally recognised journals limits independent research outside of the mainstream of the profession and rewards quantity of publication (you need at least 3 published pieces in 3 years to even be considered). This has led to the concentration of government research money in the hands of the already elite universities and the further degradation of universities catering to the working class as the researchers and lecturers in these universities wind up primarily teaching and do not have the sources and funds to do research.
Conclusion:
This report is a damning indictment of New Labour's education and equality policies. What is even worse is that this has not been a deliberate policy on part of the Labour government; the question that arises is whether education alone can prevent the hardening of class stratifications or must education policies be combined with policies that reduce income and wealth inequality so that education policy is part and parcel of a movement to a more equitable and fair society. In a society of such inequality, equality of opportunity seems to have little or no meaning. We need to tackle social and economic inequality; education is necessary, but insufficient to ensure a fair society.
I’ll end with a quote from Toynbee from the above linked article:
On social mobility, Labour willed the ends without confronting the politically difficult means. Equality of opportunity doesn't happen in any society as grossly unequal as this. The report shows graphically how the only countries that nurture talent regardless of class are those where incomes and lifestyles are most equal. The Nordics do best, because the ladder from top to bottom is short: it's easy to climb and the social penalty for slipping down is less. The US has the least mobility and the steepest ladders, despite the persistence of the anyone-can-make-it American dream. Britain lives with the same delusion, but Labour has learned the hard way that you can't allow the well-off to keep acquiring more and at the same time hope the children of the poor can catch up with rich children's life chances. Social mobility is not a separate programme that you can add regardless, like pepper and salt.