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  • “I started off as a libertarian economist, but I’ve come full...

Jonathan Derbyshire

The world of ideas

“I started off as a libertarian economist, but I’ve come full circle”—Gregory Clark on social mobility

by Jonathan Derbyshire / March 14, 2014 / Leave a comment
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In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama observed that those at the top of the income distribution were doing better than ever before. But at the same time, he said, “average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened [and] upward mobility has stalled.” And in the land of opportunity, that is unconscionable.

One often hears British politicians, of all stripes, saying the same thing: that social mobility has slowed, if it hasn’t stalled completely, and that policymakers (especially those designing education and training policy) ought to be doing something about it. If there’s a political consensus here, it’s not one that is replicated among those academics who study patterns of mobility and inequality. One notable dissident from this consensus is the British sociologist John Goldthorpe, who I interviewed for Prospect last year. In Goldthorpe’s view, when politicians refer to a “Golden Age” of social mobility in the decades following the Second World War, what they’re actually referring to are structural changes in the labour market which saw a massive expansion of professional and managerial employment. It’s not that intergenerational mobility has slowed; it never grew in the first place.

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Comments

  1. Roger McKinney
    March 15, 2014 at 23:33
    “ it’s better to be at the bottom in somewhere like Sweden than somewhere like the United States.” I doubt it. The poor in the US are almost twice as wealthy, adjusted for the cost of living, than those in Sweden. “you’ve ended up endorsing a species of luck egalitarianism, according to which because talent is randomly distibruted, it is legitimate, and indeed a matter of justice, to correct, through redistribution, for outcomes that are the result of brute luck.” Helmut Schoeck addressed this in his great book Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Schoeck wrote that when people attribute wealth to luck it tends to reduce envy. In Clark’s case it inflames envy. Socialists have redefined envy to a virtue and redefine justice to mean slaking one’s envy.
    Reply
  2. JLanceCombs
    March 16, 2014 at 15:44
    So, if he's come full circle, then he's come all the way back to libertarian economist, right?
    Reply
    1. Jeff
      February 3, 2015 at 02:34
      That's what I thought, except wealth redistribution is not libertarian at all so I'm confused.
      Reply
  3. Ray Kohn
    March 24, 2014 at 07:17
    School teachers already know that learning how to learn is taught at home. Therefore, those who look to institution-based education as the great leveller fail to grasp what politicians wish to avoid saying - that most problems for children are caused by their parents (you don;t say that to your voters now do you?). So, in demographic terms, social mobility is just slight turbulence
    Reply
  4. Jose Carlos Peliano
    March 25, 2014 at 13:21
    Mr. Derbyshire! I`m really very glad to read that both researchers have concluded that social mobility is a myth in capitalism! !`ve studied the link between income distribution and social mobility with a new approach and methodology and I found similar picture in brazilian official statistical data. Social mobility occurs for sure to small and privileged groups not to the great majority of people! Could you deliver this comment to Mrs. Goldthorpe and Clark so as to we could eventually discuss about and share information. I thank you in advance and congratulate you for the up-to-date article!
    Reply
  5. Bo Lundahl
    March 25, 2014 at 15:17
    Stating that "[t]he poor in the US are almost twice as wealthy, adjusted for the cost of living, than those in Sweden" is simply absurd. In the US, poverty is visible, and so are contrasts. In Sweden, the average standard of housing is much higher, and everybody has access to health care and most of the basics of life. This is reflected in the differences in average life expectancy. In Sweden, there is a social safety net available to all. Similar contrasts are clearly in evidence between Sweden and the UK. It should also be noted that domestic and international comparisons, poverty appears in two forms, absolute and relative.
    Reply
  6. Luke Lea
    April 11, 2014 at 22:54
    If the solution is economic redistribution from the lucky few to the less lucky many, the question becomes how to do so in a fair and efficient way. I am just an amateur economist, but may I suggest the idea (not mine) of wage subsidies to be financed by a graduated expenditure tax. I will leave it to the pros to explain what that means.
    Reply
  7. Jonathan
    February 27, 2016 at 22:47
    "If we really had a completely meritocratic society, so that people’s circumstances had no effect on their possibilities, the only thing that would be left to differentiate people would be their DNA." Um....well....no...there would be ambition...the willingness to buckle down and study market-demanded skills. I think the good professor may not fully grasp the meaning of "merit."
    Reply

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Jonathan Derbyshire
Jonathan Derbyshire is Executive Comment Editor at the Financial Times, and former managing editor of Prospect
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