With the vast majority of the country being effectively middle class, just how much popular support is there for class-based measures? It strikes me that there are too many people with too much to lose. In the past when the middle classes were a minority this sort of thing was much easier to deal with. Opinion polls may show people want greater fairness, social mobility etc but you can bet that most of those people do not believe that it is they who should move down the social ladder to make way for those coming up.

You cannot legislate fairness and any attempt to do so is a waste of time and energy.

I am trying to get my eldest son into the right school for him now . My wife and I discuss what support he may need endlessly and he will have all the help we can give him. I suppose you might call that a class advantage ( although we are quite ordinary). Its going to be very hard and potentially unhelpful to legislate against Parents trying their best for their children isn`t it , and as that is what this class advantage actually is I have grave misgivings about the state going down this route .

Well stone the crows, Toynbee is enthuisiastic about Labour policy! I reckon she still sees herself as one of those victorian toffs that went around studying and lecturing the poor. I wonder if she wrote it from her Tuscan villa. I still laugh when I remember her humiliation at the hands of Richard Littlejohn on Question Time.

“The government will create a new over-arching law creating a duty on the whole public sector ”

“Race, gender and disability injustices are all subsets of the one great inequality – class”

Its just a further extension of their Marxist political correctness within the State bureaucracy.

“One cabinet member described it with relish as “socialism in one clause”.” i.e. equality of outcome.

“Tax credits and benefits would rise to lift families over the poverty threshold”

Here we go, this is their “biggest idea for 11yrs”. Pay more benefits and entrench the welfare class in their rut.

“Public sector pay would rise”

Aah, more rewards for Labour voters.

I don’t let it slip very often, but I actually have a certain amount of sympathy for the government on this issue, primarily because the time lag between input and outcome is so vast. Labour could easily make the argument that Early Intervention, SureStart, Blair’s education reforms, after school facilities and even the minimum wage & tax credit system will all have a bearing on improving social mobility, but we don’t know that yet because all of the kids who’re supposed to benefit are still in nursery, primary or secondary education. The best way of measuring how successful the government has been would be to measure the progress of those born around ‘97, but whilst there are progress indicators (school league tables, for example), we won’t know the full picture until they’re out of full-time education.

Personally, though, I’m not a fan of measuring mobility according to education, as that often doesn’t take into account the labour market, the cost of living, the inflating/deflating value of degrees or the jobs market in general. To have a true idea of what’s going on, you need to be more holistic, but that makes mobility a very difficult thing to measure.

Haven’t had chance to read the white paper yet (I’ve not even started the Narey/Lib Dem thing), but of the two most-publicised ideas I’ve heard, the teacher thing could be a waste of money if it’s not done properly. It’s not enough just to get the highest-performing teachers into inner-city schools; those teachers also need to be able to communicate effectively and relate to a completely different audience. Not everyone will be up to it.

On the other hand, the idea of subsidising internships, whilst still a relatively small and incremental step, is a great idea. It’s not enough, nowadays, to have a good degree; you also need experience, and those who can afford to gain that experience by doing an unpaid, month-long internship in London are in a significantly better position than those who can’t. Had I had that opportunity, I would’ve bitten their hands off.

“I don’t let it slip very often, but I actually have a certain amount of sympathy for the government on this issue, primarily because the time lag between input and outcome is so vast. Labour could easily make the argument that Early Intervention, SureStart, Blair’s education reforms, after school facilities and even the minimum wage & tax credit system will all have a bearing on improving social mobility, but we don’t know that yet because all of the kids who’re supposed to benefit are still in nursery, primary or secondary education. The best way of measuring how successful the government has been would be to measure the progress of those born around ‘97, but whilst there are progress indicators (school league tables, for example), we won’t know the full picture until they’re out of full-time education.”

Back in the real World. My old primary school has no after-school facilities. It has virtually no sports teams. There are no male teachers. A high proportion of the skids are now designated special needs and many speak English as a second language. Social mobility for many people in the area means getting on your bike and getting the fuck out of there.

Back in the real World. My old primary school has no after-school facilities. It has virtually no sports teams. There are no male teachers. A high proportion of the skids are now designated special needs and many speak English as a second language. Social mobility for many people in the area means getting on your bike and getting the fuck out of there.

Then it sounds like your area’s got some problems, chavscum, though I do continue to find amusement in how often “Back in the real World” is poorly-concealed code for “my anecdotal observations prove conclusively that everything I say is right and everything you say is wrong.”

Forcing public sector or private sector bodies to ‘address’ disadvantage is a joke. You can’t legislate ‘fairness’ or ‘equality’ – instead the focus should be on setting the conditions in which access to opportunities is the rule rather than the exception.

I recently gave Harriet Harman a good shoeing for her disgraceful Equality Bill, which is a beautiful example of how legislation will increase discrimination and disadvantage rather than decrease it:

http://www.lettersfromatory.com/2009/01/06/harriet-harman-is-intent-on-destroying-fairness-in-our-society/

Thanks for comments. Neil’s points about both the time-lag in terms of trying to dislodge entrenched and inter-generational disadvantages are so often missed in the public debate. I think is a danger of over-focusing on any one issue (eg education) as a magic bullet.

But I also thought other people might well have read the Gladwell book and have something to say about it, in this area or more broadly.

Neil, people in the ‘real World’ outside of the media and political bubble like to offer their personal experiences and observations to counter the smug pronouncements of the policy-makers. Many of us do not recognise the image presented by the propoganda of the Labour Party.

The problems with such Govt initiatives or policies is that they are produced without counsulting or without any worthwhile input from the singularly most important group of people: the working-classes. More often than not, they prefer the contributions of the patronising, hypocritical middle-class, such as Polly Toynbee.

Chavscum, that’s fine up to a point. I wasn’t trying to dismiss your personal experiences, as they’re completely valid, but the only way anyone’s going to know if your personal experiences are representative of the broader working class is by doing research and producing evidence. All I said before you beckoned me into the ‘real world’ (and for the record, my part of Sheffield feels real enough to me) was that it’s difficult to determine at this point whether the government’s policies have been successes or failures in encouraging social mobility, because it’s a slow-moving and difficult to measure. You visit this place often enough to know that my posts criticise the government plenty, but I can at least accept that the jury’s still out…

For what it’s worth, though, I’d agree with you about the disconnect between the government and elite professions and the rest of the country, and the only way we can bridge that gap is by achieving a greater measure of social mobility.

Sunder, where the argument comes unstuck (and where Gladwell’s book falls down) is that Govts, think-tanks and social commentators/theorists alike (be they leftish, or rightish) are spectacularly bad at predicting which practical measures will actually improve any given child’s life chances: there are way too many variables, and a shedload of luck involved.
Gladwell’s book is another kind of conjuring trick, as it has the wisdom of hindsight. Yup, Gates got where he is partly because of his access to that terminal, but who at that time knew such a pursuit would prove to be so valuable for the future.
You simply cannot fund every type of all opportunities and openings for all children, as there isn’t enough money, time or supervisory/mentoring/teaching resources for this, so guesses (yup, guesses) have to be made. Is Govt the best agency to make such guesses?: does it know the child and that child’s nature?:is Govt not eternally fated to come up with least bad, rather than optimal solutions, and tied to the lowest common denominator?

I disagree. It sounds plausible as a radio talking point. If we can’t have hindsight, is there anything useful we can do to substitute for it ? Or do we just have to guess badly?

An idea: What if there was a great deal of comparative evidence about the type of social institutions which tended towards more equal opportunities, more social mobility (within the family of democratic liberal capitalist democracies) and those which did not. What if we could examine the range of features which make Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway comparatively better at this, and the United States worse?

Might it not be possible to come up with some methodologically robust findings about what was systematically important? You make it sound like guessing about new technology – but there are obvious distributional questions which determine who is more and less likely to get access and opportunities to any new technology. (For example, should schools have either books or computers at all, or should they only be in the homes which have them? Should there be a public library system?)

Some problems remain
- Strategy: How do gradual changes of the type necessary gets sustained (particularly as some path-dependency gets locked in?)
- Politics: Do enough of us prefer to have an approach which is more like the UK than something more like a hybrid between the Anglo-American and Swedish model? (This is what the ippr called the Anglo-social model. (I don’t think the UK could choose to be Sweden quickly, but Sweden had to choose to be Sweden once). There is very effective championing of high reward, high inequality, low mobility societies by those who do best in them – just as there is always very high championing of the status quo by current winners.

But that is the perennial challenge of political change, in whatever direction.

“Might it not be possible to come up with some methodologically robust findings about what was systematically important?”
It might, but there is the perennial problem you did acknowledge upthread: time lag.
a) This makes data hard to interpret on social mobility, with such a distance between a measure/action/initiative and being able to quantify (if ever) its effects, good or bad.
b) The speed of change in many of the ‘external’ social factors (i.e. those other than the particular programme/measure/whatever being analysed) is such that the waters are constantly being muddied, and the lessons learned fom research may not be readily applied because society has evolved or moved on again in the time taken to compile the research

I’m not saying attempts shouldn’t be made to improve social mobility, but that it has to be acknowledged that is is deeply imprecise, and the best we can hope for are good guesses (informed ones, but nonetheless guesses) which inevitably will have unintended (and possibly very undesirable) consequences. Jumping in head first to muddy water’s never a terribly wise move

I read Tipping Point, which I found interesting, but I am sympathetic to the view that Gladwell basically takes common phenomena (or ideas that have no basis – such as Blink) and turns them into books.

Tipping Point could easily have been half the size it was. Anyway, that aside, I might pick this book up if you recommend it.

Those who make the absurd claim that discussing class means ‘class war’ will say they are for ‘equal opportunities’ yet then seem to want to stick their fingers in their ears to shout ‘can’t hear you’ when anybody tries to discuss the barriers to more equal opportunities and social mobility in Britain today.

I thought this was spot on. LFAT is a prime example, especially given his last attack on Harman.

Sunny,

Thanks. I know exactly what you mean. I got halfway through Blink and didn’t finish it, as much because I lost track of my copy. And I heard enough of Tipping Point to feel that I got that by osmosis. (So credit to my brother, who I think is a Gladwell fan, as I don’t think I would have necessarily got hold of this for quite some time if it hadn’t been a present)

Given that this takes not many hours to read. I do recommend it. As I say, I was surprised by it because you start to glimpse some political implications and then you find that a set of commitments and convictions emerge through the book – amidst the ideas conjuring – and turn out to be pretty core to Gladwell’s own biography and self-identity, in a way that you would find interesting too.

And if its a commitment that is willing to rethink itself if the data doesn’t fit or work that way, that’s a positive for me too.

(But perhaps I am reading too much US long-form journalism. I also finally got around to reading Matt Bai over christmas too – again, having felt I had got enough of the point second hand – but what a good and fun piece of reporting that is).

Its a shame this large subject does not get more time , so so important

Slight tangent, but:

“If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”

None. That’s the nature of a monopoly.

I haven’t read Gladwell’s book, but my brother who read it said that he doesn’t present evidence from both sides of an argument, he just picks an opinion and cites the evidence that supports it. One example being that he claims that the reason that the Chinese do better at maths than Westerners is because the number system is more logical in Mandarin than in European languages. This is a highly disputed claim (to the point that the majority of researchers in education would say it was wrong) but there are SOME papers that do support the view (which he cites).

Anyway, I haven’t read it so I can’t add much.

Matt Bai’s The Argument? Brilliant book…

Sunder, where the argument comes unstuck (and where Gladwell’s book falls down) is that Govts, think-tanks and social commentators/theorists alike (be they leftish, or rightish) are spectacularly bad at predicting which practical measures will actually improve any given child’s life chances: there are way too many variables, and a shedload of luck involved.

Of course every child is different so making a prediction for any given child is difficult. However, it is not so hard to identify the factors that tend to make a difference to a child’s development. To take a slightly simplistic example, a child with a reasonably balanced diet will tend to be healthier than one who eats tons of junk food, so where the state does have influence over a child’s diet, such as at school, it makes sense to try to make sure s/he eats as healthily as possible.

Agreed, Andrew, but beyond the most (bleeding) obvious points (kids get adequate nutrition, shelter, etc) is the tricky stuff, and it is guesswork, so beware of unintended consequences. If you think in terms of system theory, what ’system’ is more complex than the raising of a child to reach his or her maximum human potential (it’s been debated since the dawn of consciousness, just about), so engineering of that system needs to be very well evidenced and thought through before commencing. Gladwell’s notions are plausible, and slick reading, but not evidenced.

Gladwell’s ‘Blink’ was full of interesting anecdotes but since the first half (in which he details cases of sudden insight) is cancelled out by the second (in which leaping to conclusions lead us astray) I didn’t know what lessons to take from it.

Alas, my class background forbids me from buying hardbacks (if only I’d had more help at school) so I’ll have to wait before passing comment on his latest work.

I instinctly belive getting parents into work will improve their children’s chances at a better future. If it doesn’t, at least they’ll have had a better childhood.