February 16, 2009
A reply to David Laws, MP
The following is in great part speculative. It is not presented as a definitively formed critique. I appreciate any replies and responses, so long as they are carefully considered given how difficult the subject matter is.
On Monday 9th February I attended an event hosted by the think tank Centre Forum, at which David Laws, Liberal Democrat MP and Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families presented a paper on equality in the UK. The paper is being distributed by Centre Forum, along with replies by Greg Clark (Conservative shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change) and Jon Cruddas (Labour MP for Dagenham and notorious party rebel who came 3rd in the last Labour deputy leader contest), who also spoke at the event. It costs £6 and you can order it from Centre Forum via the above link.
My aim here is to offer a reply to David Laws’ essay, and I’ve endeavored to present one which is accessible to somebody who hasn’t yet read it. In fact, this turns out not to be so problematic, as Laws’ essay is quite typical of the dominant trends in thinking about equality in British politics over the last 20-30 years. I will here argue that Laws’ essay is vulnerable to two broad criticisms, one from within his own intellectual framework, and one from without. When combined, they demonstrate that Laws’ proposals to deal with inequality leave a lot to be desired.
Before continuing, I should stress that Laws’ essay is a very good one. It is well argued, highly cogent and powerful. To demonstrate its failings therefore requires a particular approach. Rather than taking issue with particular points made, or intellectual manoeuvres deployed, it is necessary to understand the holistic structure of Laws’ thinking on inequality.
To do this, we start by laying out the core structure of Laws’ thinking on equality, which is typical of mainstream thinking on the matter for the past 20-30 years, but especially since the premiership of Tony Blair. It goes, in stripped-down form, like this:
1. Meritocratic society is the most desirable form of society.
2. Meritocratic society requires equality of opportunity if it is to be truly meritocratic.
3. Britain at present has aspirations to be a meritocratic society and is becoming more so in some respects. However the level of equality of opportunity in Britain at present is below that required for genuine meritocracy.
4. Therefore the primary consideration for modern Britain is to improve levels of equality of opportunity, thus bringing about genuine meritocracy (which is the most desirable form of society).
This 4-stage reasoning process helps to understand both Laws’ position and my critique of it. However it is complex, employs a great deal of hidden or pre-assumed reasoning, and therefore needs to be explained at some length.
The first premise (1) is highly important, and facilitates my criticisms of Laws which I describe as being external to his system of thinking. To pre-empt what I will argue later, I believe premise 1 is wrong, or perhaps better, inadequate, as it stands. This, however, will be clearer if we come back to it later.
Let us now focus on the second premise (2); that meritocratic society requires equality of opportunity if it is to be truly meritocratic. This is certainly true, as it is merely a statement of the logic of what “meritocracy” means. Unfortunately that logic is rarely spelled-out and made clear (for example, Laws’ simply uses the terms meritocracy and equality of opportunity without ever explaining what they mean or how they relate to each other). This is problematic, as it prevents proper understanding of the issues at stake – but it’s also not surprising, because the logic is very tricky and requires a lot of careful reasoning. I will try and expound that reasoning now.
A meritocracy is a politico-economic system under which people advance according to “merit”. That is, Mrs Jones gets a job instead of Mr Smith because Mr Jones had more “merit”, whatever “merit” means in this case. (For example if the job in question is news reporting for The Telegraph, under a meritocracy Mrs Jones ought to get the job because she is a better news reporter than Mr Smith. If Mr Smith gets the job because he went to the same Oxford College as the editor of the Telegraph even though he is a worse news reporter than Mrs Jones, then this is not a meritocratic appointment).
Now a meritocracy, if it is to truly be such, requires equality of opportunity. At this point things can get out of control unless we handle them very carefully. There is an obvious way in which meritocracy relates to equality of opportunity, which we can see if we consider the following example. Imagine Mrs Jones and Mr Smith apply for a job. Under a meritocracy, the person with the most “merit” should get the job. Factors which do not impact upon their ability to do the job in question – that is, things which do not add or subtract from their merit – should not be considered. The obvious example of (typically) non-relevant factors are things such as race, gender, sexuality or class. If an employer gave the job to Mr Smith because he is a man and Mrs Jones is not, even though being a man had no bearing on either candidate’s ability to do the job in question, this would not be a meritocratic appointment.
Equality of opportunity which excludes the consideration of non-relevant factors (such as race, gender, sexuality etc) should be both relatively non-controversial and obviously connected to meritocracy. In modern Britain, few would wish to defend an employer’s right to discriminate on grounds of a person’s skin colour or gender. And we can see why this connects to meritocracy quite easily. If a meritocracy is a system under which people are rewarded, promoted, etc according to their “merit”, rewarding or promoting (etc) people on grounds other than their merit is incompatible with this. Let us call this kind of equality of opportunity “immediate equality of opportunity”. We can helpfully think of it as the kind of equality of opportunity people should experience when in the interview room (or whatever): the expectation that only their merit at that point, and no other non-relevant factors, will be considered.
But there is another kind of equality of opportunity, and it is perhaps much more important. It is also the kind with which Laws’ essay – and most thinking on the matter generally – is predominantly preoccupied. We can see what this kind of equality of opportunity is like by thinking about people before they get into the interview room, so to speak.
Imagine two people, Janyce and Humphrey. Janyce is born to a black single mother in East London, attends a failing comprehensive school where lessons are frequently disrupted and teacher turnover high, and lives on an estate where most people are unemployed and drug abuse is rife. Humphrey on the other hand is born into a stable two-parent white household in Surrey, attends private school, receives tennis and piano lessons, progresses to Oxford and makes many contacts there.
If meritocracy only considers “equality of opportunity in the immediate sense”, then if Janice and Humphrey both apply for the same job, all that they need be guaranteed is that only their “merit” by considered, not non-relevant factors such as gender, race or sexuality.
Of course, it should be pretty obvious that something has gone wrong here. Do we not wish to say that meritocracy, if it is to be such, requires more than “immediate” equality of opportunity? Do we not wish to see that each person should have an equal chance and likelihood of acquiring merit? That is, do we not wish to say that for a meritocracy to be truly a meritocracy, all must have the same chance of acquiring, developing and demonstrating the merit required to get the best jobs, etc? In the case of Janyce and Humphrey, this has clearly not been the case. For after all, if Janyce had been given all the opportunities Humphrey received, perhaps she would have demonstrated even more merit than him at the interview stage (and perhaps it is now worth recalling that given how unequal their backgrounds are, the chances of them even being interviewed for the same job are highly unlikely).
It seems that what we want to say is that meritocracy requires not just equality of opportunity in the “immediate” sense, but the equality of opportunity of acquiring merit, over a course of time, so that people are not hampered by inequalities in educational, social and situational backgrounds, which if left as they are might prevent them from developing their full potential. I take it this is what David Laws is referring to when he says that “Britain has become increasingly meritocratic, but people’s chances of acquiring ‘merit’ appear as unequal as ever.”
Yet we must notice something at this point: ‘meritocracy’ has suddenly morphed from a seemingly simple and obviously desirable politico-economic social setup into something wholly more complex. When “meritocracy” simply meant “picking the people with the most merit”, all that was really required was “immediate” equality of opportunity; not excluding people on the basis of irrelevant factors. Yet if we want to demand that meritocracy not only consider people’s merit in the here and now, but address – as Laws puts it – “people’s chances of acquiring ‘merit’”, then things are far more complicated. What we are asking is not only that people are considered and rewarded only on their merits, but that people are equally able to acquire merit.
At this stage it is helpful to return to the schematic argument laid out above, focusing on premises 3) and 4):
3. Britain at present has aspirations to be a meritocratic society and is becoming more so in some respects. However the level of equality of opportunity in Britain at present is below that required for genuine meritocracy.
4. Therefore the primary consideration for modern Britain is to improve levels of equality of opportunity, thus bringing about genuine meritocracy (which is the most desirable form of society).
Now these arguments at first glance seem to address fairly well our concerns. They imply that we need to address equality of opportunity to acquire merit. Yet it is here that my first major criticism of Laws’ essay becomes relevant: that if we consider Laws’ proposals for addressing (in)equality of opportunity to acquire merit they are woefully inadequate to deal with the task in hand.
Laws’ proposals come under 5 headings, which are:
- Public Expenditure
- Welfare Reform
- Education
- Pensions
- Taxation
Before addressing Laws’ proposals, however, it is worth briefly glimpsing the enormous task at hand if one is serious about achieving equality of opportunity to acquire merit. Ensuring that our fictional but realistic characters Janyce and Humphrey have equality of opportunity to acquire merit will mean addressing the very fact Janyce is poor, as well as the fact the she and thousands like her not only attend failing schools, but come from social backgrounds with extremely low expectations and aspirations. It is likely that dealing with these issues will require spending a lot of money. And furthermore, whilst overhauling a failing school system is extremely expensive, it can only do so much.
As Dr Adam Swift of Oxford University has frequently pointed out both in his published material and in his spoken lectures, one of the key determining factors regarding whether a child is academically successful (and thereby likely to be financially successful) appears to be whether their parents read to them as a child. On the one hand this is a question of money: parents with money to spare are more likely to spend it on books to read to their children. But it’s about more than just money – after all library membership is free. There is a question of attitudes and ethos here; plenty of poor people read to their children, and lots of middle class parents don’t read to theirs. But as a general rule, people who were read to as children are more likely to read to their children in turn. If being read to as a child increases one’s chances of being financially successful, then those who are financially successful are likely to be those who are more likely to read to their children – and so the cycle of financial success is continued. If your parents were read to as children they are likely to be financially successful, and are likely to read to you in turn, making you more likely to be financially successful – but if not, then not.
So we begin to see that the problem of achieving equality of opportunity to acquire merit is certainly about more than just money; it is also about social and family factors, the expectations of peers and other less-tangible determinants of future success. However it is likely that throwing money at these problems will certainly help: if Janyce’s single mother hadn’t needed to work 60 hours a week at Tesco’s earning minimum wage to keep the wolves from the door, perhaps she would be more inclined to read to Janice.
With those considerations noted, let us however put them slightly to one side. The fact is, money helps increase equality of opportunity of acquiring merit. If schools are better funded, with class-sizes reduced, then children will do better at them. If council estates receive investment, not just in visual infrastructure, but in programmes which can provide youngsters not only with constructive ways to pass their free time (bearing in mind that many of them won’t be able to afford to undertake the weekend activities their middleclass counterparts will) but also with role models of success they can aspire to emulate, this again will help. The rub is, however, that these things are expensive. And that is my main problem with Laws’ proposals: he is not willing to accept how expensive it genuinely is to address (in)equality of opportunity to acquire merit.
Disclaimer: unfortunately all I can offer here is speculation. I don’t have the empirical date to prove my argument, which I concede is a weakness in my position.
Now, to explore Laws proposals in a little more depth:
Public Expenditure
Laws boldly writes that “public spending choices should be assessed specifically against a government aim of reducing inequality”. This sounds very noble, but it doesn’t in the end amount to much. In fact, it is just the correlate of Laws’ desire to address (in)equality of opportunity to acquire merit without raising taxation – something which I will focus on in due course.
Laws’ proposals around public expenditure do little to actually address how he will increase equality of opportunity to acquire merit. Rather, he simply suggests ways in which efficiency savings could be made by, for example, capping growths in NHS spending, or reducing expenditure on “hidden” unemployment in the form of incapacity benefits.
The problem is that not only does Laws decline to tell us how these efficiency savings would be focused towards reducing (in)equality of opportunity to acquire merit, it also seems fantastically unlikely that they would generate the kinds of sums required. Overhauling a failing schools system, or investing in the creation of worthwhile jobs for people at the bottom end of the scale which in turn foster aspiration and a desire to achieve, is incredibly expensive. Cutting “red tape” – even a lot of it – is unlikely to free up enough cash to achieve anything like the measures required. But more on that in a due course.
Welfare Reform
Laws’ proposals for welfare reform are difficult to reconcile with any genuine desire to address (in)equality of opportunity to acquire merit. They focus on getting people on incapacity benefit into work, better policing of the benefits system, and new expectation that lone parents will work. This kind of rhetoric is appealing to a right-wing electoral base: it shouts of getting tough on “scroungers”. But it’s hardly likely to achieve equality of opportunity to acquire merit. Pushing people off benefits generally means pushing them into menial, low-skilled jobs with little in the way of career prospects, coupled with poor pay. Perhaps it is better for economic productivity if people work rather than claim benefits (indeed that is almost certainly true). But it won’t address (in)equality of opportunity to acquire merit, or (in)equality per se for that matter. Children growing up in families and communities where people work in low-skilled, low-payed, low-aspiration jobs with no opportunity for improvement will be sent the message that such occupations are all that exist in life. Again, it is arguably (indeed, almost certainly) better for overall economic productivity if children grow up to work shelf-stacking in Tescos rather than claiming dole – but these sorts of proposals simply do not touch the question of improving people’s opportunities to acquire merit, and in turn the issue of addressing inequality.
What may be going on here is that Laws is confusing equality of opportunity with equality per se. Indeed, Laws makes no attempt to clearly distinguish the two at any point in his essay, and the result is that sometimes his reasoning appears confused or his conclusions ambiguous between the two kinds of inequality
Pension Reform
Laws’ proposals here are most definitely focused on (in)equality per se rather than (in)equality of opportunity (to acquire merit). While what he has to say is on the surface welcome – namely, pensioners need to be better looked after by society – it is in fact difficult to reconcile with what he says about taxation. However I will address this in my second general criticism of Laws, below.
Education
Laws says some grand sounding things about education: it is “the engine that powers social mobility”, and “should be the route out of cycles of deprivation and inequality”. He also seems right when he says that “Good education depends on two principal factors: adequate resources and strong school leadership”.
There are four problems with Laws’ proposals, however. The first is that some of his proposals sound good on paper, but how he intends to fund them is an altogether more difficult question. Laws talks about targeting the 15% of most deprived children with “Pupil Premiums”, which will cost an estimated £2.5 billion. He then talks of a further £5billion dedicated to helping disadvantaged schools to provide one-on-one tuition, Saturday classes, smaller class sizes, etc. Again, on paper, these things sound good – but that is a lot of money (especially in a recession). Laws seems to think it can all be funded through efficiency savings, because he specifically doesn’t advocate tax rises. It is hard to believe this kind of money can be found simply through cutting red tape.
That first problem becomes more acute when it is remembered that failing schools won’t be turned around simply be offering a few one-on-one classes or Saturday school (will the kids at failing schools really choose to come in on a Saturday, for a start?) Laws’ proposals actually appear incredibly modest, faced with the task of really turning around not just schools at the absolute bottom of the pile (and it is doubtful Laws’ proposals on those sorts of sums could even achieve that), but average comprehensives with mediocre results too. After all, if genuine equality of opportunity to acquire merit is the goal, it is hardly likely to be achieved given the levels of disparity currently witnessed between the attainment of children educated in the independent sector and those educated in the not-failing but not-excelling state sector. Or does Laws only care about those at the very bottom? Maybe he does, and maybe he is justified in doing so – but he needs to say why.
Which leads to a third point: if Laws is serious about equality of opportunity to acquire merit, surely the question of ending private education needs to be raised. There seems a strong prima facie case for arguing that a good way of achieving greater levels of equality of opportunity to acquire merit between our fictional Janyce and Humphrey is not just to provide better state education for Janice, but to end the state of affairs whereby Humphrey’s parents can pay for him to be educated to a standard Janyce’s single mother could never achieve. The playing field is manifestly uneven when the children of the wealthy are bought better educations. Anybody who is serious about levelling the playing field must provide very good reasons as to why a society genuinely committed to equality of opportunity in the name of meritocracy can continue to condone private education.
The fourth problem relates to Laws’ sentiment that “it is a distinctly 20th Century assumption that the state deserves to have a monopoly of educational provision”, under which he introduces some suggestions that non-fee-paying schools receive greater involvement from the private sector. This appears to be Laws’ solution for how to improve schools without incurring enormous costs, which efficiency savings alone could never cover. Personally I am deeply sceptical about the involvement of non-state bodies in state-provided education – but here is not the place to go into that tangled debate. I merely flag it as a not-uncontroversial aspect of Laws’ proposals.
Taxation
Taxation is, as I have hinted above, the Achilles heel of Laws’ proposals.
Partly Laws focuses on how to reduce the tax burden on the poorest in society. Here his concern is equality per se not equality of opportunity. Hence he talks of reforming the council tax system which is fantastically regressive and hurts some of the poorest in society. On the one hand I welcome these sorts of proposals – but I will nonetheless in my second general criticism of Laws attempt to show how the intellectual grounding and commitment to meritocracy that his thinking exhibits prevents gets him in some tangles about taxation and the promotion of meritocracy – and whether meritocracy is even a wholly desirable system.
The main problem with Laws’ proposals on taxation that I wish to focus on for now is that they just don’t offer enough. Although Laws is keen to, for example, raise the personal tax allowance so that the poorest in society receive meaningful tax relief, or to change pensions tax relief to end the current subsidising of the rich, these measures again tackles only the issue of (in)equality per se, not (in)equality of opportunity to acquire merit.
In order to tackle (in)equality of opportunity to acquire merit, what is required is concerted state action to directly aid those people who lack the opportunity to acquire merit. As written above, that will require enormous amounts of money – the kinds of sums which will not be found through efficiency savings alone. What is required are higher rates of progressive taxation, with the aim of redistributing the revenue to society’s poorest with the aim of improving equality of opportunity to acquire merit.
Yet Laws is specifically opposed to increasing the tax burden, even for the wealthiest in society. He is keen to reduce the tax burned on the poorest in society (which seems in itself desirable), yet only to pay for it with efficiency savings and assessment reforms. Yet the money required to create genuine equality of opportunity to acquire merit in this country is, I contest, likely to be available only through increasing the tax burden of the wealthy.
There are, I think, two reasons Laws is resistant to advocating this measure. The first is that his party, the Liberal Democrats, recently dropped their commitment to increased progressive taxation (namely, 50% income tax on those earning over £100,000 a year) when Nick Clegg shifted the party to a right-wing low-tax focus perhaps designed to emulate Cameron’s resurgent Tories. Laws may therefore be simply working within the constraints of the party line.
The second, however, is I believe more fundamental. It relates to the unquestioned belief that meritocratic systems and societies are essentially desirable, and that measures which temper their workings are to be rejected. As it happens, this has been the mainstream thinking on meritocracies for quite some time, and which reached its apotheosis with the rise of figures like Clinton and Blair who gave wholesale endorsement to right-wing politico-economic thinking. It is to this fundamental problem which I will in a moment turn to, as my second general criticism of Laws’ essay.
Before I do so, let me recap my first general criticism of Laws’ essay: meritocracy – or at any rate, desirable meritocracy – requires not just equality of opportunity in the immediate sense, but also equality of opportunity to acquire merit. Yet Laws’ proposals for improving equality of opportunity to acquire merit are inadequate, principally because he is not willing to fund the necessarily far-reaching measures which would be required, because that would entail increasing levels of progressive taxation. Laws is committed only to reducing the burden of tax on the poorest and making efficiency savings; this might help reduce inequality per se to some extent, but will be inadequate to genuinely address the issue of inequality of opportunity to acquire merit. Thus even within a framework accepting meritocracy as a desirable politico-economic system, Laws proposals are inadequate to address his own stated problem: “that Britain has become increasingly meritocratic, but people’s chances of acquiring ‘merit’ appear as unequal as ever”.
I now turn to my second general criticism of Laws, which is in fact a general criticism of all the vast majority of mainstream thinking on meritocracy. Namely, the assumption that meritocracy is unambiguously a good thing. My contention is that it is not.
To see why, it is worth returning to the original source of the word “meritocracy”. Few people today are aware that the word “meritocracy” was originally coined to describe a nightmarish dystopia. Certainly, David Laws shows no awareness of this in his essay. But when Michael Young wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958, the society he depicted was not one he celebrated. For young, meritocracy was a system under which he saw those at the top absolving themselves of any bonds of responsibility – or even empathy – to those at the bottom. The thinking behind Young’s vision was powerful and straightforward: under a meritocracy, those at the bottom must be at the bottom because they lack ‘merit’ (however defined). In other words, they deserve to be at the bottom. It is a short step for those at the top to conclude that they owe nothing to those who are poor and at the bottom. Consequently, those at the bottom of the social pile are abandoned by those at the top.
Young was alarmed by the prospect of this sort of society – and I believe he was right to be. The message we should learn from Young’s negative evaluation of meritocracy is as follows. Inequality is something we should care about even if the people at the bottom end of the scale deserve to be at the bottom end of the scale. A society which takes the vindictive and retributionist view that if you are poor you deserve to be poor, and in turn do not deserve help, is a dystopia, therefore not a political society progressive liberals should aim for. (I must be careful here: for sure, meritocracy is a more desirable system than plutocracy, aristocracy or nepotism – but nonetheless, just because it is better than what has come before, that doesn’t mean it is unambiguously good and desirable).
Laws might reply that he wishes to increase what I have called “equality of opportunity to acquire merit”, ensuring that nobody ends up at the bottom of society’s pile “unfairly” because they lacked opportunity to acquire merit. But this misses the point entirely.
Firstly, and to espouse an unashamedly socialist sentiment, we may want to say that even if there was complete equality of opportunity to acquire merit (which in the UK there manifestly is not), there would still be something wrong with a society which permitted gross levels of inequality, even if that inequality were the direct result of meritocratic selection when there was total equality of opportunity to acquire merit. That is, there is a thought here that inequality is bad in itself, no matter how it arises, and that the badness increase as the level of inequality increases (leading to the conclusion that modern British levels of inequality exhibit considerable levels of badness, so to speak). Consequently there is a responsibility incumbent on the “haves” to not abandon the “have-nots”, even if they deserve to be have-nots due to a lack of merit.
That sentiment will be ill-received by those on the right (especially) who generally endorse the idea of personal responsibility for one’s social situation. If there was complete equality of opportunity to acquire merit, they might reply, then who could have a problem with saying that people at the bottom deserve to be at the bottom?
The problem is two fold. Firstly, one may well wish to advocate a place for empathy in politics, such that we strive to help people at the bottom of the pile simply because they are at the bottom of the pile, no matter why or how they got there. That sentiment will be viewed with hostility by the right. The second problem, to reinforce the first as well as what I have said previously, is to point out that complete equality of opportunity to acquire merit is an impossibility. The brute fact of the matter is that some people will be born stupider, less adept, slower or just plain more unlucky than others. It is a fact of human existence that we are not all uniform. No matter how much money the state chucks at the problem of increasing access of opportunity to acquire merit, some people will, by simple virtue of who they are, always acquire less merit than some other people. And here lies the important point: that some people will inevitably acquire less merit than other people is in many cases no fault of their own; it is an arbitrary fact of their being born stupider, slower or less lucky than others around them and something which
Now, we may – and I stress, may – be happy with a society which confines those who have less merit, or ability to acquire merit, to the lower echelons of society in terms of pay, employability and prospects for improvement. Yet there can be no justification for abandoning these people at the bottom of the social pile on the grounds that they deserve to be there. The fact is, even in an “ideal” meritocracy with the most perfect equality of opportunity to acquire merit possible, people would still end up at the bottom of the pile through no fault of their own.
Add to this the (admittedly far more left-wing than Laws’ is likely to endorse) thought that even if people “deserve” to be at the bottom of the social pile, there is a responsibility incumbent upon those at the top of the pile to help them, and you have a serious and strong critique of meritocracy.
To repeat: meritocracy as it stands is not an unambiguously desirable political system; it encourages the haves to abandon the have-nots, which is morally distasteful both when the have-nots “deserve” to be have-nots, and even more so due to the inevitable fact that even in an “ideal” meritocracy many of the have-nots will in fact not deserve in any meaningful sense to be have-nots . This will be even more the case in the real world where, as Laws concedes, equality of opportunity to acquire merit is woefully short of anything like the levels required to facilitate genuine meritocracy.
Thus meritocracy, if it is to be accepted as a socio-economic political system which treats its citizens with an adequate regard for justice, needs to be tempered with reference to the responsibilities those at the top owe to those at the bottom. In other words, meritocracy needs to be tempered with a large dose of social justice.
As it happens, this leads to some concrete policy differences between those who reject the unquestioned assumption that meritocracy is a good thing, and those like Laws who accept that assumption without questioning it.
The principal difference is in taxation. Those who see that meritocracy is a worrisome thing, because of its implications for abandoning those at the bottom of the pile, are in a position to advocate progressive income taxation which aims to close inequality gaps between rich and the poor. This is very straightforward: having seen that under meritocracy many will end up at the bottom of the pile because of arbitrary factors about themselves they are not responsible for, and correspondingly that many will rise to the top of the pile because they have “merit” due to personal factors they received arbitrarily from the lottery of birth and which happen to be well remunerated by capitalist market-based economies, the state has role in addressing this arbitrarily-generated socio-economic disparity, by redistributing from the wealthy to the poor. Nobody need here be advocating total equality, notice – and Laws is probably right to suggest that any free society will require some levels of inequality. But there is a big difference between the enormous levels of inequality currently witnessed in Britain and the levels which would be countenanced by a society recognising that wealth generated through “merit” rests on the arbitrary allocation of well-remunerated skills through the lottery of birth. (And the arbitrariness of wealth discrepancies and corresponding inequality in this country only increases when we recall that Britain is still a long way from being a meritocracy).
Those who fundamentally endorse meritocracy – or who unquestioningly assume it is a good thing – are not in the same position regarding taxation. If one believes that meritocracy is fundamentally correct – that people are rewarded according to merit – then redistributive taxation is very difficult to countenance. For if the correct socio-economic system is one in which the rich are rich because they have merit and so deserve to be rich – and vice versa for the poor – then how can it be justified to take away the wealth earned by the rich and give it to the poor? After all, the rich deserve to be rich, the poor deserve to be poor, all because of their corresponding levels of merit. Of course, advocates of meritocracy could countenance redistributive taxation which targets wealth (etc) which was not earned meritocratically (e.g. by advocating a 100% inheritance tax, because after all nobody “merits” to be born to wealthy parents and therefore nobody “deserves” to inherit their money). But as for wealth earned meritocratically, those who believe meritocracy is fundamentally a desirable politico-economic system will have great difficulty countenancing redistributive taxation from rich to poor when wealth discrepancies are generated according to “merit”. Yet as argued above, that promotes a society in which the poor are effectively abandoned by the rich.
We are now in a position to make an interesting connection between my two general criticisms of Laws’ essay. To recall, my first criticism was that his measures to promote equality of opportunity to acquire merit are insufficient given the task in hand. My second was that Laws’ unquestioning acceptance of meritocracy as the best kind of society leads to the endorsement of a political and economic system where the rich abandon the poor, and this is justified in terms of merit and desert.
Those two criticisms are quite damning in themselves – though I freely admit the above arguments are in reality only sketches and need a great deal more work to make them rigorous. Yet it is worth noting a thread connecting both criticisms, namely the issue of taxation.
I pointed out whilst expounding my first criticism that Laws is constrained as to what he can do to promote equality of opportunity to acquire merit by his unwillingness to raise the requisite funds via (I suggest, progressive) taxation. In my second criticism I attempted to show why those who unquestioningly endorse meritocracy as a desirable system will be pushed towards a hostility and suspicion of progressive taxation. Indeed, this hostility and suspicion of progressive taxation in the name of meritocracy appears to have underscored a great deal of political thinking in recent years, arguably getting under way in the 1980s with Thatcher and Reagan, reaching its apotheosis during the 1990s when it was endorses by Blair and Clinton (those supposed figureheads of the left, who accepted the fundamental desirability of meritocracy and correspondingly abandoned commitments to progressive taxation as a cornerstone of social justice).
What seems to emerge is a paradox in Laws’ position: his commitment to meritocracy makes him hostile to progressive taxation, and yet it is progressive taxation which is required to bring about the meritocracy he champions. Add on to that the argument that meritocracy is in any case not a desirable political system, unless modified by an ethic of social responsibility to people at the bottom (even if they deserve to be at the bottom), which we might describe as the promotion of basic social justice with a view to compensating for the moral arbitrariness of the lottery of birth, and a fairly damning critique of Laws’ essay begins to emerge.
To what extent that critique is sustainable, I leave to anybody who has managed to get this far down the post.
Grace said,
February 16, 2009 at 5:59 pm
“In modern Britain, few would wish to defend an employer’s right to discriminate on grounds of a person’s skin colour or gender. And we can see why this connects to meritocracy quite easily. If a meritocracy is a system under which people are rewarded, promoted, etc according to their “merit”, rewarding or promoting (etc) people on grounds other than their merit is incompatible with this.”
But how do you define what “merit” is? Skin colour and gender could easily be components of the ability to do a job. eg imagine a man who wants to hire a PA. he has a strong dislike of women and finds them very irritating. if he hires a woman his work will suffer becuase he hates the idea of having one in his office. why should he be able to turn away someone who was born with a very low IQ but not someone who was born a woman? both natural IQ and sex are randomly assigned at conception, morally arbitary, relevant to the job etc. Is it consistent with meritocracy if he refuses to consider a woman?
If it is not, then meritocracy seems to be an empty concept – the “freedom” to be discriminated against on some arbitrary grounds but not others. If it is, then i think most people would not be very happy with it – perhaps because people tend to think that their natural talents are laudable while their race etc is irrelevant (maybe because this is a way of making themselves believe that they deserve any success that they have had, thus absolving themselves of any responsibility for inequality).
“unless modified by an ethic of social responsibility to people at the bottom (even if they deserve to be at the bottom)” – I don’t think this is anywhere near good enough. It seems very patronising to the untalented – “we all know that you deserve to be poor, but we’re going to be kind and responsible and give you some of our money”
I do agree with the general gist of what you’re saying though (I hope I haven’t completely missed the point) -do any political parties reject meritocracy? (i guess the SWP would, but i’m not a socialist) I’m disappointed in the lib dems, i generally like them. oh well, depressing.
Grace said,
February 16, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Also, it seems absurd for merit to be related to desert because ‘merit’ has no constant criteria. eg if you’re a meritocrat, Beckham deserves his millions because his talents are deemed desirable in the society into which he was born. But what about if he had been born a few hundred years earlier? His natural talents – supposedly the source of his desert – are the same. But, in a meritocratic industrialising society, i doubt his footballing talents would have been very useful -> poverty for him. So it can’t be merit in itself that creates desert.
please destroy my points
Paul said,
February 17, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Grace,
You comments don’t need “destroying”, but they do need refining somewhat. I think we agree about a lot more than you seem to think.
1. “But how do you define what “merit” is? Skin colour and gender could easily be components of the ability to do a job.”
Yes, and in that case, they would be relevant factors for consideration. I, however, was working on the assumption that in the cases under consideration – for example, the job at The Telegraph – they weren’t relevant factors, and hence their being considered were incompatible with meritocracy. Perhaps I should have made that assumption clearer.
2. ” eg imagine a man who wants to hire a PA. he has a strong dislike of women and finds them very irritating. if he hires a woman his work will suffer becuase he hates the idea of having one in his office. why should he be able to turn away someone who was born with a very low IQ but not someone who was born a woman? both natural IQ and sex are randomly assigned at conception, morally arbitary, relevant to the job etc. Is it consistent with meritocracy if he refuses to consider a woman?”
I agree with your sentiment here wholeheartedly. Indeed, it is exactly what I try to argue in me “second criticism” of Laws.
However, be careful regarding where you want to bring this sort of criticism in. Under a meritocracy, let us suppose that high IQ means having more “merit”, but gender has no impact upon “merit” (let’s not get distracted about why for now, let’s rather just take it for granted to see where we end up). In that situation, it is acceptable on meritocratic grounds to give a job to the person with the high IQ, but not to discriminate against a person for being a woman. Given that we have agreed that being female has no impact upon merit, one way or the other, it should not be considered when making appointments. On the other hand, we are assuming IQ does impact upon merit.
Thus, within the frame of reference of meritocracy, it is ok to discriminate on grounds of IQ but not gender. What I think you are driving at is that there is something wrong going on here; that both IQ and gender are arbitrarily assigned, so a system which encourages wholesale discrimination towards one but not the other has gotten something wrong. I agree entirely. But notice; that is a criticism external to the system under consideration (meritocracy), not a complaint about the coherence of the system (as your comment suggests). Meritocracy would be wholly consistent to discriminate on grounds of IQ but not gender, assuming as we have done that the former is relevant to merit but not the latter. Yet in this case, consistency (as you have noticed) is arguably anything but a virtue. Again, that is broadly what I was driving at under my “second criticism” of Laws.
3, “do any political parties reject meritocracy?”
Not really. It’s become an unchallenged part of the political landscape. Partly for understandable reasons; I think meritocracy is probably favourable to aristocracy or nepotistic society. A system which rewards talent over family name is probably better than one which does the reverse. Yet the old socialist thought of “from each according to his ability unto each according to his need” has basically been abandoned by the mainstream political parties. You can thank, in large part, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, and the apparatchiks who helped them into power for shifting the mainstream left onto a platform which endorsed fundamentally right-wing outlooks inc. deep commitments to meritocracy with little regard for those without merit as defined by capitalist market society.
4. The SWP won’t have a policy on it because that would require them to think and construct policies, as oppose to drinking in student union bars and hi-jacking other people’s protests with their shit placards.
5. Don’t be disappointed at the Lib Dems full stop. David Laws represents a section of the right of the party which is currently in the ascendancy under Nick Clegg. Lots of Lib Dems will be further to the left than this – indeed, further to the left than many Labour MPs.
6. “Also, it seems absurd for merit to be related to desert because ‘merit’ has no constant criteria. eg if you’re a meritocrat, Beckham deserves his millions because his talents are deemed desirable in the society into which he was born. But what about if he had been born a few hundred years earlier? His natural talents – supposedly the source of his desert – are the same. But, in a meritocratic industrialising society, i doubt his footballing talents would have been very useful -> poverty for him. So it can’t be merit in itself that creates desert.”
I like this argument a lot. It’s pretty much exactly what i’m driving at when I say talk of the arbitrary allocation of skills which happen to be rewarded by a market-based capitalist society. You are right to be suspicious of the link between “merit” and “desert”. Namely: if your merits are arbitrarily assigned to you, how can you deserve anything which flows from your possession of such merits?
That’s one of the fundamental dishonesty’s of meritocracy: it is presented as giving people what they deserve, based on the grand-sounding word “merit” – but when we realise that “merit” is in large part something people have little control over, the whole claim of meritocracy being a system based on desert, and by implication a fair or just system, starts to look very very suspicious.
Ste For Sure said,
February 17, 2009 at 4:23 pm
interesting post.
to add to your (quite correct) criticisms of meritocracy as a desirable politico-economic system; that it means haves abandoning have nots: We shoud think about the fact that the kinds of people who reach the top in a meritocratic society are going to be those who are most ambitious and driven to rise above everybody else for want of money, power and social status. Are these the people we want at the top of the pile? Are these the kinds of characterisitics we should like to reward in the first place?
I like the arguments made on this thread. But they surely urge us towards the question: Why is a “market-based capitalist economy” at all an appropriate structure for organising human activity?
The short and facetious answer is that it isn’t haha.
Grace said,
February 17, 2009 at 4:29 pm
“But notice; that is a criticism external to the system under consideration (meritocracy), not a complaint about the coherence of the system”
I think it might be – because meritocracy is often dressed up in nice-sounding phrases (eg talk of the “american dream”) + (even more frustratingly) meritocracts use “equality” of opportunity to pretend they really care about equality. (yet another “dishonesty of meritocracy”.) I think it needs to be emphasised that equality of opporunity isn’t equality in any meaningful sense – maybe this is is still working within a (broadly speaking) meritocratic framework because you’re trying to show meritocrats who also like equality (like i guess some of the lib dems) that the two values are in opposition. Of course this wouldn’t convince ultra-right meritocrats but this reclaiming of equality might help us gain some ground in the general political battleground.
Paul said,
February 17, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Ste, I very much agree with your point about the kinds of people meritocracy is likely to reward.
However, I think you are too quick to associate meritocracy with market based society. It is quite feasible to have a market-based society with a state actively regulating against the kinds of unpleasantries meritocracy appears to encourage.
As for your comment about “Why is a “market-based capitalist economy” at all an appropriate structure for organising human activity?
The short and facetious answer is that it isn’t haha.”
I don’t really agree. There is a lot of scope to “humanise” market-based society, and for some pretty good reasons. The first is that markets are fantastically efficient – far more so than any other system of resource allocation. Now, that doesn’t mean they are perfect (a quick look at the world economy teaches us more about that), but it is an important point. And not just one about resources, either; Amartya Sen has made a very good case that liberal capitalist democracies do not suffer famines; that the combinaion of democracy and free(ish) movement of goods ensures food goes where it needs to be. You certainly can’t say the same about Maoist China or Soviet Russia.
Secondly, I think Winston Churchill’s words are worth remembering: that capitalist democracy is the worst system of government – apart from all the others that have been tried.
Grace,
I think I agree with you, but i’m a little confused by your reasoning. On the whole, though, I think that we certainly should be trying to shift the political agenda away from a focus on equality of opportunity and onto a focus of equality (or rather, inequality) per se.
Ste For Sure said,
February 17, 2009 at 10:53 pm
We disagree about capitalist markets. I think they are dehumanising and alienating and necessarily so. The first few chapters of Das Kapital are real food for thought here. I suggest you pay them some close attention. It should certainly lead one to be less quick to accept the commodity form, and thus capitalist markets, as some kind of given.
Further, a system based on wage labour to produce commodities (goods to be exchanged for money) gives rise to a society where the imperative to put money to use to make more money is dominant, overriding our needs and desires as human beings, both as producers and consumers, and tearing the bonds between us asunder. Solidarity is necessarily undermined in a market because the buyer and seller have opposite interests and all other potential social interests are externalities with regards to a given transaction. Further as producers we are all forced into competition with each other, and society is divided into classes. This leaves us atomised, and breeds top-down hierarchical structures which are dominating and unsatisfying, in which we play the role of ancillary tools of production.
With regards to efficiency, the market is massively inefficient. All costs are externalised where possible. Resource allocation is absurdly unequal, and wierdly placed: there is a trillion dollar advertising industry when charities trying to help the homeless etc can barely stay afloat and have to treat their own workers like shit to do so. There is a HUGE amount of waste, which is terrible for the environment, and for people. Does the very concept of a “food mountain” not strike you as completely insane!? Or the way shit is ferried and flown around the world in a myriad of convoluted cris crossing routes, just cause thats how business is done most profitably?
The Churchill quote can be ignored, because its irrelevant. the fact that this system is better than feudalism or stalinism or whatever is of no consequence with regards to whether we should want to perpetuate it.
Paul said,
February 18, 2009 at 10:51 am
I challenge you to show me a system of resource allocation which is less inefficient than markets.
I’m not saying that markets are perfect – far from it. They need regulation and the injustices they produce need correcting (note that you seem to confuse inefficiency with injustice).
As for the point about alienation and atomisation, I don’t buy the line that markets are necessarily alienating. I think G.A. Cohen (a Marxist) is right to emphasise the importance of social ethos in any desirable socialist state. There is nothing to say, a priori, that markets are incompatible with social ethi which promote and encourate fairness and justice. It just happens that at the moment we associate markets with selfishness and greed. Economic theorists have re-inforced this by applying the picture of man as necessarily rational, egoistic and utility-maximising (where utility is defined as personal gain).
But there is no necessary reason why we cant have market-based systems of exchange and regulation, which are more efficient than any other system of resource allocation ever tried, whose worst effects are tempered by both an active state AND a prevalent ethos of justice and fairness.
The problem i’m seeing with your comments is that you are a) under estimating the extent to which markets are superior in terms of sheer efficiency to anything else we’ve ever tried, b) confusing matters of (in)efficiency with matters of justice, and c) have nothing to advocate in terms of replacing markets…which means you seem to be threatening the adovcation of the erradication of markets, the only known attempt at which was soviet-style communism, which was an unmitigated disaster at every level (it is worth bearing in mind that in order to eradicate market exchanges, one must impose extraordinary levels of restrictions on the free movements and interactions of ordinary people, all of the time).
So what I want from you is an alternative to markets which doesn’t lead to totalitarianism.
Beth said,
February 18, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Grace, you certainly haven’t ‘missed the point’ and it sounds like you’re pretty much in agreement with Paul’s argument. A couple of things I wanted to add (apologies if this goes over some ground already covered – I wrote this response yesterday but have only just had a chance to post it):
Firstly, the difficulty with your counter-example is that it doesn’t show what you are trying to prove – i.e. that gender or skin colour ‘could easily be components of the ability to do a job’. If we think in terms of the job description of a PA – for e.g. to effectively organise meetings, draft correspondence, perform basic admin duties etc – then IQ level will have an impact on an individual’s competency to do that job in a way that skin colour or gender will not. For instance a capability to plan ahead, be punctual and organised are likely to be associated with intelligence in a way that they are certainly not related to gender or skin colour. Therefore in the case you describe it is not consistent with meritocracy for the man to refuse to consider the woman for the job purely on the basis of his personal dislike of the opposite sex.
Although your example doesn’t do the work you want it to do, the main force of your argument concerning arbitrariness is spot on. In our capitalist society we allow such things as ‘talent’ and ‘effort’ to justifiably determine social status (well in principle anyway), whereas identity categories such as gender or race are meant to have no influence. Of course – as you point out – things such as talent and even ability to exert effort are as arbitrarily assigned to us as our race or gender. Why then should society attribute status and wealth to people who possess one set of arbitrary characteristics above another? From what I can see you and Paul both agree that it shouldn’t.
Given the line your argument is going down concerning the moral arbitrariness of social status and your hostility to the suggestion of social responsibility – ‘I don’t think this is anywhere near good enough’– I am interested to know why it is that you then go on to say that you are not a socialist? The reason for my posing that question is that ‘socialism’ has taken on some pretty negative connotations that make people quick to dismiss it (akin to, but perhaps not quite as bad as, the label feminist!). Yet as soon as we agree with the argument that it is morally arbitrary for society to be set up in such a way that conveys status and privilege on individuals because of some randomly assigned attributes rather than others, and we think that this is wrong, then surely this means that we should favour some form of socialist state?
Interestingly Laws states that the discussion between social democracy and liberalism ‘is a false debate’ and that the goals of the former can be achieved through the latter. Surely for this to be true the liberal society that would result will look a whole lot more like socialism than the minor adjustments to the current state of affairs proposed by Laws. I suppose this brings us nicely onto the debate between Paul and Ste and the question of where do we go from here?
Perhaps now more than any time in the past 30 years there exists a window of opportunity to introduce radical suggestions for societal change into political debate. At this point I think it is crucial to think both politically and idealistically – whilst it is important to have the debate about markets it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that we’re not going to be moving to any non-market based set-up anytime soon. Whether or not you think that is a negative thing, we do need to consider what the possibilities for change are now, within a market-based system.
Jon Cruddas (the other politician involved in the Equality Seminar) gives a persuasive account of the failures of our current system but I am still left wondering what the alternative that he gestures towards would really look like (over and above the obvious income re-distribution that would be a necessary first step). Of course we can only speculate at Cruddas’ opinion but I’d be interested if any of you guys have thoughts about this (bearing in mind the scale of fiscal constraint Britain will face in the coming years).
Ste For Sure said,
February 18, 2009 at 5:15 pm
You want me to show you another system that is more efficient than a market. However, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by efficiency here (if food mountains are not a case of ineffiency in allocating resources, but only an injustice, Im not entirely sure what to say, however Im not sure that that is what you meant). But I can make some comments.
I mentioned in my comment to the above post a “society based on solidarity, mutual aid, and grassroots democracy, with the means of production held in common, directly meeting the needs and desires of human communities”
I think this is the foundation of an answer. When the drive is capital accumulation, inefficiency abounds. When decisions are made in direct accordance to peoples’ needs, through properly democratic structures (Im throwing the word democracy around a bit liberally here. Im still unclear in my thinking on democracy) one might reasonably expect many such inefficiencies to melt away.
I mean, there is a direct community incentive to reduce waste, or for transportation of goods to be done with the least effort/energy for example. Whereas the imperative of capital is accumulation through extraction of surplus value, so the incentives are indirect. Concerns about waste are peripheral for example.
Again I need a more concrete grasp of what you mean by effiency in order to give better examples or sketch this out further.
I agree with you about change in social ethos. Remember I am not defending marxist-leninism. The kind of social transformation I am talking about requires these changes in social ethos, and in anarchist circles, people go to great lengths to organise in such a way that helps bring this about and keep it alive amongst participants. Violent seizure of political power by a party does not fully require this.
when I am talking about capitalist markets I am talking about production of commodities for exchange for profit. You mention that we associate markets with selfishness and greed. Well, yes, because constant accumulation is the driving force. However, it is important not to get too moralistic here. A market society still divides us, creates a class system yadda yadda yadda, even if we are all gentle buddha-like paragons of virtue. We have to look out for number one in a market, regardless of how much I love sharing. Bosses have to accumulate, better than their competitors to survive, however philanthropic they might be. Capitalist markets can and do make people greedy, but they are not bad just because of that.
Abolishing markets means production is not done with the aim of exchange for profit. This doesnt mean we have to restrict movements and everyday interactions. We can still move around, swap stuff etc. If (in the kind of society I have alluded to) community A has a factory producing x, and community B has a factory producing y, they can still move the stuff around so that everyone gets a bit of x and a bit of y. But these trades are not ends in themselves for the purpose of creating more and more money, the expression of that mysterious substance; “value”.
There is more to say but I dont want to derail the thread, so if you want me to elaborate/clarify, or you want to continue the debate then I await a reply. I am torn between thinking that we agree with each other more than we think, or whether we really are going to be yelling across a chasm! haha
Ste For Sure said,
February 18, 2009 at 6:47 pm
last sentence in penultimate paragraph in my last post is fudged. I meant something like “but these trades do not mean that production is done only with a view to exchange with the purpose of creating more and more money, the expression of that mysterious substance;value”
Paul said,
February 18, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Ste, as regards inefficiency, yes food mountains are inefficient. But if you are referring to the EU food mountains, they aren’t the product of free markets – they are the products of EU regulations dictating artificial prices for farmers resulting in excess supply of product. Not that i’m advocating complete free markets. All i’m getting at when I say that markets are efficient is that they deal with all the information – who wants what, where, and what they are willing to pay for it – and resources are distributed accordingly. All that information cannot be assimilated and ordered successfully by even the most powerful computer.
now of course, some of the distributions markets produce are inefficient – e.g. in the most obvious example due to ignorance or misinformation during the market process. In addition, even some efficient market allocations are unjust. I see those situations as the point when the state has a mandate to step-in and regulate the market to promote justice and/or efficiency. Thus what I propose is a state working with the market, to correct it and improve it, so to speak – but not to replace it fundamentally.
“society based on solidarity, mutual aid, and grassroots democracy, with
the means of production held in common, directly meeting the needs and desires of human communities”
I actually advocate this, too. But I don’t see it as incompatible with market interactions. All these things could be ways of humanising markey societies to make them more just.
“When decisions are made in direct accordance to peoples’ needs, through properly democratic structures (Im throwing the word democracy around a bit liberally here. Im still unclear in my thinking on democracy) one might reasonably expect many such inefficiencies to melt away. ”
This is far too vague and speculative i’m afraid. You could mean a thousand things with these words.
“Whereas the imperative of capital is accumulation through extraction of surplus value, so the incentives are indirect. Concerns about waste are peripheral for example. ”
Although your comment about waste is correct – indeed, it is an aspect of the inefficiencies and injustices markets do produce, and which they need to be regulated for. But your reliance on the Marxist theory of surplus value extraction is controversial; remember that most Marxists don’t even believe that theory any more.
“Again I need a more concrete grasp of what you mean by effiency in order to give better examples or sketch this out further.”
Go to Tesco. All those products on the shelves got there through the interaction (essentially) of demand and supply. No central administration sat down and calculated how many cans of beans (etc) were needed to satisfy the level of bean demand in Southport, and worked out what price the bean-demanders were willing and able to pay for those beans, which would also be at a cost-effective level for the supplier and for Tesco. Rather, the interaction of supply and demand over time did all that for the administrators, all they had to do was pay attention. The result is that bananas come from Jamaica, coffee from Nicaragua, clothes from China. The market (i.e. the free interaction of buyers and sellers) does all that – on its own. Notice that issues of justice and inefficiency *are* raised; coffee companies pay Nicaraguan coffee pickers less than a living wage, Chinese workers are also exploited and struggle to clothe their children whilst making cheap T-shirts for Tesco. But those are questions on top of the issue of efficiency. In the old Soviet Union there were constant shortages of basic goods. In the market-based Western nations, that has never been true since the end of WWII. That sounds like efficiency to me.
“and in anarchist circles, people go to great lengths to organise in such a way that helps bring this about and keep it alive amongst participants. Violent seizure of political power by a party does not fully require this. ”
I can get behind this. But I’d just note that in anarchist households, it always seems to be the same people who end up doing the washing up (but then, that’s probably another question of ethos in the end).
“A market society still divides us, creates a class system yadda yadda yadda, even if we are all gentle buddha-like paragons of virtue.”
You’re just begging the question though. You offer no proof that this is the case.
“We have to look out for number one in a market, regardless of how much I love sharing”
Even if there was a properly administered welfare state supported through progressive income taxation? And if there were such a welfare state, would looking out for number 1 be such a bad thing? And if there was an ethos of social justice, would not people look out for number 1 less?
“Bosses have to accumulate, better than their competitors to survive, however philanthropic they might be.”
Under the current state of affairs, yes. But who ever said the current state of affairs is the necessary state of affairs?
“Capitalist markets can and do make people greedy, but they are not bad just because of that.”
Not sure what you think this sentence is doing here, as it rather looks like it belongs with my argument.
Your entire penultimate paragraph is confused, I think. It just sounds like dogmatic Marxist gesturing in accordance with Kapital Vol.1 (sorry).
I think you are apt to confuse market exchange mechanisms with consumerism, by the way. I also think that this is causing you to become confused about what your target is. I’d recommend watching this documentary, to see that market-based societies didn’t always look like the one we currently live under:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151
Peter said,
February 19, 2009 at 12:16 am
Ste writes:
“Abolishing markets means production is not done with the aim of exchange for profit. This doesnt mean we have to restrict movements and everyday interactions. We can still move around, swap stuff etc. If (in the kind of society I have alluded to) community A has a factory producing x, and community B has a factory producing y, they can still move the stuff around so that everyone gets a bit of x and a bit of y. But these trades are not ends in themselves for the purpose of creating more and more money, the expression of that mysterious substance; “value”.”
- sounds like a market to me!
Ste For Sure said,
February 19, 2009 at 1:02 am
“society based on solidarity, mutual aid, and grassroots democracy, with
the means of production held in common, directly meeting the needs and desires of human communities”
I actually advocate this, too. But I don’t see it as incompatible with market interactions. All these things could be ways of humanising markey societies to make them more just.”
havent the time to respond to everything right now, but the above is interesting. I would have thought that holding the means of production in common, and bringing economic decision making under democractic control (not said explicitly in the above quote, but mentioned in other parts, and implied in “a society based on…grassroots democracy”) would not be a market really. at least not the kind im talking about.
If people being able to move goods around in desired ways, however this is organised, is still a market for you then fair enough. It seems almost like you are saying that anything is a market apart from a system where the state commands the economy.
Paul said,
February 19, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Thank you Peter!
Dave S said,
February 19, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Firstly, forgive me for not reading Laws’ essay. Seeing as everything I’m taking issue with here is, through your reporting, his work I probably should have. To be honest, I just didn’t want to spend £6 on it.
“Laws’ proposals around public expenditure do little to actually address how he will increase equality of opportunity to acquire merit. Rather, he simply suggests ways in which efficiency savings could be made by, for example, capping growths in NHS spending, or reducing expenditure on “hidden” unemployment in the form of incapacity benefits.”
This may simply result in further entrenching the inequality of opportunity that Laws’ is puportedly seeking to eradicate. To cap growth in NHS spending could – potentially – leave an NHS system to fall further behind private healthcare in terms of performance. This would therefore mean that not only would Humphrey could reap greater benefits from his ability to afford private healthcare whilst Janyce is told that the new drug available to treat her illness is unaffordable due to new spending caps on the NHS. If both get ill and one can be cured very quickly and the other left to see how long it takes to fight of a disease then this can have very negative implications for Janyce. Whilst Humphrey takes a week in bed with his mother tending to him and returns to school the following Monday. Janyce tries to care for herself as best she can – is in and out of school because she never really gets over the illness and her immune system is blasted to pieces and suffers further disruption to her already difficult education.
As for incapacity benefits – whilst undoubtably there are some who claim incapacity but could work, we mustn’t forget the reason that such a benefit was ever created and administered. Some people just can not work or can only work sporadically for issues of health. I would ask Laws’ the question should we just condemn our sick to a life of poverty? I am sure that he would reply they would look to tackle the few that abuse the system. However, I sense that incapacity benefit has become the new area of attack for those who want to cut spending on social security. It is often pointed to as an area full of scroungers and has become the point of attack for every politician. Labour are already mounting an attack on incapacity benefits and have been doing so for some time. Just how many scroungers are there really? I feel that incapacity is just the ‘safe’ benefit to attack?
“The playing field is manifestly uneven when the children of the wealthy are bought better educations. Anybody who is serious about levelling the playing field must provide very good reasons as to why a society genuinely committed to equality of opportunity in the name of meritocracy can continue to condone private education.”
Just like to echo this thought. Something that I agree with very strongly
“The fourth problem relates to Laws’ sentiment that “it is a distinctly 20th Century assumption that the state deserves to have a monopoly of educational provision”, under which he introduces some suggestions that non-fee-paying schools receive greater involvement from the private sector. This appears to be Laws’ solution for how to improve schools without incurring enormous costs, which efficiency savings alone could never cover. Personally I am deeply sceptical about the involvement of non-state bodies in state-provided education – but here is not the place to go into that tangled debate. I merely flag it as a not-uncontroversial aspect of Laws’ proposals.”
As I remember education is a merit good. Private investment in schools will simply not cover the costs of what is needed to provide fix the education system. Especially if Laws’ intends to provide greater equality of opportunity with smaller class sizes (forget the Saturday school idea – my personal belief is that it’ll be seen as nothing more than punishment and will accrue a low attendance if at all). The costs of hiring enough teachers, providing training for those willing to be teachers (so that they are at least of an adequate standard) would be astronomical and not something the private sector would be interested in. I don’t think they would anyway.
With regard to Laws’ (and the Liberal Democrats) shying away from taxation:
Surely if there was ever a time when taxation of the mega-rich and massive earners would be feasible political policy it would be now. At a time when this group are blamed (much more keenly than those who should have been regulating them) for causing the World to fall into the deepest recession since the 1930’s, the political sensitivities about taxation of this group can surely be dropped. Mass support for this taxation of the mega-rich is surely something that shouldn’t seem politically difficult. Whilst I recognize that some will still espouse the theory that the rich business men who innovate and fuel the economy will leave if they are taxed more – I just don’t buy their argument.
Paul said,
February 19, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Dave,
I think I agree with everything you have said. I just want to expand on your final point.
The problem with increasing taxation is that right-wing administrations with low-tax agendas have consistently and successfully sold the lie that taxing the rich in some way penalizes hard-working people and is a punishment for working hard.
Lying behind this is a general – and i think, covertly encouraged – ignorance about a) what progressive taxation actually is, b) how progressive taxation works, c) why progressive taxation is the foundation of a fair society, and d) just how inequitable the present tax system is for people in the middle and at the bottom.
This Poly Toynbee article says it best (read the whole thing, it’s excellent):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/09/gordon-brown-labour-tax-income-class
So the problem is that even though there is better opportunity now for advocating increased progressive taxation than ever before, many people are instinctively opposed to it because they do not realise how it operates and why it is required. Which is what Thatcher, Regan and their accomplices and supporters wanted.
Michael Gove’s Class War « Bad Conscience said,
June 19, 2010 at 2:28 pm
[...] from the fact that before the last election Lib Dem education policy was in the hands of David Laws, a man so far to the right many Lib Dems muttered that he should have joined the Tories, [...]