It's all very well for people to go on about how life is better in countries where there is greater equality - point is are they willing to dip their hands in their pockets to pay the extra taxes, create the benefits structure that is eye-wateringly tough but fair (if you think the Coalition's welfare reforms are tough try being a single mother in Sweden) and take 30% off the value of their property not to mention the restrictions on personal lending and the culture that puts shame on those that over-borrow then we might be getting somewhere.

Until all these things are in place it's all a pipe dream.

Until then the majority of working people will support the only form of inequality reduction that works in the mess bequeathed by Labour reduction of inequality with a higher pupil premium, higher tax thresholds and devolving of power.

btw - any news yet of the details of Labour's 44bn of cuts and 20% reduction in the state - nah, didn't think so

Does anyone take his progressive claims seriously now? He also states in the article that progressiveness is tied to pluralist government. I fail to see how two parties working seemlessly together to decimate the welfare state makes the outcome any more progressive than one party doing it on their own.

Clegg is once again trying to redefine notions of "fairness" (his other catchphrase) and rewrite the rules to create a battle he thinks he can win.

Social Mobility not Social Equality - hmm, is it just me or is Clegg repeating Mrs Thatcher's words?

The way to achieve social mobility is to give people opportunities to develop their skills and knowledge to benefit both society and themselves. Another term for it is free university education.

====== http://www.tinyurl.com/23wkoeq ====

====== http://www.tinyurl.com/23wkoeq ====

====== http://www.tinyurl.com/23wkoeq ====

====== http://www.tinyurl.com/23wkoeq ====

====== http://www.tinyurl.com/23wkoeq ====

====== http://www.tinyurl.com/23wkoeq ====

====== http://www.tinyurl.com/23wkoeq ====

@ang, almost all social policies are experiments, as is most all Politics, you put something in place with good intentions but because there are so many economic variables that cant be quantified, controlled or clearly understood its always an experiment.
Not fantastic news, but its true.
If you think Labour or any other party in history has 100% control of things your mistaken.

Credit to Clegg for admitting the truth. Get the facts out.

If that graph is correct (it DOES come from The Spirit Level), it shows that low social mobility leads to greater inequality. It's easier to see how that would happen than the other way round. So, apart from being a desirable end in itself, improving social mobility would have the effect of reducing inequality. Everyone's a winner. Better to do that that to somehow reduce inequality and hope that it has the knock-on effect of improving social mobility. Address the organ-grinder, not the monkey.

Confusing cause and effect is a common problem in The Spirit Level and George is doing the same here. But we shouldn't expect too much from someone who believes that Japan is "the most equal country in the world". How's social mobility in hierarchical Japan by the way? It doesn't seem to be on that graph.

====== http://www.clshoe.us/ ==========

====== http://www.clshoe.us/ ==========

====== http://www.clshoe.us/ ==========

Wonderful
Share a website with you ,
input url in google sirch
(http://www.clshoe.us)
Believe you will love it

Incidentally, even if you do believe "social mobility" is a good thing in its own right (and the true end to which social equality exists) - the graph presented in this article is cack. It comes from the controversial book, The Spirit Level, but this is one of those strange beasts that has taken fire in the imagination of policy-makers but not among many serious social and health scientists.

Unfortunately, including data for more countries would make the pictured graph look much less impressive. There are very many ways of measuring social mobility and income inequality, which would also change the shape of the graph - the one that has been selected for this picture, is the one that makes it look like the clearest association - when all it actually shows is that the US and UK have a different socio-economic structure to the other countries in the study. It certainly doesn't prove there is causation between inequality and lack of social mobility. Peter Saunders is an ideologically conservative sociologist, but his analysis http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/assets/Beware_False_Prophets_Jul_10.pdf is very robust statistically - it examines the claims of The Spirit Level and finds that many of them lack substance when more recent or complete data is used, or when technically correct statistical methods are employed. Some dispute Saunders, other support him - it certainly remains the case that the consensus among medical scientists e.g. writing in the BMJ, is that it is not inequality that leads to negative health outcomes, although poverty poverty does. At any rate, the claims of the Spirit Level remain controversial. http://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/ is well worth a critical read.

The important factor is poverty, not inequality. People who are less well off do worse than people who are better off - but not because of the inequality. Making everybody the same income level, by making the rich poorer, will make Britain's health problems worse (despite reduced inequality). Doing it by making the poor richer, will make them better (but not because of the reduction in inequality).

Writeon above seems to believe that social equality cures all ills. But actually comparable ignored in the Spirit Level shows that the more equal countries do worse in terms of divorce, crime, alcohol consumption, smoking, single-parent households and suicide...

The attraction to an equal society is not that it statistically increases some measure of wellbeing. The evidence is mixed. On some measures it goes up, on some measures it goes down. The basis for equality is that it is a fairer and more ethical system. Peter Saunders also wrote a fascinating report on social mobility (http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/SocialMobilityJUNE2010.pdf), which suggests that Britain is more socially mobile than is generally credited for. The problem his evidence suggests with our social mobility, is that the bright poor do get richer, but that the dim rich generally maintain their status or only fall slightly. What's particularly fascinating is that after analysing social mobility, and despite being a right-winger himself, he then goes on to consider whether social mobility is a good thing at all anyway - in a remarkably open-minded manner. Rawlsian justice, Nozickian libertarianism and social equality all get a fair airing. Saunders happens to be a conservative, and for that reason SUPPORTS social mobility. As a left-winger, I disagree - social mobility is a bad goal when what really matters is flattening the income distribution. That's not because I want to achieve some goal like improved health or happiness, for which the evidence that I will be successful in mixed and controversial... it's not because I want to increase divorce, suicide rate or alcohol consumption, which are other features that statisticians claim to find in more equal societies. It's because equality is just and equitable, and desirable in its own right.

The idea that social mobility or income equality is a panacea for all the world's ills is not actually something that the statistical evidence unambiguously point to - and for different ills, it seems you'd have to choose the opposite solution. And the evidence for that, can of course change, as data for more countries becomes available and because some data - especially crime rate - can change dramatically over the course of a few years. If you bet all your money on social equality because of some statistical correlations found in current data, then if you follow an evidence-based policy process (as Keynes said: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?") you must also accept the possibility that you will later be compelled to argue strongly against your current position. But I am arguing on principle - no amount of statistical data can convince me that inequality is fair, and as even the conservative Saunders admits, that is a perfectly reasonable position. If the supposition that this would bring increased social mobility or decreased crime is correct, I can accept that as a happy byproduct. If the supposition that a more equal society would bring about higher levels of divorce, alcohol dependency and suicide rates is correct, then I must accept that as an unfortunate consequence too. But if the statistical evidence changes or is brought into dispute, it doesn't undermine my case either way.

'Dane Clouston' - "Nothing do I see about redistribution of the receipt of unearned capital in the form of gifted and inherited wealth"

Nail head. The humungous intellectual (and moral) flaw with liberal and right-wing politics (which are not by necessity evil in any way) is that whilst proclaiming the value of individual self-maximisation (a beautiful and noble aspiration in tune with Nature/God etc.) the parties who proclaim such are always peopled by individuals who support and are steeped in unearned and inherited wealth. A big f*cking elephant.

'littlejohnuk' I'd very happily have 30% off my property if everyone else had 30% off their property.

NS - get rid of the bloody ads, ban hyperlinks (sorry 'Etch Tee')

@Left is Forward

If the graph is cack, then perhaps you should read this OECD report which shows the inextricable link between income inequality and social mobility.

http://www.oecd.org/document/9/0,3343,en_2649_201185_41530009_1_1_1_1,00...

@PhilDuval

Thanks for taking the time to comment. The Spirit Level is indeed about many benefits of equality - social mobility being proclaimed to be just one, I only mention it here because this blog entry is about that particular relationship. The Spirit Level takes it much further and talks up a multitude of benefits of a more equal society - while I support the latter, I'm not convinced by the strength of their evidentiary argument, or their refusal to consider measures where evidence suggests an equal society will actually get worse. Any sociologist who claims all evidence unambiguously supports their theory, and dismisses alternative explanations or indeed different statistics, is usually overstating their case.

Empirical evidence on how to achieve the "best possible outcome for people" is a good thing - but the definition of "best" is actually ideological by nature, so some doctrine matters. So you might believe, beyond empirical evidence but out of rational principle, in "the greatest good for the greatest number" or "everybody is entitled to a certain minimum standard of living" or "fairness consists of treating people equally" (NB Nozick has a quite different, libertarian definition of fairness - in terms of fruits of earned labours - that currently seems more popular in the discourse of all three main parties, but is by definition anti-egalitarian). Of course, once your doctrine has set your goals, collecting empirical evidence for how to achieve them is the best rational response.

What particularly impressed me about Saunders is that he did not just crunch the numbers, but threw open the question of whether the numbers even matter. Ultimately, we need to do the same on the question of e.g. economic growth, given ecological constraints - instead of writing thick reports on how to promote growth, asking whether eternal growth is even a reasonable goal. I heartily recommend both the Saunders books (I linked to pdfs for them) - he's conservative, but admittedly so, and it's easy to separate his "ideological" conclusions from his "evidence-based" ones. The ironic thing is that he concludes in favour of social mobility precisely because he is conservative!

Some people find Saunders' evidence-based conclusions unsavoury or distasteful. He does present a case that most inequality in the US is due to racial not social divisions (or alternatively: the deepest and most harmful social divisions are racial, not inherently wealth-based); this seems plausible to me, particularly if you look at the low intermarriage rates, low levels of integration e.g. there are still almost-all black and almost-all white schools and even universities(!) and even the fact that the top 10 TV shows watched by black people don't cross over with the top 10 for whites. His conclusion that race explains more social variation between states better than income equality is not something that can be dismissed out of hand, and although some other writers disagree with him, it's just very difficult to isolate out cultural effects from economic ones. Similarly, the fact that IQ may be partially inherited (either by nature or by nurture) and that IQ is related to possible career outcomes, is uncomfortable reading. But it isn't social Darwinism, particularly when the author suggests government strategies for boosting the IQ of disadvantaged young children, and also points out that "regression to the mean" across generations ensures we won't end up ruled by an aristocratic lineage of the genetic elite - the children of bright people tend to be have a lower IQ than their parents, just as the kids of tall folk are usually shorter than them (although they are also usually brighter/taller than the average person, this advantage tends to dissipate across the generations). A lot of the criticism of Saunders is very hostile, and paints him as some kind of neo-fascist, but it's worth engaging with what he writes. Some pro-equality people base their arguments on everybody having equal intelligence genetically, for instance - a dangerous assumption, for if science proves them wrong, they must either double-back on their argument or become proponents of inequality instead. Difficult debates need to be had about the effect of cultural differences and intelligence on inequality and social mobility, and shouting "fascist social Darwinist!" is not the answer.

I don't think that Saunders is right about everything, but the point is that all social science is complex, there are many interrelated variables, and correlation and causation can be hard to prise apart. So don't believe, or put too much trust in, all the hype about the Spirit Level - anybody who claims that they have found something that explains more-or-less everything in social science, is heading for a fall, because complex systems are rarely that simple. Stating that "all the evidence backs the Left-wing cause" is misleading - evidence is often disputed, is open to multiple interpretations, and even the data used is contentious - different ways of measuring it, different criteria for inclusion. People always tend to quote the data that is most favourable to their view! The big risk of proclaiming the evidence-based benefit of equality policies based on the Spirit Level hype, is that a counterblast (possibly an unfair and excessive one, like has struck the global warming debate) is inevitable. A stand on the basis of principle is firmer - and there's obviously good reason to support equality, regardless of who says what about disputed sociological and economic evidence. Do you think that the Equality Trust is making good practical progress towards those goals?

The Spirit Level graph, and Eaton's spiel here assume correlation is the same as causation. It isn't.

It also clouds the obvious: in a society where income differences are smaller, moving from one end of the scale to another is easier. So Eaton and the Spirit Level put the cart before the horse too.

Income equality is desirable, and leads to more stable, more productive capitalism. Why not argue on those terms, instead of falling into the false narrative of social mobility? All it does in these times is disinfranchise the middle class.

PS Left is Forward is incapable of commenting on anything without resorting to verkrappt leftist verbal diarrhea.

@Hans Castorp - your post feels rather out of place and your assertion that, 'Income equality is desirable and leads to more stable, more productive capitalism' is both distasteful and utter bollox.