Against social mobility

Tony Blair  said yesterday that he wants to "create a Britain where work and merit, not privilege or class background, decide how far you go."
This is a bad idea. There's a lot to be said against social mobility.
Now, this should be strange coming from me, because I have been upwardly mobile. I've come from a single parent family in inner-city Leicester, via Oxford (and a grammar school) to jobs in the City and media and a flat in Belsize Park. Shouldn't I want more people to follow my path?
No. Sure, upward mobility has made me relatively well-off. But you get used to money. And it's come at a cost - loneliness, a feeling of never quite fitting in, of always being regarded as an eccentric, and the insecurity that follows from all this. I'm honestly not at all sure whether upward mobility has, on balance, made me happier or not.
You might reply that these problems are the result of being in a minority, and that greater mobility would solve this.
Maybe. But it would create other problems. Imagine everyone's income and social position were due to "work and merit." (This isn't possible in a free market economy, but leave that aside). What would happen? First, the poor would be very depressed. They couldn't comfort themselves with the notion that their lack of success was due to a lack of opportunity. Instead, it would be because they were failures.
Equally, the rich and successful would be even more intolerably smug than they are now. As Michael Young put it in The Rise of the Meritocracy, written at a time when the Labour party showed signs of being able to think:

If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.

If we were to have genuine social mobility, then, we could forget any notion of equal worth or community spirit. It'd be every man for himself.
To this, New Labour might reply that social mobility is necessary for economic efficiency. We can't, they'll say, afford to have stupid people in "top jobs."
And herein lies my main objection to the notion of social mobility. It perpetuates the illusion that well-paid jobs require high technical skills.
In many cases (there are obvious exceptions) they don't. To see what I mean, take the TV series 24. The (former) boss of CTU, Erin, is a useless airhead*. It's Edgar, the insecure and bumbling technocrat who actually saves people's lives. The contrast between the two highlights a wider point. Senior managers don't always have or need high intellectual skills. Indeed, these can be an obstacle to success. Instead, they owe their position to  having middle-class character traits -  self-confidence, getting on with one's middle-class peers, and the ability to utter half-witted managerialist bullshit.
The rhetoric of social mobility helps to legitimize  class hierarchies, by maintaining the pretence that  management is a technical skills. In fact, bosses' power derives from other sources.
And what's worst of all is that such hierarchies might not be needed anyway. In many firms, "management" is either a redundant function - because good companies run themselves - or it's worse than useless.
The "left", then, should not support social mobility. The point is not to join the rich and powerful, but to overthrow them.
* Yes. I know she's since been replaced by Michelle Dessler - we're a few weeks behind in the UK. I'm using an illustration here, not drawing an inference.

Comments

[Blimpish]

With you on a lot of this, except for that last one - what do we get once we overthrow them..?

[Paddy Carter]

I guess you are being provactive, but putting a few neglected extras in the cost column is not the same thing as demonstrating they outweigh the benefits. CD would you really prefer a society that inhibits social mobility? what would that look like?

[Monjo]

Cuba

[Jacob]

your attribution of managerial success to self-confidence and an ability to interact with fellow middle-class business types is an interesting one which is worthy of further discussion but your broad dismissal of social mobility troubles me immensely. Though I appreciate all the problems with social mobility that you highlight, is there a fairer way of distributing wealth than to those with the greatest talent and industry? Are we not, inevitably, concerned with choosing the least bad option ?

[Rob Read]

You are confusing merit (i.e. fitness for a job) with intelligence/academic attainment!

The two are only vaguely related. There are lots of different types of jobs, and lots of different fitness sets for them. Getting rid of stupid laws preventing firing, will mean more hiring and firing, more roles per person, and more chances to find a good annealing fit.

[Rob]

Approve of this. Social mobility is only a good thing in so far as it results in an increase in the number of well-off people: if anything, social mobility in a society without expanding well-off groups is likely to be a bad thing, because it increases uncertainty and makes long-term planning (for persons, not firms) more difficult. The comments above confuse social mobility - a moves from w/c to m/c, but unless m/c increases in size, b moves from m/c to w/c - with rising general incomes - a does not neccesarily move from w/c to m/c, but gets better off. You can have social mobility in a very static social system, because although none of the social roles change, the people occupying them change.

[Jacob]

I don't think social mobility has anything to do with practical politics. I feel it's entirely a philosophical point and if we have to devise a division of wealth, what fairer way than to award it to the most talented and hard working? The point about expanding well-off groups is barely relevant - how can one be comfortable with members of the better off groups lacking the merit to justify it?

[Dander]

My gut reaction - which I'm not sure could stand up to empirical scrutiny - is that the options are not social mobility vs. social stasis. They are social mobility vs. ever-deepening social segregation.

This is basicly a Lockean fear that money, status, confidence, knowledge of how the system works confer such massive and transmissible advantages upon those who hold them, that unless we actively shake it up, the differences will become so huge that there could be no meaningful interaction between people of different strata. We would become two species.

That would be bad for many reasons, including:
- Network theory suggests the value of human society is greatest when there are the maximum number of possible and meaningful human interactions. We want to foster nodes.
- Sooner or later the rich and powerful will want the also-rans to fight a war for them. They need a reason to do so.
- There is nothing sacred about property and the rule of law if the system is not sufficiently in your interests to warrant your obedience.