What’s the best way to manage a capitalist, democratic society? Handouts, ‘may the best people win’ or a new-new deal? The mainstream version of the argument circles around degrees of the new-new deal.
When times are tight (and even when they are not) its human nature to re-trench into cultural niches. In other words for elites to form. The only circumstance that can structurally promote social mobility is an excess of job-supply.
Coming at it from the other side to see the phenomenon from the ground up; on the individual level its easy to imagine that two things add up to making a difference: motivation and a pathway to change. Easy to give an individual, more difficult for a crowd.
Motivation is a very human, therefore hard-to-scale phenomenon. You could imagine a sort of social movement to support this but in management speak its the ‘soft’ part. The ‘hard’ factor is pathways, also highly varied by individual so the practical route is to identify the pathway barriers that affect the largest number of people.
Its surprisingly easy to forget that the major pathway barrier here is ‘a job I can get’, followed by a step up the ladder to ‘a job I can enjoy’. Pre-crunch there wasn’t so much competition for any individual job so the ‘…i can get’ was a lesser issue than it is today. Despite this, even in a post-crunch scenario, the most instrumental pathway issue is supply-side – what jobs are available.
This is structurally true because very few people in society are entrepreneurs. The normal behaviour in job seeking isn’t to say ‘what opportunity can I create’ – its ‘what opportunities are there for me to get’.
This brings us to a sort-of conclusion, or an idea, that the best way to manage a capitalist, democratic society is to proactively stimulate economic growth. Not a mind blowing revelation – but take a look at the government’s efforts in this area. At the risk of offending Lord M (oh that he might read my words – swoon) there isn’t an obviously strong, systematic, professional approach to this.
There is outstanding talent in this country but, to take two typological examples, they are either sucked into socially pointless banking or have been so successful there is little pressing need to take on near-impossible challenges, or no easy mechanism to allow it even should they want to. The example of Gerry Robinson’s ‘Can he fix the NHS’ comes to mind, the answer being ‘probably, if only they would listen’.
Handouts, new deals and a competitive environment are all needed to cope with the present needs. A strong, proactive, disciplined approach to putting our (or the world’s) best talent to work creating growth (not cost cuts) is what we really need – and only the government is in a position, in a competitive economy, to instigate such a unilateral approach.
And that’s what will create social mobility.
Of course endless growth is rapidly proving itself to be a thing of the past. All that means is that social mobility requires growth in ‘…that I enjoy’ rather than ‘…that I can get’ but that’s a subject for another lunch time.
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