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EQUALITY VIA MOBILITY: WHY SOCIOECONOMIC MOBILITY MATTERS FOR RELATIONAL EQUALITY, DISTRIBUTIVE EQUALITY, AND EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2015

Govind Persad
Govind Persad*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Stanford University
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Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , Spring 2015 , pp. 158 - 179
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Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2015 

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References

1 The most notable example is the Economic Mobility Project, a collaboration between prominent American think tanks spanning the political spectrum (the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation, New America Foundation, and Urban Institute): http://www.economicmobility.org/.

2 Examples include Krugman, Paul, “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” The New York Times, July 29, 2012, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/all-things-bright-and-beautiful/Google Scholar; Cowen, Tyler, “Why Economic Mobility Measures Are Overrated,” Marginal Revolution, January 18, 2012, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/why-economic-mobility-measures-are-overrated.htmlGoogle Scholar; Salam, Reihan, “Should We Care About Relative Mobility?” National Review, November 29, 2011, http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/284379/should-we-care-about-relative-mobility-reihan-salam.Google Scholar

3 See, for example, Zakaria, Fareed, “The Downward Path of Upward Mobility,” Washington Post, November 9, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-downward-path-of-upward-mobility/2011/11/09/Google Scholar; DeParle, Jason, “Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs,” New York Times, January 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.htmlGoogle Scholar; Breen, Richard, “Social Mobility and Equality of Opportunity,” The Economic and Social Review 41, no. 1 (2010): 413–28.Google Scholar

4 As a very rough estimate, a Philosophers’ Index search conducted on October 15, 2013 found 31 articles with “mobility” in the title and 52 articles under the “mobility” subject heading; in contrast, 1190 articles contained “equality” in the title (and 294 “inequality”), with 2700 and 397 falling under those subject headings respectively.

5 Since I do not discuss geographic or physical mobility in this essay, I will in what follows use “mobility” to refer exclusively to socioeconomic mobility.

6 Fields, Gary, “Income Mobility,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Blume, Lawrence E. and Durlauf, Steven, eds. (New York: Palgrave, 2008).Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 1: (“In the intergenerational context, the recipient unit is the family, specifically a parent and a child. In the intragenerational context, the recipient unit is the individual or family at two different dates”).

8 Beller, Emily and Hout, Michael, “Intergenerational Social Mobility: The United States in Comparative Perspective,” The Future of Children 16 (2006)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed: 21. (“It is possible to talk about social mobility in general terms, but most researchers focus on one of five specific forms of mobility: educational mobility, occupational mobility, wage mobility, family income mobility, and wealth mobility.”)

9 Isaacs, Julia B., Sawhill, Isabel V., and Haskins, Ron, Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility In America (Washington, DC: Economic Mobility Project, 2008), http://www.pewstates.org/research/reports/getting–ahead–or–losing–ground–85899375818, 2.Google Scholar

10 Hacker, Jacob, The Great Risk Shift (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 21: (“Consider the growing body of research on inequality in the United States . . . . These surveys can tell us how many people are rich and how many are poor, and how big the gap between the two is. But they cannot tell us whether the same people are rich or poor from year to year, or whether movement up (or down) the income ladder is greater or smaller than it used to be”).

11 For example, Isaacs, Sawhill, and Haskins, Getting Ahead or Losing Ground.

12 Ibid., 19: (“All Americans do not have an equal shot at getting ahead, and one’s chances are largely dependent on one’s parents’ economic position”); ibid., 39–41 (reviewing intragenerational mobility and finding that 50 percent of fathers’ advantages in the United States are passed on to sons, while the corresponding correlation in Canada and the Scandinavian countries was only 20 percent).

13 Ibid., 54.

14 Ibid., 19; see also ibid., 54 (illustrating that 36 percent of children starting in the lowest wealth quintile remain in that quintile as adults, while only 11 percent starting at the top drop to the bottom; meanwhile, 36 percent of children starting at the top stay there, while only 7 percent rise from the bottom to the top).

15 Corak, Miles, How to Slide Down the “Great Gatsby Curve”: Inequality, Life Chances, and Public Policy in the United States (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2012), http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2012/12/05/46851/how-to-slide-down-the-great-gatsby-curve/, 8.Google Scholar

16 Isaacs, Sawhill, and Haskins, Getting Ahead or Losing Ground, 31–32 (reviewing research and concluding that “[o]verall, the most direct evidence of relative mobility across generations does not suggest any strong trend, but . . . some research points to a decline in recent decades”).

17 Ibid., 37–42.

18 Gregory Acs and Austin Nichols, “America Insecure: Changes in the Economic Security of American Families” (Urban Institute Low-Income Working Families Paper 16, February 2010), http://www.urban.org/publications/412055.html, 6–10.

19 Isaacs, Sawhill, and Haskins, Getting Ahead or Losing Ground, 17 (finding that 67 percent of Americans who were children in 1968 had higher incomes in 1995 to 2002 than their parents had in 1967 to 71).

20 Winship, this volume.

21 Sawhill, Isabel V. and Morton, John, Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well? (Washington, DC: Economic Mobility Project, 2007), 11.Google Scholar

22 Lawrence Mishel, “The Wedges Between Prosperity and Median Compensation Growth” (Economic Policy Institute Issue Brief #330, April 26, 2012), http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation/, 3.

23 Ibid., 10–11.

24 Ibid., 2; Sawhill and Morton, Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well? 12.

25 For examples, see Breen, “Social Mobility and Equality of Opportunity,” 415–16.

26 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999): 63.Google Scholar

27 Winship, this volume.

28 Ibid.

29 For a defense of focusing on opportunity levels rather than equality of opportunity, see Cavanagh, Matt, Against Equality of Opportunity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; see also Sachs, Benjamin, “The Limits of Fair Equality of Opportunity,” Philosophical Studies 160 (2011)Google Scholar: 323, n. 49. For a criticism of the move from equality of opportunity to opportunity levels, see Kahlenberg, Richard, The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 88.Google Scholar

30 I am grateful to Jerry Gaus for this observation.

31 Swift, Adam, “Would Perfect Mobility be Perfect?” European Sociological Review 20 (2004): 8–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses how individual preferences may lead individuals, even when offered broad opportunities, to choose careers in a way that leads to unequal mobility rates. See also Valdes, Guadalupe, Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 189, who discusses how cultural norms can limit the pursuit of opportunities and so restrict mobility.

32 Breen, “Social Mobility and Equality of Opportunity,” 417; Swift, “Would Perfect Mobility be Perfect?” 2.

33 Isaacs, Sawhill, and Haskins, Getting Ahead or Losing Ground, 4: (“If there were little or no economic inequality and all incomes across society were similar, discussions of relative mobility would have little resonance: people could not improve their economic status significantly by changing ranks. Put differently, if the rungs on the economic ladder were closer together, then occupying one rung rather than another would have few consequences”).

34 Winship, this volume.

35 For this phrase, see Chambers, Clare, “Each Outcome Is Another Opportunity: Problems with the Moment of Equal Opportunity,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8 (2009): 382–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Chiara Cordelli for this reference.

36 Sachs, “The Limits of Fair Equality of Opportunity,” 323.

37 Chambers, “Each Outcome Is Another Opportunity,” 389.

38 For discussion of potential justifications for distributive equality, see Voigt and Wester, this volume.

39 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962): 171.

40 See Kopczuk, Wojciech, Saez, Emmanuel, and Song, Jae, “Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data since 1937,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 91 (2010): 96–97.Google Scholar

41 Isaacs, Sawhill, and Haskins, Getting Ahead or Losing Ground, 29.

42 For a graphical illustration of how relative mobility generates long-term equality, see Markus Gangl, Joakim Palme, and Lane Kenworthy, “Is High Inequality Offset by Mobility?” paper presented at the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Poverty, Social Welfare and Social Policy, September 8, 2007, available at http://www.u.arizona.edu/∼lkenwor/ishighinequalityoffsetbymobility.pdf, 2–6.

43 Recognition of the efficiency of specialization goes back to Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations ; see also Becker, Gary S. and Murphy, Kevin M., “The Division of Labor, Coordination Costs, and Knowledge,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (1990): 1137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 For two prominent theories of why hierarchy is efficient, see Coase, Ronald H., “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4.16 (1937): 386–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Williamson, Oliver E., “Markets and Hierarchies: Some Elementary Considerations,” American Economic Review 63.2 (1973): 316–25.Google Scholar

45 See Gomberg, Paul, How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice (2007):166Google Scholar–67 (arguing that we should “change the organization of production so that opportunity to perform complex labor is unlimited”); Andrew Sayer, “Contributive Justice and Meaningful Work,” Res Publica 15 (2009): 12 (“Even if one does accept the efficiency/cost and feasibility objections, it may be argued that there are nevertheless overriding considerations that outweigh these, for they take no account of the human consequences in terms of workers’ well–being and contributive justice. Is it ‘efficient’ — or socially just — to restrict the development of large numbers of individuals’ skills by confining them to routine work? Is it ‘efficient’ or just to deny them the recognition that doing complex work can bring and the self-esteem that tends to follow from that?”).

46 The argument that relative mobility more fairly allocates indivisible goods resembles that in favor of random allocation of a scarce resource. See Broome, John, “Selecting People Randomly,” Ethics 95, no. 1 (1984)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed: 48. (“Random selection . . . can help to reduce the conflict between fairness and the general good, making it possible to increase one without too much damage to the other.”)

47 See Nicholas Rohde, Kam Ki Tang and Prasada Rao, “Income Inequality, Mobility and Economic Insecurity in Australia” (University of Queensland School of Economics Discussion Paper No. 407, March 2010), http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/407-income-inequality-mobility-and-economic-insecurity-in-australia, 3.

48 Cowen, “Why Economic Mobility Measures are Overrated”: (“For a given level of income, if some are moving up others are moving down. Do you take theories of wage rigidity seriously? If so, you might favor less relative mobility, other things remaining equal. More upward — and thus downward — relative mobility probably means less aggregate happiness, due to habit formation and frame of reference effects”).

49 Scitovsky, Tibor, The Joyless Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

50 See Krugman, “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (criticizing Cowen’s defense of a society that lacks social mobility).

51 For an overview of the literature on welfarist responses to unjust, external, and tuistic preferences, see Chang, Howard F., “A Liberal Theory of Social Welfare: Fairness, Utility, and the Pareto Principle,” Yale Law Journal 110 (2000): 173, 183–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 See Cudd, Ann, “Contractarianism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Zalta, Edward N., ed., 2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/contractarianism/Google Scholar. (“Rawls and Gauthier . . . have argued that negative tuistic preferences (envy, jealousy, spite, vengeance) make cooperation for mutual advantage impossible and therefore are irrational.”)

53 See Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1999), at xiii.

54 For a criticism of Rawls’s and Gauthier’s exclusion of tuistic preferences from social policy, see Heath, Joseph, “Envy and Efficiency,” Revue de Philosophie Économique 13 (2006): 2, http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/∼jheath/e&e.pdfGoogle Scholar: (“The way that ‘envious’ preferences get filtered out has the effect of completely invalidating any concern people may have about their relative standing in the economy or in any other domain of social interaction. This has meant that theorists like Rawls and Gauthier have had almost nothing useful to say about status, along with other concerns which, for better or for worse, occupy a very central role in people’s value systems”).

55 Friedman, Benjamin M., The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Knopf, 2005)Google Scholar, 86: (“[U]nder robust economic growth the fundamental asymmetry between ‘more’ and ‘less’ takes on reduced importance because, for most people, downward mobility — should that be someone’s lot — does not mean ‘less’ but merely not as much ‘more’ as they might otherwise enjoy. Over a far broader range of the income distribution, therefore, people in a growing economy will be willing to accept enhanced mobility, and they are willing to accept measures like anti-discrimination laws, or special education programs for children from low-income families, designed to make actual mobility greater”).

56 Novemsky, Nathan and Kahneman, Daniel, “The Boundaries of Loss Aversion,” Journal of Marketing Research (2005): 124Google Scholar, discuss how thinking of goods as temporarily held reduces loss aversion; Dylan M. Smith et al., “Happily Hopeless: Adaptation to a Permanent, but not to a Temporary, Disability,” Health Psychology 28 (2009): 787, discuss how seeing a disability as temporary prevents psychological adaptation to that disability.

57 Frank, Robert H., Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

58 Dennis McKerlie, “Equality and Time,” Ethics 99 (1989): 479.

59 Ibid., 483.

60 Ibid.

61 Schaller, Walter E., “Rawls, the Difference Principle, and Economic Inequality,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998): 376.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 For an argument that distributive equality should be the default, see Ackerman, Bruce A., “On Getting What We Don’t Deserve,” Social Philosophy and Policy 1, no. 1 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 Anderson, Elizabeth, “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 316CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more general discussion of relational equality, see Wester and Voigt, this volume.

64 Sikora, R. I., “Six Viewpoints for Assessing Egalitarian Distribution Schemes,” Ethics 99 (1989): 493–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matthew D. Adler, “Well-being, Inequality and Time: The Time-Slice Problem and its Policy Implications” (University of Pennsylvania Law School Institute for Law and Economics Research Paper No. 07–17, 2008), http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5233, 20.

65 McKerlie, Dennis, “Equality Between Age-Groups,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 21 (1992): 289.Google ScholarPubMed

66 Ibid., 290.

67 On workplace governance, see Anderson, “Equality and Freedom in the Workplace: Recovering Republican Insights,” this volume.

68 Cohen, Joshua, “Taking People as They Are?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001): 370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69 Ibid., 385.

70 Ibid., 372 (quoting Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 468).

71 Ibid.

72 Satz, Debra, “Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship,” Ethics 117 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 635. (“[I]f we reflect on the civic purposes that we want a conception of educational adequacy to serve, we will endorse only conceptions that contain comparative and relational elements.”)

73 Ibid., 636–37.

74 See, for example, Massey, Douglas, “The Age of Extremes: Concentrated Affluence and Poverty in the Twenty-First Century,” Demography 33 (1996)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed: 403. (“Industrial growth and development from 1870 to 1970 produced a wholesale upgrading of the occupational structure to create a diamond-shaped status distribution that supported mass upward mobility, rising income, and declining inequality; in contrast, the postindustrial transformation since 1973 has produced an hourglass economic structure of high-paying jobs for the well-educated, a dwindling number of middle-income jobs for the modestly schooled, and many, many poorly paid jobs for those with little schooling.”) For two hypotheses about the mechanisms by which this happens, see Frank, Robert H. and Cook, Phillip, The Winner-Take-All Society (New York: Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar, and Cowen, Tyler, Average is Over (New York: Dutton, 2013).Google Scholar

75 Anderson seems to endorse a “diamond” structure in her “How Should Egalitarians Cope with Market Risks?” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9, no. 1 (2008): 267. (“Egalitarians prefer not just that income inequalities be limited at the top and bottom, but that individuals be crowded in the middle of the distribution.”)

76 A proposal to cap CEO pay at twelve times worker pay was considered and rejected recently in Switzerland, as discussed in John Sutter, “U.S. Should Copy Switzerland and Consider a 'Maximum Wage' Ratio, Too,” CNN, November 11, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/21/opinion/sutter-swiss-executive-pay/. For academic discussion of a range-constraint principle, see Bond, Douglas G. and Park, Jong-Chul, “Notions of Distributive Justice: A Comparative, Empirical Test of Rawls' Theory of Justice in Korea and the United States,” Pacific Focus 4, no. 1 (1989): 47–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which reports support among Korean experimental participants for such a principle.

77 Salam, Reihan, “Going Nowhere,” The Daily (Nov. 19, 2011), http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/11/29/112911-opinions-column-mobility-salam-1-2/Google Scholar: (“When you think about it, achieving a high level of relative mobility isn’t actually that attractive a goal. . . . We should instead focus on improving upward absolute mobility across the spectrum”); Alex Tabarrok, “Stasis, Churn, and Growth,” Marginal Revolution (July 30, 2012): (“Growth has relative stasis, that is, there is no relative generational mobility. So now we come to the crux of the issue. . . . Do you want to add some Churn to Growth? Why? If there isn’t much difference between Stasis and Churn then how can adding Churn to Growth make it better? It doesn’t and that is why economic mobility measures are overrated. What we should care about is growth”).

78 Tabarrok, ibid.

79 For empirical discussion of growing inequality, see Horwitz, this volume: (“Various measures of inequality seem to have gotten worse in the last few years, with a recent study indicating that over 95 percent of the income gains between 2009 and 2012 went to the top 1 percent”). Horwitz speculates that this is due to government entanglement in the economy; for alternative explanations, see Cowen, Average is Over, and Frank and Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society.

80 Horwitz, this volume, Table 4. The research by Hassett and Mathur on which Horwitz relies for the claim that consumption inequality between the better-off and worst-off is fairly low has been challenged in the literature. See Orazio Attanasio, Erik Hurst, and Luigi Pistaferri, “The Evolution of Income, Consumption, and Leisure Inequality in the US, 1980–2010” (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W17982), http://www.nber.org/papers/w17982.

81 See Laughlin, Lynda, Who’s Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements: Spring 2011 (2013): 17, http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p70–135.pdf.Google Scholar

82 See Anderson, “Equality and Freedom in the Workplace: Recovering Republican Insights,” this volume.

83 See, for example, Hayes, Thomas J., “Responsiveness in an Era of Inequality: The Case of the U.S. Senate,” Political Research Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2012): 585–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Horwitz, this volume: (“[I]t should not surprise us that those who are wealthier might have better access to the political process and thus be more successful at getting it to channel resources in their direction”).

84 For criticism of the claim that workers have enjoyed much upward absolute mobility, see Landy, Benjamin, “Household Debt and Middle Class Stagnation,” The Century Foundation Blog (Jan. 29, 2013), http://web.archive.org/web/20140110205400/http://www.tcf.org/work/social_insurance/detail/graph-household-debt-and-middle-class-stagnation.Google Scholar

85 Anderson, “How Should Egalitarians Cope with Market Risks?” 267–68, argues that “[e]galitarians prefer that there be constant circulation among the occupants of the top ranks of the distribution of income and wealth. A society in which the wealthy are self-perpetuating is a society with an insular class of the most advantaged, liable to see itself as set apart from and antagonistic to everyone else in society, and therefore liable to pressure the state to adopt policies that protect its superiority.” Anderson also argues in her “Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective,” Ethics 117, no. 4 (2007): 612, that “[a]n integrated elite is . . . more qualified to carry out its responsibilities than is a socially insular elite that is drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the multiply advantaged.”

86 Satz, “Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship,” 637: (“A society whose leaders come narrowly from one social group will generally do a poor job in representing the interests of the diverse members of that society, interests about which they may have no real information”).

87 Kahlenberg discusses the connection between class-based affirmative action and socioeconomic mobility in The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action, 87–88.

88 Sherraden, Michael, “Assets and Public Policy,” in Inclusion in the American Dream: Assets, Poverty, and Public Policy (Sherraden, Michael ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).Google Scholar