Liberal Vision

What the ASA should have said

JP Floru of the Adam Smith Institute has an entertaining piece on the Advertising Standards Authority judgement regarding the Jack Wills ‘2011 Spring Term Handbook’. Floru quite rightly disapproves of their nannying and Victorian style paternalism over a few supposedly pornographic images,

“Morality is personal: nobody is forced to pick up the Jack Wills catalogue, and nobody is forced to buy their clothes. My morality may not the same as the morality of the Hare Krishnas or the Zoroastrians.”

I agree wholeheartedly.

Unfortunately, my social life at university didn’t consist of cavorting with attractive scantily clad girls on the beach but nerdy political activities, cheap vodka and general disappointment. Frolicking on the beach in any brand of clothing was out of the question – the icy winds blowing from the North Sea were not conducive to the activities seen in the aforementioned catalogue.

In reality, the life of an average student reflects that of an Argos Catalogue: drab, cheap and conformist. But one can dream and I thank the people at Jack Wills for helping me do that.

Mobility: What does success look like?

Social Mobility, or the ability to achieve to your potential unencumbered by your start in life, is a frequently used piece of jargon.

It is intuitively understood. A young Mozart who never had access to a piano would be a tragedy.

But empirically vacuous. There is no agreed end point where a society can be judged to be ‘socially mobile’.

Nick Clegg’s new report on the Coalition’s social mobility strategy has not resolved this.

Social mobility is not for example the same thing as equal outcomes.

It is merit-based. To get a footballer’s salary you have to be good at football.

It is not equal opportunity. More removing barriers to access the opportunities required to get on.

It’s not necessarily, contrary to article of faith within the Liberal Democrat party, a solution to the graph below:

Many find this graph shocking. It shows talented kids with low-status parents doing worse at school than less talented kids with high status parents at an early age.

It surely means the current education system fails to help children achieve their potential?

Or does it?

What it shows most strongly is that, in educational outcomes, parental input matters. A lot.

As Freakonomics put it, ‘to get on in life, choose your parents very carefully’.

Parental advantage in “an open society, one in which every individual is free to succeed.” will continue whatever the education system or policy environment at other life stages.

The Government is not nearly as capable of social engineering as some like to pretend.

So my open question is what social mobility policy is actually going to do to that graph or any of the other proposed ‘gap’ metrics in the report?

What does success look like? How much less of a gap? At what cost? With what unintended consequences?

If we can’t answer that, it begs the question how we’re ever going to know if any policies like the pupil premium actually work. Or whether they do so without destroying life chances elsewhere through the dead-weight cost of the tax burden and debt.

Classical liberalism in the 21st century

Classical liberalism is often associated with the ‘night watchman State’: the government of the day defends the liberty of the people by ensuring defences are effective and crime is kept under control. Giving the way our society is structured with strong public welfare provisions and active government many wonder if it is at all possible, or desirable, to return to the night watch.

The attempt to go back to such a situation would lead to a cruel paradox. The State would have to be active in the extreme to change things. Given the classical liberal view that one individual cannot make decisions for many because they do not have enough information, how could such a step change work in practice without unintended consequences?

Perhaps the best way to start is to look at the distortions that have emerged from such unintended consequences. Jock Coats has discussed at length his idea of ‘rigorous liberalism‘. In brief, Jock argues that when government wants to tackle a problem it should not immediately legislate but look at what has caused the problem and remove the legislative obstacle. While the government is active it is active in freeing people from legislative restrictions.

The next step would be to create enough space for liberalism to flourish. This means making sure that policies enable people to control their own lives and make decisions for themselves. This is perhaps the trickiest area for modern liberals as they deal with the dilemma of level-playing fields and so on. Some believe the State has to intervene to ensure equal of opportunity either because that is a good in itself or because the State has previously caused unequal opportunity.

Then there is the question of poverty that I recently wrote about.

There are no easy answers to these issues.

It is highly unlikely though that one could ever return to a ‘night watchman State’. Instead a classical liberal needs to encourage a State that lays out the framework for voluntary engagement and then stands back. While doing that it also needs to remove distortions and perverse incentives that stops people from running their lives.

Poverty and social mobility

Yesterday, I suggested that it was time to make the moral case for liberalism.

Today Nick Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith have set out their vision for social mobility.

It already has its critics.

The way policies are implemented will be crucial: if it becomes more social engineering it will betray its liberal roots but if you agree that liberals need to talk about poverty then this has to be a step in the right direction.

Looking forward to freedom

Liberal Vision’s tagline is ‘looking forward to freedom’. That assumes we aren’t as free as we might be.

I have often written about moving towards a more liberal society.

Here is a possible roadmap to how we might get there.

Having a liberal party making the case for liberalism, and fighting poverty, is a start. Nick Clegg recently positioned the Liberal Democrats in the radical centre and made it clear he sees the party’s core as being liberal. Of course, one can argue over what that means but let’s presume this will lead policies that give people more control over their lives.

The next step is the emergence of alternative ways of dealing with social problems. The more control people have over their lives the more this is likely to happen. And those people who rather like liberalism can make choices that help that along: doing things that illustrate how a liberal society can work for the better of everyone.  For example, joining a co-operative.

The more liberal ‘space’ there is the more likely people will want more. And that, over time, should lead to a more liberal, and free, society.