Equality and the Left: a follow up debate

6 August 2009

Is the capabilities approach a theory of equality? Why might we care about the gap between rich and poor? How could we translate an account of equality into a guide to political action?

In a short e-mail exchange, Oxford political theorist Marc Stears responds to questions from Graeme Cooke, Head of the Open Left project at Demos about his earlier post on different dimensions of equality.

Dear Marc

Many thanks for your contribution to the debate about what sort of equality the Left should aspire to and pursue. I wanted to come back and discuss a couple of points with you.

The main distinction that has arisen since we launched Open Left has revolved around ‘opportunity’ on the one hand and ‘outcome’ on the other (often expressed as capability in relation to the former and income or wealth on the latter). Your typology seems to be more focused on variations of equality of opportunity, with various degrees of ‘toughness’ (though maybe ‘democratic equality’ is an exception?). Am I interpreting that right?

One of the things we’re interested in exploring is the potential role of capabilities in any debate about equality – given that a capabilities approach is primarily focused on ensuring individuals have genuine freedom and power, rather than the overall distribution of those capabilities or the ‘outcomes’ they produce.

So, assuming we could agree on what the basic capabilities needed by all people are, and we designed policies so that everyone had them, would we care about ‘gaps’ in the distribution of those capabilities? Or the distribution of the experiences and outcomes that resulted? And, if we did, on what basis?

What do you think?

Best, Graeme

Dear Graeme

Many thanks for this. I had thought about discussing opportunity and outcome. The reason I didn’t is that almost nobody in political theory thinks that “equality of outcome” as such is the right way of thinking about equality. Historically, people started talking about “equality of outcome” only when they wanted to criticize the idea of equality. It is a critical piece of rhetoric to say that egalitarians care about “equality of outcome” as it is clearly unrealistic to want to equalize all outcomes. The question for philosophers has always been which particular outcomes, and which particular opportunities, to equalize.

As regards capability theory and equality, though, you raise a very good question. On the one hand, you are absolutely right to say that a theory of basic capability isn’t strictly a theory of equality in that what matters is that everyone has access to a set of basic capabilities not whether some people have more capabilities than others. Having said that, capability theorists generally believe that many actual socio-economic inequalities undermine the practical possibility of securing such a distribution of capabilities.

To take an example, if we said that we were interested in ensuring that everyone had “the basic capability to influence political decision making in their own society” then we might well be worried about vast inequalities of wealth because it is likely that the rich will be able to crowd out the influence of the poor. Inequality of wealth in this example thus leads (even indirectly) to a capability shortage at the bottom end of society.

This claim is a central part of all serious capability theory. Putting it another way, access to basic capabilities always requires that policy-makers be attuned to levels of inequality because the more unequal a society is the less likely it is that those at the bottom of the social order will possess the basic capabilities. In a way this is an empirical claim rather than a philosophical one. But it is a claim with a lot of evidence to back it up in a lot of areas, including education and health.

Given all this, if the Open Left project is interested in thinking about the policy implications of a capabilities approach, I think the first thing to address is not “what does the approach mean for equality?” but rather “which are the basic capabilities that we care about?” Once you have identified a list of such capabilities then it will be possible seriously to address what we might call “the equality question” as some of those capabilities will be equality-sensitive and others will be less so.

Does this all make sense?

All very best, Marc

Dear Marc

Thanks – that’s really helpful.

I agree that a discussion of pure equality of outcomes doesn’t get you very far. I guess the distinctions I think might be important are similar but slightly different. First, what should be the balance of concern between individuals and some wider notion of community or society? Does one have to be prioritized over the other? And second, at what point do we care about equality – the start, the middle or the end?

I think one of the tensions for the Left in the capabilities approach is that it is essentially about individuals and the conditions needed for a good life. So it can appear simply as a slightly tougher equality of opportunity (with the focus on whether you try to give people equal capabilities at the start of people’s adult lives – Dworkin – or also seek to make up for inequalities which arise along the way – Rawls). These are all versions of what some would call liberal egalitarianism.

Under this view there is not really a concern with the distribution of capabilities, beyond an instrumental need to ensure everyone had ‘enough’ of them. Having said that, you are no doubt right that meeting this test will require actions very likely to produce more egalitarian outcomes along various domains.

So the issue is not so much about seeking equality of outcomes in some pure sense, the question is more whether we should be concerned about the outcomes that equal capabilities produce? This seems to me to be one of the central debates between radical liberals and social democrats.

Income inequality is, I think, where this really bites. A decent level of income (or indeed wealth) is needed to have real freedom to pursue a good life. And this needs to be seen in relative terms, as the prosperity of society as a whole rises. But assuming that everyone had such a level of income or wealth, do we care about the level of inequality in these domains across society of the whole. In it’s most basic form: if they pay their fair share of tax, should we care about the super rich?

Many people on the Left clearly do – as our contributions to the Open Left debate have shown. But it seems to me it is important to ask why this is and what might be the justification for action to address it. Many arguments are put forward; I’d be interested in your perspective.

A slightly different but related question is if society ensures the basic capability for, say, decent housing, and then someone willingly and knowingly acts in a way that means they no longer enjoy that capability (say they cause deliberate physical damage to the property), does society have a duty to act in their interests again. On what basis are all people entitled to basic capabilities? I guess the fundamental question is: who owes what to whom, and why?

Having said all this, I totally agree that we shouldn’t get bogged down in debating the philosophy when there are real and obvious injustices to address.

Thanks again, Graeme

Dear Graeme

I guess my own position on this is that inequality doesn’t matter that much solely in and of itself but it does matter for two very important consequential reasons.

First, is the power issue I alluded to earlier. It seems to me that the more unequal a society is (say in terms of wealth and income) the less likely it is that the voices of those at the bottom will be attended to in political debates of all sorts. That’s why we should worry about the ‘super rich masters-of-the-universe types’. Not because its wrong that they should have more money per se but because when they have as much money as they currently do and others have so little then they have so much more influence. That, crucially, is what has happened in the UK since Thatcher: the voices of the poorer have got quieter and quieter as the rich have got richer and have bought themselves more and more influence. The banking crisis has thrown this into sharp focus, of course, but it is a more general issue that has been relatively little discussed of late.

Second, I also worry about the consequences of wealth and income inequality for any sort of “community building” projects. For much of the twentieth century this was the crucial egalitarian concern for both Labour and radical liberal thinkers (thus for social democrats and for liberals). The basic idea being that citizens had to be “close to each other” if they were to grow to like each other in some way and then dedicate themselves to common projects. The justification for the NHS and for comprehensive schooling was initially along these lines: if rich and poor alike have the same experience in the waiting room or in the school yard, if they even meet each other there, then common bonds would be able to develop in ways that they cannot otherwise. I really think that the government has taken its eye off this reason to care about equality over the last decade or so.

According to this theory, faith schools, academies, private health care etc. are not problematic in and of themselves, but because they reduce the number of common experiences that citizens are able to have and thus reduce the nation’s capacity for shared projects.

Both of these issues also have interesting – but complicated – implications for the conditionality of support. It strikes me that the case for conditionality is strong in the second case. Rights have to come with responsibilities if we are going to build a strong common spirit in our country. If people get help from other people then they should be expected to show some mutual concern.

But, intriguingly, there seems to be a strong case for non-conditionality from the first argument. If, after all, we are interested in redressing the “power imbalance” in our society and in “giving the poor their voice” then it seems odd to say that this should be conditional on them behaving in a way that the government sees fit.

Conditionality is, after all, a mechanism of control, and we might well think that the poorest and most excluded in our society are already subject to too much of that. Perhaps if there was not such a general power imbalance then it would be OK to impose conditions on receipt of benefits, but at the moment then those conditions always seem to be beating up on those least able to defend themselves and least able to influence the decision making process which determines the nature of the conditions.

All very best

Marc

9 Comments

9 Responses to “Equality and the Left: a follow up debate”

michael_green
August 7th, 2009 @ 11:42 am

Is this equality of capabilities about giving people the capability to have choice in public services?

Trusting the individual with the power to compete and the producers to produce is very different to trusting the individual with the power to co-operate.
Graeme_Cooke
August 7th, 2009 @ 11:54 am

Hi Michael – I think there are a number of ways of interpreting the implications of a capabilities approach – but it is fundamentally about focusing on what people can DO and BE (rather than just on what they HAVE) and the necessary conditions for people to live decent lives and pursue their goals.

This puts the concept of power centre stage, but – as you note – power can be exercised in a number of different ways and across a range of relationships (all of which need to be taken seriously). As far as public services are concerned, a capabilities approach would prioritise ensuring everyone had the power that comes from a decent education or good health. The role of choice based policies then becomes more of an empirical one: do they make this outcome more or less likely?

What do you think?
michael_green
August 7th, 2009 @ 1:34 pm

I believe user choice has the potential to drive up overall standards in public services, it also has the potential to drive down overall standards and reduce universaility.

I advocate user choice, only where it doesn't significantly impede universaility or drive down standards.

I am in favour of NHS patients being able to choose their hospital for treatment and to choose their specialist. I favour citizens being able to choose their GP.
These policies have all been implemented and show evidence that they have driven up standards without impeding universal principles.

When it come's to this idea of 'virtual vouchers' to choose a school, like the free schools in Sweden, I have some serious doubts. Would parents be guaranteed a place at a state school with a good teacher:student ratio, if they did not like any of the 'free schools' on offer to choose from? Would the money spent on free school vouchers used to purchase a place at a free school, be deducted from the state schools? Would communities with no free schools get the same amount of money spend on state schools as communities with free schools?
There's all sorts of social justice problems that need solutions before we can think about rolling out Swedish style free schools.

Finally, I still believe co-operation gives citizens greater power than user choice, as co-operation gives citizen's ownership over the means of production. But, since we live in a time constrained capitalist economy going through rapid globalization, citizen's don't often have the time to take part in co-operative processes, when they are competing in the labour market.

Should we make the labour market more citizen friendly? Or should we make citizenship more labour market friendly? That seems to be the dividing line between democratic republicanism and liberal republicanism.

I think the best solution in the short term will be a combination of the 2, making citizenship and public services more labour market friendly, and making labour market's more citizen and public service friendly.

I think both liberal republicanism and democratic republicanism can offer solutions to building a society of more powerful citizens in this current age of globalization. Perhaps when society achieves a democratic global republic, then we can begin to put the market in it's place and make time for greater citizenship use more democratic republican solutions to societies problems, which in theory give greater power to citizens.
michael_green
August 11th, 2009 @ 12:55 pm

@Graeme_Cooke:

Is Open Left pushing for privately run state schools that are funded by 'virtual' student vouchers (Swedish Style Free Schools)?

Please let us know. James Purnell and many Tories including George Osborne are now pushing for this.

How successful has this policy been in Sweden?
KatrineK
August 12th, 2009 @ 1:20 pm

Hi,

I’m a Swedish social democrat.

I think most Swedes would tell you that our voucher system (set up in 1992) has been a success.

All political parties, except the former communist party, are in favor of it. Even the teacher’s unions like it (teachers now have more employers to choose from, and in many cases this has led to better working conditions).

The system is not perfect and there are things I would like to see changed about how it’s regulated, but let’s not get into detail.

I believe it’s important for the left to be unafraid to use the private sector to deliver state services, but with very strong guarantees of equality of access. And I guess one can’t emphasize the last point enough.

The virtual ‘voucher’ in Sweden is equivalent in value to the cost of educating a child in the local municipality school (and Sweden spends a lot more on education than other countries). Parents use this voucher to ’buy’ a place at the school of their choice. The idea is that funding follows the pupil, which shifts power from politicians and bureaucrats to parents, and pupils.

The voucher cannot be ’topped up’ in any way, so all parents have equal ’buying power’ on the ’school market’. No school in Sweden is allowed to charge any additional fees to the cost covered by the voucher. This is of course crucial for the system to work in a progressive way.

The fact that schools are allowed to make profits is controversial in Sweden. Personally I can’t really see why people make this into the key issue, and one cannot deny that the reform has made municipal schools more efficient.

What I find more worrying are reports that points towards that it is mostly better-educated, middle-class parents who take advantage of the right to choose schools. If this is the case, then that’s a problem. One way around it could be to make the voucher larger for pupils from poorer areas and hence create incentives for the private schools to attract them. That could be something to experiment with. But to be honest we don’t know enough about the effects the vouchers have had on social mobility.

Katrine

PS. Very interesting discussions about ’equalities of capabilities’, but don’t forget that Amartya Sen is a feminist economist, the concept is kind of hard to grasp without the gender perspective in mind, isn’t it?
michael_green
August 12th, 2009 @ 3:22 pm

Katine, are the Swedish Free Schools allowed to turn away pupils for any reasons or ban them from applying?

If it is a market, it's first come first serve, and then richer parents with access to nannies can get their kid a place in the waiting list before poorer parents can.

And if there is a dynamic education market, what affect does this have on state run state schools? Is there undercrodwing or overcrowding in them and is the whole thing financed properly?

Also, how have the parent co-op schools done in Sweden?

Thanks.
KatrineK
August 17th, 2009 @ 3:58 pm

Hi again,

Thanks for the interest in Sweden. I'll try answering your questions:

1. No, they're not allowed to do that.

2. I'm sorry, but I don't think I understand what you mean, perhaps cause nannies are not that common in Sweden…

3. Schools are not run by the state, they're run by the municipalities. The municipal schools compete for the students with the free schools – the funding follows the pupil.

If a local government can prove that the funding of a new free school would significantly damage its own capacity to provide education, it may take the issue to the National Agency. This is an impartial Agency which then must assess whether or not a new school would be truly detrimental to the municipality as a whole.

Independent schools are a much more common phenomenon in the larger cities (where there's a large 'market' of students to compete for). In these municipalities the free schools have contributed to improved education, but they have also sometimes led to overcapacity in the municipalities' schools, and hence cost increases. However, this is disputed and I haven't looked into the numbers myself.

3. There are a lot of schools started by teachers, parents and educators who were dissatisfied with the education provided by their local government schools. However, not as many as people on the left would have liked. Big companies that buy up and run many schools have taken a large share of the market. There is also a discussion about the vouchers leading to an 'inflation of grades', schools with a reputation for giving high grades attract many students and hence more funding.

As I said, our system is not perfect, and has not yet been properly evaluated. But I think the discussion is important. Commentators and politicians from abroad often tend to forget that Sweden is in some ways one of the most market oriented economies in the world: State pensions, schools, health care, public transport, and post offices have all been fully or partly privatized. Public services in Sweden are to a larger extent than in other European countries delivered by private profit-making companies.

There is broad agreement that welfare should, in all essentials, be financed through taxes. However, we've been experimenting a lot with providing and distributing social goods through market principles – 'marketising' the provider dimension, while financing remains planned. Creating these 'quasi markets' that the school voucher system is one example of.

They're not in any way unproblematic and they definitely don't make politics any easier, rather the opposite is true. It's very difficult to construct and uphold a system using market mechanisms, but not being used by it.

However, I guess that's what social democracy in a broader sense has always been about – how to make markets work for people and not the other way around.
annamaris
August 17th, 2009 @ 10:13 pm

As a Swedish parent of school children, I would testify that the voucher system has worked very well. Growing up in socialdemocrat Sweden in the 1970s, my own school was all about conforming to the mainstream. There were no alternatives to “the school”. Gifted children were outright discouraged and made to wait for the slowest in the class to catch up (which from time to time was rather a long wait).
The old system prevails, but is now complemented by free-schools. These come in all shapes and sizes (steiner, montessori, university-style schools, etc). My eldest son attends Kunskapsskolan “the School of Knowledge”, soon to open a branch in London. One would of course hope that all schools are indeed “Schools of Knowledge”, but either way, the school certainly lives up to its name. There are some 350 students, aged 13-16 at the school. The model of learning is completely different to the traditional schools. As my son is half British, he has been able to work at his own pace within the 35 levels of learning that the school provides, whereas he has been working at a slower pace in other subjects where he has needed to work harder. He plans his own education with the help of his handler and has become a very responsible young adult through managing his own education. It does require support and interest from parents and I would say that all of the parents are very concerned and involved in their childrens education. I do not believe that any children of deprived households (because these certainly do exist in Sweden) attend the school. Many of the parents of my sons previous school (I still have two kids at that school) did not put their kids in the queue, because they didn't realise that could. The local authority schools are very reluctant to inform parents, as they feel that they loose children to the free-schools. Whilst we do not pay any extra money for our childrens school, the parents of free-school children are “punished” by having to pay for things outside of school, for example travel (paid for by the municipality for those attending their schools) and admissions to arts museums, etc. Because of the way in which children work on their own in my sons school, sitting in small groups, sometimes in open-plan rooms, the school does not welcome pupils who disturb others, including students with aspergers (I happen to know someone who was refused a place there for that reason). We did consider not sending our child there because of these restrictions, but as he himself chose to go there, we didn't feel that we wanted to stop him. I am glad we didn't.
The school that my son attends has been operating for ten years. It suffered a lot of bad critique at the start, with failing systems and pupils. Amongst other things, their maths teaching was deemed substandard after a few years. Many parents I have spoken to have been resentful about the school, in some cases saying that their childrens lives have been destroyed and that they were used as guineapigs. Now, the school has a spear-head maths programme and has addressed most of the problems that it had at the beginning. I would therefore warn against the dangers of new schools by inexperienced operators. Having said that, my old state school from the 1970s has had 40 years to change, and nothing seems to have happened there to date …
annamaris
August 17th, 2009 @ 10:27 pm

I think that I may have overlooked one important aspect here. The reason why my sons new school is better than the old one is that the teachers and others who work there are passionate about what they do. Most of the providers (I may kid myself here, but I think not) are not only in the schools business to make vast amounts of money, but because there is an underlying ideal of wanting to create something better. They are in a sense social enterprises. I think that there is a real danger of the free-school concept being exploited, but then again, the UK have always had alternative private education system, which, I am sure, has not always been provided for the right reasons.