Matt Yglesias

Opportunity and Outcome

Last week, David Brooks introduced the following conceit into his column:

There are two major political parties in America, but there are at least three major political tendencies. The first is orthodox liberalism, a belief in using government to maximize equality. The second is free-market conservatism, the belief in limiting government to maximize freedom.

But there is a third tendency, which floats between. It is for using limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. This tendency began with Alexander Hamilton, who created a vibrant national economy so more people could rise and succeed. It matured with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Republicans, who created the Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act to give people the tools to pursue their ambitions. It continued with Theodore Roosevelt, who busted the trusts to give more Americans a square deal.

Now I think we understand that no conceit of this sort is going to be literally accurate. But I really doubt you could find any kind if substantial American political movement that’s ever been dedicated to the idea that we need to maximize equality as opposed to mobility. This is something that conservatives say about liberals who they don’t like (Brooks likes Obama and says “Democrats now control the middle” citing the Hamilton Project — an initiative of Bob Rubin, Jason Furman, and others) but I don’t think you find a lot of people there.

But either way, this is truly a false choice. Look what I found reading the UK section The Economist on the plane the other day:

Inequality is strongly associated with immobility. And of course it is. In a society with a lot of equality (Denmark) you naturally get a lot of mobility. But in a country like the United States where you have such giant gaps between the first and second decile, the second and third decile, and the ninth and tenth decile, it would require genuinely heroic public policy interventions to create anything resembling real social mobility. Meanwhile, most of the mobility-enhancing things you could think of (taxing rich people and spending the money on high-quality universal children’s health and early childhood education) are also egalitarian measures.