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Duncan O'Leary

photo of Duncan O'Leary

Senior Researcher

Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.

Posted by Duncan O'Leary at 3:02pm on Tuesday, 11th March 2008

John Hutton’s speech to Progress today is causing a stir. (Here’s Polly Toynbee). Hutton argues that: "Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country. Rather than placing a cap on that success, we should be questioning why it is not available to more people." I wonder if he actually means different people, rather than more people. There are, after all, always going to be low-paid jobs in society. We may achieve greater social mobility but not everyone can be a city high-flyer all at the same time, no matter how highly skilled we all are. In the end, markets produce wage inequality, so the political decision is when – and to what extent – this inequality is acceptable or should be redressed through the state.  

 

So the question for the government (and opposition parties) is where it stands on equality. Does it stand for meritocracy – which can produce huge inequalities – or something closer to equality of outcome as well as a fairer start for everyone? This is related to pledges to cut to poverty, but these don't quite answer the question. In Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour Party conference last year he flirted with both:

 

Not the old equality of outcome that discounts hard work and effort.

Not the old version of equality of opportunity – the rise of an exclusive meritocracy where only some can succeed and others are forever condemned to fail.

But a genuinely meritocratic Britain, a Britain of all the talents.

Where all are encouraged to aim high.

And all by their effort can rise.

A Britain of aspiration and also a Britain of mutual obligation where all play our part and recognise the duties we owe to each other.


 

Who said there are no big questions left in politics?

Comments

1
By far the most vulgar aspect of Hutton's speech (and there were several) was his pig-headed failure to recognise the difference between areas of the economy in which rewards are linked to productivity, innovation and hard work, and those in which rewards are linked to structural changes in the position of finance capital (and the City of London) in the global economy. Personally I am just about willing to be a Schumpeterian, and agree that entrepreneurs and inventors 'deserve' high levels of wealth, but when it comes to bankers, I refuse to accept any version of events that denies the obvious Marxist truth that their wealth is created by millions of Chinese workers. If the language is of talent, desert, work and merit, this is a tolerable model of inequality, but only accurately captures those areas of the economy where somebody has employed skill and imagination to create wealth, and not simply taken a routinised job of producing money out of a financial sausage machine.
Posted by Will Davies  at 1:54pm on Tuesday, 18th March 2008
2
On reading Hutton, Why was I strangely reminded of this, from way back.in 1975?

"I believe you have a saying in the Middle West: "Don't cut down the tall poppies. Let them rather grow tall." I would say, let our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so. Because we must build a society in which each citizen can develop his full potential, both for his own benefit and for the community as a whole, a society in which originality, skill, energy and thrift are rewarded, in which we encourage rather than restrict the variety and richness of human nature."

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=102769
Posted by Paul Hayes  at 9:39am on Friday, 21st March 2008

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