By Magnus Henrekson
Friday, June 17,
2022
On the question of economic justice, political
debate tends to swing between two poles. The Left wants to reduce economic
differences based on the notion of distributive justice, while the Right
emphasizes social mobility based on equality of opportunity. A plumber today
might not be just an ordinary employee, but actually, with the right career
moves, the boss of a plumbing company. Does the plumber, however—or for that
matter the builder, elderly care worker, or shelf-stacker—need to move into a
higher social class for their job to be seen as worthwhile? Theirs is work that
needs to be done and that is valuable to us all.
We should move our focus from today’s
one-sided emphasis on redistributive justice versus social mobility. Instead,
we should talk about contributive justice—that is, the individual’s
right to contribute to the common good based on their skills and abilities. For
this to happen, our perception of what constitutes a contribution must change.
Any salaried job that adheres to national workplace norms should be regarded as
valuable and worthwhile.
To grasp the reasoning behind this
statement, a shift is required. Let me illustrate what I mean by taking a
closer look at the challenges facing my own native country Sweden.
In the spring of 2022, 8.2 percent of the labor force were unemployed in Sweden. Among foreign-born
people from the Middle East and Africa, unemployment is about 30 percent. After 13 years in Sweden, only half of those born abroad achieve a
very modest level of economic self-sufficiency. For foreign-born people from
Africa and the Middle East, the proportion is under 40 percent. This is
demonstrated in a 2020 report by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum, where the most recent data
are from 2016. Since then, net immigration to Sweden has been close to half a
million, and most of those who came here during those years are from countries
whose citizens are proving particularly difficult to integrate.
Despite high unemployment and rapid
population growth among people of working age, in many localities it is hard to
find suitable labor in many sectors. The main solution proposed for this
problem is always the same: education. This is often made with reference to the
lack of programmers, doctors, systems analysts, and other highly educated
professionals, which has long created political pressure to expand the higher
education sector. In the autumn of 2021, 273,000 people—two full cohorts—were
admitted to universities and colleges in Sweden. In total, 450,000 people, or four
full-time cohorts, are currently enrolled in university-level education.
Education and status
Of course, continued prosperity demands
high-quality tertiary education. But this is not what our education looks like
today. Bloated university admissions, for which a large proportion of the
courses are of low quality, are hardly the solution. In addition, most jobs do
not require extensive education or training. The 20 most common occupations
among women cover almost half of all female employees; in less than one-in-five of these jobs is
higher education required. For the equivalent occupations among men, only one-in-four requires tertiary study.
Nor is it obvious that things will be
different in the future. Tasks that must be performed on site, such as social
care, healthcare, and maintaining the physical environment, are difficult to
automate and cannot be moved to low-cost countries. The integration of IT into
more and more jobs and a general knowledge of IT—which virtually all Swedish
young people have already—means that many future jobs will not require
extensive education. Often you will be able to learn these jobs quickly, so
long as you have the right character traits, such as self-discipline, social
skills, motivation, a good work ethic, perseverance, reliability, and emotional
stability.
The challenges and contradictions that
arise from extensive social exclusion, and the demands for change that follow
from rapid technological development, are politically very difficult to handle.
Sweden’s former prime minister Stefan
Löfven (October 2014–November 2021) often justified political decisions by
referring to “the equal value of all people.” Indirectly, he was referring to
the Biblical idea of man created in the image of God, who thereby becomes the
ultimate guarantor of each person’s unique and inviolable value. At the same
time, human beings are reputation-seeking or status-oriented, and our societies
are hierarchically organized. Our complex society needs to function. This
inevitably creates differences in income and living conditions, and these
differences are growing. In many countries and industries, this is mainly
because globalization leads to outsourcing and downward pressure on wages. In
Sweden, extensive immigration from poorer countries is the most important
factor behind growing income differentials.
How, then, should politicians deal with
the tension between sweeping declarations about the equal value of all human
beings and the growing differences in income, status, wealth, and standards of
living?
It is common for politicians on the Left
to point to differences in outcomes and label them as “unfair”—something that
needs to be fixed. This has an undesirable side-effect: an emphasis on economic
outcomes as the basis for equality actually undermines the notion that everyone
has equal value. Politicians on the Right, on the other hand, emphasize the
importance of mobility between the classes—even if you start out further down
the status hierarchy, you should be able to raise your status through hard work
and self-improvement. Sweden’s Moderates, for example, talk about creating a
society where people are “on the move.”
While the public debate goes on, reality
creeps in in the form of growing social exclusion. Most jobs do not require
credentials in the form of demanding university diplomas, but there is still a
shortage of labor.
Social change also takes place when higher
education is raised in debate as an ideal and a necessity. The status of jobs
that do not require extensive education falls even further. This can be seen
not least in the fact that young people would rather incur large debts to get a
university degree and then work as a bank clerk or in customer support for SEK
27,000 a month, than train as an electrician or plumber with a salary of as
much as SEK 45,000. This illustrates that a job’s reputation weighs very
heavily, and that significant wage premiums are required in a welfare state
such as Sweden to persuade young people to choose occupations with a low
status, even when the educational requirements are low.
During the past quarter-century, the rich
countries of Western Europe have managed this equation by becoming heavily
dependent on people from the former Eastern Europe and guest workers from East
Asia for jobs in maintenance, forestry, agriculture, and home food deliveries.
It is hard to see how this can go on indefinitely. On one hand there is popular
opposition, and on the other, developments at home are making it less
attractive to become a guest worker in one of today’s richer EU countries.
Both left- and right-wing governments
naturally use their powers to impose their own solutions to social exclusion
and outcome differences. For left-wing governments, it is common to use taxes
and subsidies to force a more equal distribution of disposable income and
housing. This inevitably leads to weakened incentives for gainful employment
and self-improvement, which in turn, albeit with some delay, leads to increased
exclusion.
Right-wing governments tend to apologize
for the fact that there are jobs with lower status, but they hold out the
prospect of class mobility and promise to increase these opportunities. But the
truth is that most people are not mobile between the classes; they have a job
further down the status ladder throughout their working lives. When there is no
class mobility and you describe jobs further down the status hierarchy as
something to “move away” from, it creates dissatisfaction among those who do
not move on. Sympathy with those who have remained “further down” also falls;
they have not moved on, they have not made the required effort, they have
chosen to stay there, and they deserve their fate. They had the opportunity,
but they did not take it. The rhetoric weakens the sense of unity and cohesion
between the bottom and the top.
Both the left- and right-wing strategies
are affected by the fact that status weighs heavier than money, which means
that increasingly higher wage premiums are required for low-reputation jobs, or
that more and more guest workers are required to perform them at a reasonable
cost. Both strategies involve focusing on the citizen’s relative position.
But for someone to improve their relative position, it must deteriorate for
someone else. Research has shown that the negative experience of having one’s
position deteriorate is much stronger than the positive experience of it
improving. The net outcome therefore does not necessarily lead to increased
political support, something that the Conservative government in Britain has
become aware of since the Brexit vote.
What is justice?
The simplest measure of justice is distributive
justice, that is, outcomes should be as equal as possible, regardless of
how they are achieved. Here, however, the problem is that resources obtained
through redistribution do not confer the same status and self-respect as those
earned through work. And as we have already noted, status and self-esteem
outweigh financial reward (especially in a wealthy society).
This finding brings us to the concept
of contributive justice, introduced by the American philosopher
Michael J. Sandel in his book The Tyranny of Merit. This entails all people having the opportunity to contribute to
society through productive work, which in turn confers social recognition and
respect by producing what other people need and value.
Ronald Reagan understood the value of
contributive justice. In his inaugural speech in January 1981, he highlighted
everyday “heroes”:
Our
concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected.
It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses
political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food,
patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our
homes, and heal us when we are sick—professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers,
clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the people,” this
breed called Americans.
Robert Kennedy understood it too. In a
speech a few months before he was murdered, he put it this way: “We need jobs,
dignified employment at decent pay; the kind of employment that lets a man say
to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important to
himself—‘I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its greatest
public venture. I am a human being.’”
People’s pursuit of dignity, status, and
self-respect means that the main task of politics is to ensure that all
citizens can contribute to managing and developing their society. This means
not least that any job with terms of employment and a working environment that
comply with Swedish norms is a good job that provides a route to dignity and
out of social exclusion. Instead, many important jobs are labelled low status
and carried out by economic migrants. Workers who already live in Sweden must
be trained and supervised to do these jobs. If, for example, it is not possible
to persuade those with citizenship or permanent residency to deliver ready-made
food for a salary, then it means simply that there is no market for such
services.
Dignity and self-respect
A key issue for the centre-right
governments of 2006–14 was the so-called work line (arbetslinjen).
The objective of these measures was that “it should pay to work, and more people should be given
the opportunity to support themselves through their own work. … Through the
proposals that the government has included in this Budget, it will become more
beneficial for people to work. It will be more beneficial than today to go from
handouts to work and self-sufficiency.” The weakness of the work line was that
it was essentially justified by economic arguments: everyone must work, pay
taxes, and contribute to welfare. But perhaps the most important aspect of the work
line was the moral one—that it brings about contributive justice: all people
should have the right to contribute to building society, to become an “agent of
society,” and thereby gain status and respect. But then it is necessary that
the perception of what constitutes a worthwhile and valuable contribution must
also change.
The political discussion is often about
how differences in outcomes are said to be caused by differences in
environmental factors that must be corrected. It is of course important to create
the best possible conditions for everyone, but the public sector is failing in
this respect more and more often. The discussion is less often about how we
should deal with differences that cannot be corrected through political
measures, precisely because people have different talents and preferences.
This emphasis contributes to undermining
the notion of the equal value of all. The implicit message is that those with
higher intellectual abilities are more valuable, and that it is the task of the
political elite to eradicate the environmental factors that give rise to
differences so that everyone again becomes equally valued.
Perhaps the problem lies partly in how
Article 1 of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was translated
into Swedish. The English original—“All human beings are born free and equal in
dignity and rights”—has become in Swedish: “All people are born free and equal
in worth and rights.” The Swedish translation becomes
problematic because worth is something relative that allows comparison, while
dignity is absolute, incomparable, unconditional, inviolable, and belongs to
everyone. All human beings thus have human dignity, and in this respect, we are
all equal. It is therefore a moral duty to respect human dignity. As the organizational
researcher Ingemund Hägg has shown, Sweden seems to be unique in talking about
worth instead of dignity.
The Swedish translation of the rest of
Article 1, on the other hand, is unproblematic. It reads: “They are endowed
with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of
community.” I understand this to mean that people should work together for the
public good rather than prioritize their narrow self-interest. If this can be
achieved, the foundation has been laid for a high-trust society that enables
effective cooperation at low cost to solve complex tasks within the framework
of well-functioning companies, authorities, and civil society organizations.
Effective cooperation requires structure.
Power and authority must be distributed in some way, and the benefit will be
greatest if they are distributed meritocratically—that is, to those who have
the greatest ability to contribute to the group’s success.
In a 2021 essay for Quillette, I argued that people have an inherent
ability, naturally and voluntarily, to bestow influence and authority on the
person or people who have the greatest ability to contribute to the group’s
success. Those who receive power and authority from the group concerned also
receive a large part of their compensation in the form of status, i.e., in
non-pecuniary form, which reduces the income gap. As Adrian Wooldridge points
out in his 2021 book The Aristocracy of Talent, maintaining such a system requires “a wise meritocracy,” that those
entrusted with positions of power must remain humble and feel responsible for
the common good. It is important to avoid meritocracy developing into an
entrenched aristocracy that lives a life far removed from those they rule
over—the very system that Michael Sandel critiques.
Nor can such a wise meritocracy survive
unless those without the ability or motivation to advance to higher levels in
the hierarchy are offered paths to dignity and self-realization. This is about
upgrading our view of vocational education and practical skills, while at the
same time toning down the current focus on academic studies as the path to
success, status, and self-respect. Moreover, most people have a completely
different path to dignity and what they perceive as a worthwhile life: forming
and taking good care of a family, spending time with friends, and being able to
say that you support yourself and those you are responsible for by holding down
a respectable and socially valuable job. That is precisely the value of work.
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