Fungible opportunity

Opportunity is not fungible; you cannot convert some types of opportunity into others. This matters when discussing privilege and inequality in modern society.

We have successfully provided most people with the opportunity to meet their physiological, safety and even love/belonging needs. There is a growing number of homeless men on our streets, but still a small fraction of the population. When economists or social campaigners discuss inequality, it’s often with these levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in mind. How precarious is someone’s access to these things? How good is people’s accommodation? How much food, and how healthy? How expensive?

(picture from Wikipedia creative commons: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)

              Precarity is a defining feature of modern life that is hard to measure. We try to get an idea by shifting people up the value scale for these basic needs: someone with food that scores 90% on an arbitrary quality rating must be more fulfilled than someone with food that scores only 50%. And that first person must have more opportunity to buy good food. Maybe those figures represent a high earner, earning 50% above the median wage (about £42k a year) and someone on benefits. The relationship might not be linear; perhaps it’s very easy to drop from 90 to 40%, but hard to drop from 40 to 10%. We assume it is. And we assume that the ability to satisfy one’s food needs translates to other needs.

              If you can buy good food, presumably you can buy shelter… that’s what the baby boomers say, admonishing the millennials for buying tasty coffee (oxymoron, I know) instead of saving for a house. But good homes are so expensive it’d take a thousand years of saved coffees to buy one. Millenials can satisfy their need for food with ease but still can’t get good homes: they’re stuck renting places that hit about 30% on the quality scale, whereas baby boomers could buy places at 60% as soon as they started work. Millenials aren’t not necessarily poor; someone can have a decent income and still not afford a good home. The ability to push oneself further up the satisfaction scale does not change linearly with income. Some things money can’t buy.

              When people discuss inequality and economic opportunity, they often mean the ability to reach that sudden steep part of the satisfaction curve; to reach a basic level of life. Some people are prevented from hitting 50% on these basic physiological and safety needs; others start far above those levels. Mostly this relates to poverty. A couple of years ago a sociological study I heard about divided the population into five classes based on income, and concluded that there was social mobility because many children of poor parents moved up from the bottom group.

              I don’t want to deny that escaping the bottom group of truly impoverished people is important (it’s worth reminding ourselves that wealth inequality is even greater than income inequality, and income differences are not the entirety of poverty or inequality).  But that study’s data showed that most children who escaped the bottom group moved only one level up. They weren’t evenly spread across all incomes, as they should have been if we had a fully socially mobile society.

              We do have social mobility in this country, but it seems mostly to allow people to move a bit away from their parents’ level of wealth. Rich parents tend to prevent their children dropping too far into abject poverty, even if those children choose poorly-paid or risky careers. Poor parents can only lift their children so far, and the state is satisfied if they get some sort of job and home, not a great job and home.

              Those people might still feel poor if they have a job that’s just above minimum wage with no prospects and little security; if they have a house that has mould in the walls and noisy neighbours; and if they still buy cheap fast food as a treat rather than going to a better-regarded restaurant. That’s because human needs are not satisfied in a binary fashion, but by degrees.

              And beyond that problem, people will begin to focus on other needs. As people’s desire for food and shelter is satisfied, they begin to consider love, community, respect and self-actualization. Just as having enough wealth to buy great food doesn’t translate into having enough wealth to buy a good home, so too do income and opportunities that help people with the basic needs not necessarily help people with the higher needs.

              Even if a child born to a single homeless parent stood as good a chance of eating well as an adult as anyone else, that equal opportunity for basic needs might not correspond to an equal opportunity for other needs. We can fund food banks through the nose until there’s a soup kitchen on every corner serving Michelin-starred food, but that won’t help people earn respect for themselves (both self-respect and respect from others) or develop great friendships.

              You can’t even sacrifice one form of opportunity for another; not as an individual, anyway. Societies can. You can’t tell everyone that you’re happy with battery-farmed chicken rather than organic, free-range chicken and expect them to give you a spacious flat near work in return; you’ve sacrificed food, but you don’t get shelter. And if you’re a white woman, you might feel deprived of opportunities to become a company director even though you earn enough to satisfy your basic needs.

              It strikes me that even though education and society has focussed more and more on telling children to chase their dreams – to self-actualize – that it has become harder and harder for most people to do so. And this is overwhelmingly related to wealth. There are many mechanisms at work: education, support, a financial buffer that allows one to take risks in careers that require it, and, of course, just fitting in with the language, mannerisms, interests and other shared behaviours of the recruiters.

              If you are rich, you can be an artist and work at it until you are good enough to make some sort of living. If you are poor you can’t afford a few years of no income while you get better at painting and go to galleries or events to display your work and get better-known. I am sure that some artists grew up poor, but the evidence is that most actors and musicians (and presumably artists) come from wealthier backgrounds. It is much easier for them.

              If you come from a solidly middle-middle class background, you might satisfy economists and politicians that you had the opportunities you needed to get some sort of job. But if you wanted to be a journalist, for example, tough luck. Most journalists come from well-off backgrounds and had a journalist in the family, and they’re not the worst profession for this. Society might have full employment, but if a carpenter wants to be a journalist, a journalist wants to be a banker and a banker fancies giving it all up and being a carpenter, then there are still unhappy people out there who aren’t achieving their life goals.

              Sadly, of course, there aren’t nice easy cycles like that. Everyone wants to be a top footballer and no-one wants to be an office cleaner. And it seems to me that not only are the ‘top’ professions less accessible, as demonstrated by sociological evidence, but that the top of the pyramid has narrowed. There is less of it. Music is a perfect example. Before streaming and burning of CDs there was plenty of room for decently successful live performers who might be known in their town or region, and room for a large variety of nationally-known performers. But the system has become ‘winner-take-even-more’. Big bands are massive, advertised and supported by labels who see them as a sure thing. Other bands make do with less, and a hollowed-out industry. The increasing connectedness of the world has meant that winners have even more influence: everyone forms a connection with them in the relationship map of the world, and those connections are lost to people who might have managed to be ‘winners’ in the past.

              In short, the opportunity to self-actualize is very limited in today’s world, including for supposedly privileged groups. If you want to work a reasonable job, have a comfortable life, and grow a family, the modern world has you covered, although even family life has become more demanding in many ways, from working hours, through commuting and two-earner families and on to tuition fees and chasing the best for the children. But if you ever dreamed of something a bit more (than this provincial life, Beauty and the Beast style), then you had better be born very rich.

              I think it’s important to realise that privilege in some respects doesn’t translate into privilege in every respect, because this is at the heart of what makes people angry and upset in many conversations on the subject. People who have all that they need to survive still don’t have equal access to all that they need for a fulfilling life. This is because people broadly focus on the next level up on the hierarchy of needs. The people who have only level one might think it’s unfair that others have level two; those struggling to reach even level one might regard them as ungrateful, without a thought for level two.

              Elderly people who had a better chance to own a home and self-actualize might resent young people’s health while they resent old people’s security of income. And young white men might not feel like they have everything in life even while young black women moan about their privilege. Someone who can afford a better home, or even to buy a home, might still be nowhere near achieving other needs in life. It even seems that people can’t ‘have it all’, in the sense that modern society requires people to work all-out just to achieve one goal in life. So someone who worked 12-hour days for a decade might have a good enough job to afford a nice house, but could easily feel in need of a social life, rest and self-actualization. Someone who pursued the dream of being a journalist, artist or research scientist will have a bit more of that self-actualization but will be jealous of the house and food that the other person can afford.

              That change in our society that requires people to devote even more of themselves to just one option in order to achieve it makes life different for young people compared to those of one or two generations ago. It means that the rich, whose wealth and social networks can get them into good jobs and take care of the chores in life that they don’t have time for, have a huge advantage.

              This privilege of wealth and networks isn’t something that we can change by treating specific categories of people better. Feminists are realising that women still can’t have it all, and eventually people will realise that no amount of gay rights or all-lives-matter will help people reach the pinnacle of their potential. These things are vital in fighting prejudice, but it’s very easy to see all factors holding you back as part of a conspiracy against you specifically, or your group. Even if we treat homosexuals, women, racial and religious minorities, old and young, the disabled, autistic, shy or introverted all the same as we treat everyone else, and even if we then expand that simply to not rejecting people who are different from our ‘normal’, we will still not have equal opportunities.

              Because those top levels of the pyramid are overwhelmingly occupied by the rich, held up by systemic forces that privilege risk-takers, even though the poor can’t afford risk; by people’s limited knowledge of jobs, the job market and recruiters that means that knowing powerful people is a huge advantage; and by a society which demands absolute commitment to every aspiration and allows no room for rounded lives, leisure time or alternative aspirations (making pursuit of dreams even more risky, because you can only have one).

              In short, we don’t have equal opportunity in society. And protected characteristics are just one part of that, not the entirety of it. Wealth inequality, and our wider culture, are beasts that affect 99.9% of us, if not more. We should try to understand each other’s needs in life, whether higher or lower on Maslow’s scale, and work together to improve everyone’s lives. Almost all of us suffer; we just suffer in different ways.