Social Mobility

When the values of a society switch from decentralised community building to centralised competition organised around making money, then the ambitions of its people switch in the same way. The cooperative ethic of neighbourhood gives way to the competitive ethic of relative advantage, with its corollary of relative disadvantage for those that have been less successful in the competition.

The social mobility of the late market economy has become a defining ethic. It implies that manual skills and the places and communities that are left behind by the socially mobile represent failure. Community is a place the talented want to leave. The market economy mines society for its talent, confident that community won’t be needing it.

The recognition that social mobility has its disadvantages as well as its merits lacks credibility in an economy which sees values in terms only of individual advantage, and to which the idea of community is invisible. But, in the Lean Economy, community is central, and it will no longer be a standard assumption that the first thing talented people want to do is to get out of their inherited communities and concentrate in distant centres of talent, power and dislocation. Social mobility is one of the concepts about which we will need to start thinking afresh. When community is thought-through, it leads to conclusions which are unpalatable to the expectations of the present.

Related entries:

Freedom, Empowerment, Identity, Money Fallacy, Social Entropy.