Creating inequality by degrees

Imagine a world where employers judged applicants solely on their dress. Anyone in frayed clothes or scuffed shoes would never get a job. This would be unfair to poorer applicants so, in the name of equality, the government might offer favourable loans up to £1,000 to buy interview clothing. At first glance this would seem a wonderful way to promote fairness.

Yet if the number of jobs remained constant, such a policy would have the opposite effect: it would merely ratchet up the level of wasteful, zero-sum competition for what limited chances exist. Soon, anyone not sporting Savile Row tailoring and handmade shoes would be written off. Rather than widening opportunity, it would raise the bar to existing opportunities still higher.

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Brendan O’Neill

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This bizarre-seeming situation is akin to what happened with the expansion of higher education. A policy which helps more people to compete for jobs only works if there is a corresponding increase in suitable jobs on offer. Otherwise it just creates more failures. Think of help-to-buy schemes for houses: these also sound wonderful in theory; in practice they are counterproductive unless someone builds some bloody houses.

Both student loans and help-to-buy schemes are classic examples of ‘bottleneck’ problems, as identified by Clarke Ching in a series of wonderful short books, and also by the legal academic Joseph Fishkin in a commentary on social policy. Fishkin argues that a great deal of effort to reduce inequality is wasted because it merely provides people with more means to compete for the same limited things. Just as there is no point widening the M25 between junctions 8 and 9 if there’s always a traffic jam at junction 10, there is little value in giving every British child the ‘opportunity’ to study biology when the BMA artificially limits the number of medical school places to 5,000 annually.