The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Child poverty, social mobility and inequality October 31, 2013

Not to harp on about the curious ‘dependency=healthcare’ SBP piece from a short while back, but the publication of a survey by the UK Children’s Society suggests that many of those children growing up in poverty are well aware of their and their families situation.

Of those children surveyed who said their family was “not well off at all”, 76% said they “often worried” about how much money the family had.

Some of that may be an impression gleaned from the conversation of adults but it is also very very tangible, for as the piece continues:

More than 53% said their home was too cold last winter and 24% said it was “much colder” than they would have liked, while 26% said their home suffered from damp or mould.

And the effects of poverty on children are varied:

Of those who said that their family was not well off, 55% said they had felt embarrassed and 14% had experienced some form of bullying as a result.

And there are other issues, as austerity in the UK (and here) bites deeper:

A separate survey published on Tuesday shows that greater numbers of disadvantaged families are using the services offered by local children’s centres, despite continuing local government funding cuts.
The research published by the charity 4Children, which runs family and children’s services across Britain, revealed that although 73% of children’s centres say they worked with an increasing number of families over the past 12 months, 66% are operating on a decreased budget compared with the previous year. About a third expect to be able to provide fewer services in a year’s time.

In a way the issue of child poverty, or poverty which affects children, is particularly interesting in the way it plays out ideologically and politically. Unlike other areas of poverty it is more difficult for right critiques to default to ‘blame’ as so often occurs either implicitly or explicitly – as with unemployment, etc, and yet it also functions as an example of just how much is contingent in a society driven by markets and marketisation.

I wonder is that one of the reasons we are seeing little hints and nudges about supposed genetic bases for intelligence and ‘talent’ and why that must be factored into public policy on education and so on. Because those latter arguments are highly expedient if one wishes to divide the world up into those who are ‘successful’ and those who are not and to afford some sort of agency to the former and remove it from the latter.

But really, child poverty points up that previously mentioned contingency. One has no choice as to the family one is born into, that is pure random chance. Societal and economic structures which prolong, extend and exacerbate poverty impact upon the individual and the collective in such cases, and yet given the relative shortness of life-spans and the difficulties of surmounting familial circumstances child poverty points up the necessity for wholesale refashioning of the broader socio-economic context.

And let’s not forget how this feeds straight into issues of social mobility.

Aon Rud linked to this on this thread here. a piece that notes… well read on…

And Polly Toynbee in the Guardian subsequently did a good demolition job on it too. And there’s both a cultural/sociopolitical reason for this and an economic one. For Alan Milburn, that unlikely upholder of social democratic values published a study on social mobility and child poverty only a week back. As Toynbee noted:

Milburn challenges the weak incrementalism of both the coalition and Labour in power. This electoral dynamite shows not just the poor, but middling children doing worse than their parents: few good jobs, no homes and heavy debt.

Or as she put it ‘sliding into reverse’. But Toynbee noted that the area is fraught with misconceptions. Comfortable misconceptions at that:

Most people, right or left, would be alarmed at a trajectory of ever-worsening inequality. But few know the facts, wildly underestimating widening wealth gaps, still thinking Britain quite meritocratic. This ends the myth of modern classlessness, exposing shrinking mobility. The ladder up is so high and steep few can climb it – while those at the top exert all their power to stop their children falling down.
All parties praise equality of opportunity, but afraid of overt redistribution they rely on schools to bear the weight of reversing tidal waves of social difference. The report will show how the more equal a society, the less a child’s background predicts future success – Labour had already started to loosen the link between GCSEs and social class.

But wait, what’s this?

…a 250-page radical tome from Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove’s charismatically influential adviser. Ranging over a wide horizon, he lays into every element of education. But the eyecatcher is his section on genetics, implying human fate is sealed at birth, as the Calvinists and eugenicists thought. Are brain, brawn, sin and virtue preordained; the elect predestined for high things?

Cummings, I think, has left his post as adviser. But his thoughts are indicative of a certain approach. He wrote:

“There is strong resistance across the political spectrum to accepting scientific evidence on genetics. Most of those that now dominate discussions on issues such as social mobility entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best misleading and often worthless.” He claims research shows that as much as 70% of a child’s performance is genetically derived.

And perhaps unsurprisingly he continued:

“While some children will always be blessed by a brilliant teacher, by definition that is not a scaleable solution to our problems: real talent is rare and mediocrity is ubiquitous.”

This is astounding if true. It really would make issues of quality of teaching if not irrelevant, well, less relevant. But…
Toynbee did something very basic, very elementary, very sensible. She went and asked a geneticist what he thought about this ‘Professor Steve Jones, the celebrated geneticist at University College London’. Which is, in all these matters, perhaps the intelligent, and most certainly the logical thing to do.
What are Jone’s thoughts on this matter?

Cummings, using the work of the behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin, badly misinterprets it, says Jones, and “fundamentally misunderstands” how biology works. That 70% is, crucially, “a statement about populations, not individuals. It certainly does not mean that seven-tenths of every child’s talents reside in the double helix.” Teachers become more, not less, important, Jones says, when examining the close interaction of environment and genes. Even in the simple matter of height, environment plays its part: with no DNA change, his native Welsh population has grown two inches and increased its IQ since the 1950s. Moving to affluence increases a working class child’s IQ by 15 points.

That’s one hell of an error of interpretation to make. But Jones makes Cummings position even less tenable. Because rather than genetics dominating all else Jones argues that from the evidence:

“The more we learn about genes, the more important the environment appears to be.” Plomin spent years scanning top children for success genes, but never found them, says Jones. In life, “success and failure depend far more on the economic than the genetic accidents of birth”. Wealth is considerably more heritable than genes. The most equal nations with the best Gini ratings score the highest average intelligence.

Now we as leftists or Marxists (and sometimes both – nah, my little joke) know this almost intuitively. Economics isn’t everything, but it inflects everything to varying degrees. Of course the economic will have a greater influence than the genetic. How could it be otherwise. As I noted in the previous piece on this subject given the change in class structures across centuries where small elites were subsumed into broader classes and where class position changed (consider that in relation to say Ireland between 1800 and 2000, which is a blink in the eye in terms of human history) it is clear that any fixed notion of upper class=intelligence/talent is absurd.

And as to that political import? As Toynbee notes, ‘Cummings is shockingly dismissive of early years investment’. Of course he can be. If you believe that those who are in the middle and upper class are there by dint of talent then you are naturally going to believe that there is little to be done about those who aren’t by your lights talented. And yet this goes against all best practice whether in Europe or more widely afield. Indeed, and this is the contradiction at the heart of this, state after state globally is investing massive resources in its young with obvious results. Teach a child, any child, and overwhelmingly the evidence is that they will develop positively.

Toynbee asks a pertinent question at the end of her piece:

Recently I heard a Tory MP praise the 11-plus for “picking diamonds from the rough”. Genetic thinking created the 11-plus, Prof Jones says, designed “with almost no evidence” and no good results. Policymakers who misuse genetics to argue that a child’s fate is all-but preordained may stop investing in “no-hopers”. David Cameron set up this commission, but why would a government bother about inequality if failure is irreversibly stamped on some people?

My mother trained as a teacher in the UK. She once heard at a lecture, and this would have been in the late 1950s, one fairly famous conservative British educationalist arguing in an unguarded moment that the big mistake was general education for all at secondary level on foot of the 1944 Education Act, articulating a sense that for many there was no point in educating them beyond a certain level. Almost needless to remark he wasn’t talking about the offspring of the middle classes. That attitude continues to exist even if it is dressed up in different clothing. And circling back to child poverty that too is of central importance in all this, not merely in and of itself as something that must be ameliorated but what it represents in terms of the failure of this socio-economic system.