Why 'equality of opportunity' in the free market is a myth

 We hear it often, don't we, especially from the neo-liberal right. 'We don't believe in equality of outcome', we believe in 'equality of opportunity', and 'as long as we all get the same opportunities that's all we can do, after that it's what we each make of the opportunities'. The idea is described as 'Social Darwinism', described via a simple Google search as:

Social Darwinists believe in “survival of the fittest”—the idea that certain people become powerful in society because they are innately better. Social Darwinism has been used to justify imperialism, racism, eugenics and social inequality at various times over the past century and a half

But I argue that equality of opportunity is a myth, it has never existed. I have two underlying arguments for this position:

1. The flawed underlying assumptions of the market, and
2. The inevitable bias and prejudice of human nature

The assumptions of the market:

Those who proclaim the power of the market and its efficacy in solving our economic problems I suggest most often do not know let alone understand the underlying assumptions on which their market theory is built. The market concept began life with what is called 'perfect competition'. That is the basis for the market and for it to work, a series of assumptions are made about the world, all founded on a rationalist view of the world, of life, and of society. The assumptions are:

1. Homogeneous product: that is, all producers sell identical products, you cannot tell the difference between an item from producer 1 and producer 1001
2. There are many sellers, in fact so many that the entry or exit of any one producer will have no noticeable impact on total production, and so on price 
3. There are no barriers to entry or exit for any producer 
4. All market participants have perfect knowledge, that is, everyone (both buyers and sellers) knows everything they need to know to participate in the market
5. All resources (physical resources, natural resources, human resources) are perfectly mobile. Pick up your factory building and move it from Tamaki Makaurau to Bluff, shift those 47 whānau from Whanganui a tara to Māwhera, instantly transform the oil refinery to producing flour, you get the picture
6. All producers are price takers, that is, they cannot determine market prices
7. Consumers  have market sovereignty, that is, the choices of consumers send signals to producers that then determine what is produced. So persuasive advertising doesn't exist in this world.

All of these factors ought to mean that there are no power imbalances. Consumers and producers carry equal weight of power. Workers and employers carry equal weight of power. The rich and the poor carry equal weight of power. 

Now, I don't know about you, but I've yet to see any part of the world where all of those assumptions exist, well where any of them exist actually.

Economics then morphs the model to what it calls imperfect competition (also covering the extremes of oligopoly, duopoly, and monopoly), and to the concepts of market failure (presumably those states where the market assumptions begin to break down). The economics of market failure is the real killer. It would for example suggest that government intervention is warranted whenever producers do not meet the full costs of their production, as the market requires all costs to be factored into production if we are to attain 'allocative efficiency' in the market. So economics would espouse 'polluter pays' policies, which would see farmers paying all of the costs for their methane and CO2 emissions, and drivers paying all of the pollution costs of driving their cars. We have entered the dark world of spill over costs or externalities.

I have yet to se the right wing market pundits proclaim such an idea.

We can go a step further and say that the model assumes rational behaviour from all market participants, and that's several hundred years of economic theory right there.

This brings me to the second issue.

Human bias and prejudice:

Regardless of how we are raised, regardless of our world or life experiences, every one of us carries bias and prejudice in our heads. I understand that there is an evolutionary psychology argument that we have evolved to fear difference purely because it might represent a threat to our 'group' and its survival.

In a column in the NZ Listener (January 28-February 3 2023) Marc Wilson in a Psychology column titled 'Us and them' wrote:

"According to the American Psychology Association's APA Dictionary of Psychology 'prejudice' has two closely related meanings. The second is shorter: "any preconceived attitude or view, whether favourable or unfavourable." The lengthy first definition feels like a more specific elaboration of the second: that prejudice comprises negative emotional, cognitive, and behavioural attitudes towards people based upon their membership of some group. Racism then is prejudice based on racial grouping etc."

I suggest that for those with sufficient money to live comfortably, there may well be a prejudice against those who struggle financially. "Lazy ***'s", "Need to get off their """"s", "I managed to get rich from hard work, there's no reason why they can't do the same".. I suspect we've heard them all. I wrote this poem when thinking about this issue:

So what? The free market is a nonsense. There is no such thing in the real world, so the idea that the free market gives the best allocative solutions to our economic problem is a nonsense. Further, all societies are riven with bias and prejudice. It's an implicit part of the 'human condition'. This means that everyone does NOT get a ' fair suck of the sav', everyone does NOT have equal opportunity.

In short, thinking that all we have to do is give everyone equal opportunity is an utter nonsense.

We come back to the ultimate question: what sort of society do we want to live in? I believe it was Gandhi who was reputed to have said "we can judge the quality of a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members"? 

Putting our faith in the free market will, I reckon, result in inequality as everyone does NOT get equal opportunity. The free market as portrayed in text books is a myth, yet all too often those on the right worship it as a 'utopia', holding firm to the belief that it actually exists. 

Equal opportunity is. a'myth'. What sort of society do we want to live in?

Kia ora ... that racism is pretty close to the surface!!

I love the words of a wonderful colleague of mine who says that we live in a multicultural society in a bi-cultural nation. If you don't like that, you may want to stop reading now, because you are not going to like the rest of this post.

A part of our biculturalism is our multilingual status (three official languages as I understand it - Te Reo Māori, English, and Sign). I have only a small knowledge of Te Reo Māori so far, something I am working on. In my opinion it's a beautiful language, a tāonga for Aoteoroa: it is the only place in the world in which Te Reo Māori is spoken. There isn't a 'somewhere else' that you can go to speak it. It is beholding on us both morally and legally to sustain and grow the language. Lorraine and I attended two night classes run by Anton Matthews here in Christchurch, introductory classes to Te Reo. He expressed the desire to see us all normalise the use of te Reo, even if it is as simple as saying Kia ora. I love that.

Kia ora

In that spirit, one of my goals for Hornby High School is that we hear Māori spoken as often as English around the kura. It's a BHAG, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, but I love ambition. A part of that journey for me (on top of the deliberate an intentional work I do to expand my vocabulary and understanding) is that I greet everyone at our kura in Te Reo, without exception .. normally a 'Kia ora', sometimes a 'mōrena', or an 'ata marie', or even a 'tēnā koe' .. you get the idea. In my head that has become normalised, and that's what I want to happen across the kura. You have to start somewhere.

Now here's the thing: as a result I simply do that whenever greet people, on the street, in a shop, wherever. This afternoon I was in our front garden pottering away (dead heading flowers actually, not that that matters), and several groups of people walked past, out for a stroll in the first sun we have seen for three or four days. I automatically said 'Kia ora'. The responses gave me pause to think, to feel sad, to feel sick in fact. In each case. the people immediately looked away, and did not return the greeting.

Why?

Maybe they didn't hear me. I doubt it, we were pretty close. Maybe they were embarrassed and not sure how to respond. Possibly, but all three groups? Maybe there was an assumption about my race, and so a discomfort.. I suspect so. I am of European descent by the way.

What does this all mean? Well, I can't draw any conclusion with any certainty, but I have a suspicion. My suspicion is that what I was seeing was racism. There was this assumption about me which then evoked the 'look away and ignore' response. From my position of white privilege I guess I have the luxury of assuming the best - that it was not racism. I am choosing not to make that assumption, but rather to suspect that racism is exactly what I was seeing. It was bloody uncomfortable.

So my suggestion to you: as a social experiment (and also as a way of supporting the use of the second of our aural languages in Aotearoa), just try greeting everyone with kia ora, or tēnā koe, rather than hello. See what happens, see how it feels. At the very least you will help normalise the language. I actually hope however that you may also see just how close to the surface you will find an underlying racism. It is only from a place of personal of discomfort, I think, that those of us with our 'white privilege' will make the changes that we need if we are to be a genuinely bicultural nation.

I will persist with my BHAG.. I will persist in  my use of Te Reo Māori, not in a way meant to intimidate, but rather in my intent to normalise its use. After all, you don't see that response in Canada where French and English are both official language!! But of course both of those languages are spoken by those of European descent.

Kia tau te mauri

Robin

Of wedding speeches and education policy .. huh?

What do a wedding speech and education policy have in common? 

(Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-write-good-wedding-speech)

Not a lot, you'd have thought, and it isn't what I set out to think about. In fact, I was in the garden, breaking up large sods of heavy clay, thinking about something that happened a decade or so ago. I'd been asked to give a wedding address to the bride and groom. I've done that several times, and I love it. The thing that made this one different was that after the address over drinks at the wedding reception, quite a few members of our extended whānau came up to me individually to make comment on my address. That's nice. They were all complementary, but the thing that ended up putting me into something of an internal rage, was the repeated comment that expressed surprise at how good my address was (the bride and groom, I hasten add,  were simply gracious and thankful). I responded politely, but desperately wanted to rage "what the f*** did you expect? Why the surprise? I do this sort of thing every day of my  f**** professional life. Why would you think it would have been anything except 'good' .." You get the idea ....

This experience is typical of something I've experienced on numerous occasions before. Here I am, an educational professional of 41 years experience, a Principal of nearly five years, and I'd like to think in that time I've been successful and impactful (in a positive way) on learners and colleagues. Yet, I continue to find that friends and family continue to argue with me about the direction of education. They argue that they know best about the shape and form of education, having strong views about what they argue to be the cataclysmic decline and fall of our education system and educational standards. I am more than a little amused that they would often readily accept that the system didn't work for them, but then argue that what we used to do is the best option for many of them. "Bring back corporal punishment, bring back rote learning and memorisation, .. hell, it didn't do me any harm'. Except .. it did. 

Where are these opinions derived from? Well, we all went to school, didn't we? So, having experienced it, we must all be experts who are capable of expounding expert opinion. Surely? Then there are those biases from which we all suffer, confirmation bias, cognitive biases.. so the story goes. And of course on the basis of the biases, parents will most often claim that they know their own children, they know what is best for them. Sometimes that's true, but in my experience often it is not. The only frame of reference most have for any conversation on education is personal experience, and that can be exceptionally variable. That variability in itself is an interesting comment on the efficacy of things the way they used to be.

One of the biases that we often confront is opinion based on nothing more than... ideology. No data, just ideology. And here I think we see the root of flawed education policy.. individuals who come together on the basis of ideological commonality to shape and implement political ideology, who then inform their policy on the basis of their uninformed opinion. No data, no research, nothing... in fact, empty minds. Maybe that in itself is an indictment of eduction, for all of us it can be difficult to overcome the 'group think' that is so often at the heart of such political processes. National Standards would have to be the most outrageous example. Who in their right minds would think that conducting more measurement, and pigeon-holing children on the basis of that testing, was going to improve outcomes for those children? As a friend and former colleague used to say, you don't fatten the pig by weighing it more often'.

Back to the extended whānau. Maybe the problem lies in my inability to produce cogent argument to convince these people otherwise. Maybe this is a shortcoming of our profession as a whole, an underlying failure to communicate the value and worth of our profession, maybe that is why our professional advice is so often ignored. Maybe it's the example we set? There are certainly individuals within our profession who do not act professionally, and who do not engage with research data or processes. I quail at the thought of my doctor or my dentist behaving like this.  However in my most recent experience this is NOT the profession of this millennium. I work with colleagues who are inquiring into the practice (it's called 'Teaching as Inquiry') in which they gather data around small incremental changes that improve outcomes for learners. They behave professionally (whatever that means). They have heart for their learners, and are focussed on doing a better job for those learners. They are people with moral purpose and with heart, they are people with an underlying competence and good professional judgement. Most of them, anyway.

Here it is, right out of our National Curriculum:

Maybe the community has been captured by the paradigm that is represented by such 'institutions' as PISA, failing to recognise that PISA may well no longer be measuring what maters in this fast changing world. Or maybe in this current 'post truth' era such mischievousness as that peddle by the NZ Institute captured sufficient addled minds to gain the traction that it does. The neo-liberal right seems set on a path of regression to what we have always done in the past, in the belief that this gives us the best outcomes. After all, why would we want to change what works? Except that it doesn't. It has only ever worked for the privileged few, interestingly mostly for New Zealanders of European extraction. And even then our past practices don't seem to have the success rate that we'd like.

So we end up all too often with education policy that is ill informed, ill considered, or not considered at all. I do feel that in our current New Zealand climate we actually have.a Minister who listens to data-informed advice. As a profession I think we 'have a ways to go'. We need to get better at ensuring our professional credibility in the eyes of the public. Maybe, as we enter the 'post post truth' world we might have a better chance, but only if we are deliberate and intentional in what we say, how we say it, in how we engage with our stakeholders, and how we work to improve educational outcomes for our rangatahi in New Zealand.

In the meantime I need to get over the perceived 'insult' to my professional skills and credibility that was implicit in the 'surprise' expressed by whānau about my ability to speak in front of groups of people. But I am left with that question: what did they think I did with my time, day after day, in front of 50 to 60 staff, and 100 to 140 young people each week, each day? Maybe I don't want an answer to that one.

Neo-Liberalism, the free market and religion.. yeah right

There are those who state their opinions as fact. And then there are those who base their opinions on facts. I like to think that I am one of the latter. I have for quite some time been sitting on a series of views around neo-liberalism, free markets, and Christianity. Recent events on the political campaign trail have finally prompted me to go back to the notes I drafted some two months ago, and put fingers to keyboard.

This entire discussion of course has to be framed with the clear understanding that we all carry cognitive and emotional biases. Being aware of these may not reduce the degree to which we exercise them, and I am no different. Confirmation bias is perhaps the 'biggie' that we all need to confront, and all too often too few of us do.

That said, let's start with a look at the impact of neo-liberal freee market ideologies. The ideology bases itself largely on the work of Adam Smith that many derive from his book 'An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations' (1776) in which he stated:

…THE INVISIBLE HAND…

[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, (my 'bolding') which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society (again, my 'bolding'), and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV, Chapter V, Digression on the Corn Trade, p. 540, para. b 43.

This is has been. taken as an underlying truth by many, a justification for action that is fundamentally selfish in nature. I would restate it this way: 'if we act in our own best interests we generate the best outcomes for everyone else too'.

Underlying theories of economics have been developed within what is termed the neo-classical school of economics. The 'trickle down' theory is one in particular that is often cited by the political right. It goes like this: if wealth is generated amongst higher income earners, or those with more wealth (these two things are different) then as a result of their spending of that additional wealth or income, this income is spread across the economy. Or put another way, if we provide economic largesse for the ealthy, then they will spend it (there seems to be an implication, what's more, that they will know the best way to spend) in a way that it spreads out across everyone else in the economy. It 'trickles down' from higher income earners t lower income earners. It is the subject of a concept called the 'income multiplier', a statistical calculation by which we can even calculate the extent of the increase in GDP that will result form that initial stimulus. The logic is impeccable. Love it. It's a shame it doesn't work. There's a further comment below on this.

The OECD, in a report date back in 2011, agreed that 'trickle down' is flawed, it doesn't actually work. Here it was, as reported in The Washington Post in December 2011. So it seems reasonable to suggest that in fact when you increase the incomes of high income earners, or the wealth of those with greater material wealth what you actually do is... increase the incomes of high income earners, or the wealth of those with greater material wealth. Those less well off receive little of no benefit from that. Interpretation: tax breaks for the wealthy do not actually benefit those less well off.

Keynesian economics even contains an interesting piece of theory about this, called the 'marginal propensity to consume'. That concept goes like this. If each of us is given an additional dollar (the 'marginal' or last dollar) then we will spend a set proportion of it. Those on low incomes will spend a high proportion of that dollar because they are currently struggling to make ends meet, to put food on the table etc, whereas those on high incomes will be motivated to spend less of t because they are already meeting a large proportion of their material needs. The MPC for lo income earners is greater than that for high income earns. So statistically speaking if Government gives an extra dollar to some one below the average wage more of that dollar will be spent back into the economy, so the economy will receive more stimulus than if that same dollar were given to someone on a higher income. Remember that this is likely to be both 'chunky' and messy' in its nature, and operates at the macro economic level. So there may well be individuals in the economy who do not behave this way, but statistically speaking this is what we ought to see. Interestingly, the Keynesian view is that that income multiplier I mentioned above will be greater when a financial stimulus is given to those on lower incomes. The multiplier is the reciprocal of that mpc. 

Then there is the argument that inequality acts as a great incentive for people to strive, to work harder, to be innovative, and this benefits the economy through increased economic growth. Again, the logic seems flawless. Yup, but .. nope., the data says this is not true. Increased inequality appears to reduce economic growth. So with greater inequality we are all worse off, even the wealthy. Here is the OECD repot on that one. 

Finally, the evidence on the impact of the impact of the past 36 years of neo liberal or free market economics in new Zealand is that our distribution of wealth has grown ever greater. We currently have the greatest gap between rich and poor that we have ever had. Here is a study commissioned by NZ Treasury that only spanned the period 1981 to 1996 showing the changes that occurred. 

There are in fact more fundamental flaws in the free market model too, flaws that strict advocates seem oblivious of. The market model makes asries of assumptions in order to work. For example it assumes:

• Perfect knowledge
• Consumer sovereignty, and
• Perfect mobility of resources.

We do not all have perfect knowledge on which to base decisions. I think markets magnify the imbalance of knowledge and power, because producers tend to have more knowledge than consumers. This is not a level playing field. This is one of the issues that lies behind the concept of market failure, and hence the need for government intervention. in markets. Perhaps one of the simplest examples of this is the need for consumer laws (our Consumer Guarantees Act, and our Fair Trading Act, to name just two). These exist because there is a power imbalance.

Another example of market failure: with goods that we term Merit goods, and Public goods (capitalised because those are proper nouns, names for the goods in economic theory), if left to the market the market will under provide. That is, you'll get less of these goods than is in the economy's best interests. Education is just one such Merit Good'. his isa classic argument for NOT using market provision for schools, and for not using a voucher system, I have written elsewhere about the impact of market provision on education outcomes in a professional blog post titled 'Why school competition isn't optimal'. These approaches further embed institutional racism at its worst.

So all in all, the free market economy has not served New Zealanders as well as we might like to think. My own interpretations based on this data are:

• Economic growth has been less than it might have been, because of the growing disparity between rich and poor
• We have continued to assume that discredited theories of trickle down and incentive are true when they are demonstrably not so
• We have created a growing underclass of poor, with what I would interpret to be a less economically just society. My suspicion is that this underclass is overly represented with Māori and Pasifika peoples.

Now, here's the thing that intrigues me. I am at a loss to know how one can be both a right wing, neo-liberal, free market, supporter, and also a Christian. I apologise to those of other faiths, as the Christian lens is the only one through which i can view this. My suspicion here is however that other faiths might well see things similarly. While not an overtly practising Christian, I was raised in a Christian environment, and learnt much about the faith and its values while working for 15 years in an independent school with an Anglican ethos. 

My understanding is that Christian values would have us:

• Look after those less well off than ourselves
• Protect the weak
• Use our actions rather than our words to support those less well off than ourselves.
• Treat others with aroha/love, and respect .. basically, whakawhanaungataga, manaakitanga

In my confusion, and my desire to clarify my thinking on this, I asked a friend and former colleague who is an Anglican minister what I am missing here. I could not understand how one could support the right, and also be a Christian. I hd put that down to my own limited knowledge of Christianity. He commented that I wasn't getting this wrong at all. He agreed. He suggested that had Christ been alive today, he would probably have been a 'rampant socialist'.

So in my opinion the impacts of the free market are such that they run counter to the values that ought to be a central part of Christianity (and, I suspect) of all of the other great faiths.

I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone professing to be a Christian can also support the political right, and the free market. Either they don't understand the free market, or they are oblivious to the evidence, or they don't understand Christian values, or they are being disingenuous, or any combination of these factors. That's my opinion.

My new Principalship simile

Sitting in a Secondary Community of learning session today, listening to others tell their inspiring stories, this simile popped in to my head.

Principalship is like being a gardener.

We have to till the soil, plant the seeds, fertilise and water, and provide the trellis up which plants can climb. During the process we are continually weeding and pruning.

There is of course the decision about what sort of garden we are trying to create, and who decides.

Is it this?

Or this?

That's a decision to be taken by the community.

The qualities of leadership

Reading this week's 'Your Weekend' supplement in the Christchurch Press, a number of comments in the article 'Women who rule the roost' really struck a chord. The article records interviews with a number of women who hold leadership positions in business and the community, and their wisdom on the question of leadership resonates.

Raelene Castle, CEO of Sydney's Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs (NRL) team is quoted as saying:

"You need respect to succeed in leadership, It does not come with  title, it comes with your actions and how you do the things you said you would."

And:

She believes resilience if fundamental to good leadership. "What doesn't kill your career, makes you stronger". 

Naomi Fergusson, who heads the NZ Inland Revenue Department observes:

 "I learned to value my strengths and have the confidence to trust my own abilities to get things done."

And:

"None of us are perfect. We have our strengths but we also need to understand how to build a team. ...... I give clarity to the organisation and allow the people who work here to fulfill their potential. ... I just create the space for them to do it."

Knowing these things is the first step. Doing them is the challenge. As much as we might try, none of us is perfect. We all make mistakes along the way. Maybe it's our integrity that determines whether or not our colleagues are forgiving when we do?

 

Student voice and our educational future

Student voice is well recognised as important in the operation of our schools. I am however fascinated by the number of occasions in which it is not used. My intuition suggests that we are not good at collecting student voice.

As I formulate views on school and curriculum development, I have been struck by the need to value student diversity rather than squash it. This was reinforced for me during the recent address from Yong Zhao.

There are a number of students at Hornby High School who clearly value their own difference. They actively try to maintain their individuality, at the personal cost of regular conflict with the school rules, and so they are a target of the school discipline system.

I decided to meet with one of these students (I walked him to a local coffee shop and bought him coffee) and ask him why he does this, and what he would want from a school that would better prepare him for his future.

I interviewed a year 12 boy, asking only these two questions:

1. Why do you choose to dress the way you do, ignoring the uniform rules of the school?
2. What would school look like if it were to meet your own needs?

He made the following comments:

• We don’t acknowledge student differences
• We have too many rules, many of which don’t seem to serve a purpose
• We should be offering more individualised courses that meet student needs/’passions’ (he used that word without prompting
• “More people would attend school if they were doing what they love doing”
• We should have less of a gap between teachers and students, teachers need to “know more about their students”
• He would like more freedom, he acknowledged that we need some rules, but should have fewer, and more choice to specialise in what they love

When you think about it, there is nothing there that should come as a surprise. During a meeting with several staff about integrated curriculum, project based learning, connected curriculum (call it what you will) a colleague made this comment:

"I've taught in Year 7-13 schools for 18 years. As a profession we have been talking about this stuff all that time. It's time we did something about it instead of talking."

Yep. The moral imperative is clear, the mandate is there. Time to act!!!