The Spurious Arithmetic Of So-Called 'Unfair Privilege'

In a recent Facebook post in response to John McDonnell's desire for forcing harmful redistributive policies on the UK, I explained that, in terms of what we can control, wealth distribution generally follows the following kind of rule of thumb:

1) The harder you work, the better you do in life

2) The more effort you put in to improving your life, the better you do in life

3) The more intelligent, knowledgeable, conscientious and committed you are, the better you do in life

4) The more time you spend wisely and not wastefully, the better you do in life

5) The better your attitude, and the better and more kindly you treat others, the better you do in life

6) The more value you can provide to enhance others' lives, the better you do in life

7) The more you invest wisely in your future, and the less you disadvantage yourself now with unwholesome, selfish, careless and costly pursuits, the better you do in life

8) The better your life choices, the better you do in life

9) The more thoughtful, empathetic, aspirational, creative, imaginative, dedicated and inspiring you try to become, the better you do in life

There is no better, more reliable, more ethical, more empirically robust system for how wealth is distributed than the system above. And that's a fact!

A friend challenged this by talking about how society is geared towards inequality, and how you’re more likely to succeed if you come from a privileged background. He was referring to statistics like this:

"Although just 7% of the population attend independent fee-paying schools, the survey reveals that almost three quarters (71%) of top military officers were educated privately, with 12% having been taught in comprehensive schools. In the field of law, 74% of top judges working in the high court and appeals court were privately educated, while in journalism, more than half (51%) of leading print journalists went to independent schools, with one in five having attended comprehensive schools, which currently educate 88% of the population. In medicine, meanwhile, Sutton Trust research says 61% of the country’s top doctors were educated at independent schools; nearly a quarter (22%) went to grammar school and the remainder to comprehensives."

The underlying hypothesis my friend is positing is that it’s hard to succeed on your own merit because attending private school greatly advantages people in high positions (would-be judges, executives, top military officers, and top doctors). To see why this is the wrong way to analyse the situation, imagine I run creative writing workshops at the University of East Anglia, and I advertise that while only 0.01% the UK population get their work published, 5% of my students do. It would be absurd to claim statistical unfairness here, because only people who feel they have something to offer in the literary world would attend my workshops. To demonstrate an unfair advantage, you’d need to show that budding writers who attend my workshops do better than fellow budding writers who don’t. It’s a bad methodological error to compare budding writers who attend my workshops to the rest of the population, because most of them aren’t budding writers.

So when you have a statistic like “Although just 7% of the population attend independent fee-paying schools, the survey reveals that almost three quarters (71%) of top military officers were educated privately” – to show that is an unfair bias, you have to show that people who are otherwise just like the top military officers, but who were instead not educated in independent fee-paying schools, do worse. In other words, you mustn't discount the notion that it is the shared qualities and talents that make good military officers and explain the success, and not the fact that they went to private school.

In all likelihood, the people who have the kind of qualities required to be judges, executives, top military officers, and top doctors would probably dominate those industries even if all schools were fee-paying or all schools were state-funded. Similarly, it’s also most likely that the people who get published are likely to be talented writers, irrespective of whether they attended my workshop or not – just as it’s most likely that a horse jockey will weigh under 118lb irrespective of whether they had contacts in the horse racing world nor not.

Even if John McDonnell thinks he can drastically reduce the advantages of a privileged background by a socialist intervention, he can’t eliminate the advantages of intelligence, conscientiousness, hard work, commitment, dedication and wise life choices when they are so vital to success. While it’s true that not all of my list produces a fair outcome every time, and while it is true that there are definite advantages in coming from a privileged background, the notion that politicians can equalise those differences is highly dubious, especially as they make no attempt to show that the statistical differentials are driven by unfair discrimination, and not by shared characteristics (like literary prowess in publishing, or height and weight in horse racing) that procure them a natural advantage in society.