SOCIAL MOBILITY

Social Mobility



Social Mobility

Introduction

United Kingdom has a high concentration of income and a low level of social mobility. Perceptions of Europeans about their situation reflect this condition and directly affect their happiness and therefore, in their redistributive preferences. For this reason, the analysis of the determinants of support for redistributive policies in a democracy like UK necessarily requires an understanding of the causes and social forces behind individual judgments about happiness and the demand for redistribution. This is the purpose of this document.

While the proportion of income allocated by the government differs widely from country to country, there is a clear upward trend in Western Europe and North America in recent decades. Europe has not been immune to this trend and, in particular, the UK experience shows that social spending has increased in recent years substantially. However, despite the economic literature has disagreed on the reasons that explain this phenomenon, several authors have attempted to test both theoretically and empirically that happiness, political preferences in general and in particular redistributive preferences are key factors involved when the State is required more effort to redistribute resources in society.

Discussion

Indeed, the idea that social preferences play a key role in shaping attitudes and policies, particularly those on the redistribution-has a long history in the social sciences. Moreover, the debate about what factors affect social preferences of agents remains valid. The economic literature has offered three different approaches, but not exclusive, regard: personal financial interest, the prospect of social mobility and social justice perception.

As to the first, a group of economists has focused on the model of "self", which analyzes net income of individuals after pecuniary a policy of redistribution. The basic intuition is that an agent-course rational, selfish and individual welfare-maximizing support a program of redistribution X instead of an alternative program if and only if their net income is greater in the former than in the latter. In general, since any government intervention involves some form of redistribution, the rich support more often the results of the free market.

The effect that social justice beliefs on current policy decisions are not limited to the comparison between the U.S. and Europe. The Figure 1 shows a positive correlation between the percentage of the population that believes that luck, not effort determines income and social spending as a percentage of GDP. It is evident, then, that in countries where people believe that individual effort exogenous factors are what determine the income required more frequently than the State compensates this social injustice with a higher social spending.

Recently, some authors have argued that income, mobility and social justice affect individual decisions in general and attitudes towards redistribution particularly through the impact they have on subjective well-being of individuals. Intuitively, the concerns that they have as income, social mobility and social justice are reflected in its policies and decisions can lead to demand "compensatory" redistribution. Thus, this work based on the hypothesis that a thorough review of the determinants of redistributive preferences necessarily requires studying the factors ...