Deep Opportunity
What is deep opportunity?
A society of shallow opportunity provides a decent level of education for all and ensures that no one has to overcome overt discrimination or bias, but does not tackle underlying systemic barriers to maximising their potential, such as growing up in poverty, in poor housing or in poor health.
A society of deep opportunity provides a decent level of education for all and ensures that no one has to overcome overt discrimination or bias, but also ensures that no one faces underlying systemic barriers to maximising their potential, as everyone has access to the ‘fair necessities’.
What are the barriers to deep opportunity?
As a society, we have some way to go before we even achieve shallow opportunity in the UK, as many people still face bias and discrimination, and not everyone has the benefit of a good education throughout their childhood and adolescence. But we have even further to go before we achieve deep opportunity, because of the increasing severity and range of underlying structural barriers.
These barriers in turn have deeper structural causes, such as inadequate social security, a dysfunctional labour market and housing system, crumbling public services and unequal access to justice. Each of these are interwoven with inequalities of class, race, gender, region, disability and so on.
But we are focusing on three really deep structural causes of these barriers to opportunity, which do not get enough attention in the debate about how to promote opportunity:
- Wealth inequality. Our economy is structured so that wealth inequality runs rampant - and it will get much worse over the coming decades. Wealth inequality entrenches advantage, reduces the role of merit as opposed to luck, exacerbates poverty, forces up house prices, undermines health outcomes, damages social cohesion and trust, and distorts our democracy.
- Our tax system. To tackle the barriers to deep opportunity (poverty, poor housing, poor health), we need to invest in public services, social housing and social security, and better regulate housing and employment. But our unfair and ineffective tax system fails to tax wealth properly, has plenty of unnecessary reliefs and loopholes, and doesn’t raise enough revenue.
- Our political system. Our political system is structurally skewed towards short term interests and rewards. And our system is too vulnerable to influence from entrenched interests, including the very wealthy. None of this is helped by a media that is largely owned by oligarchs. This leads to policies that further entrench wealth inequality, and blocks reform.
