Healthy Living

The Good Society: Social Justice And Equality Of Opportunity

What are the elements that define a “good society”? Is the concept of social justice the same for everyone, or does it depend on our perceptions?

In general terms, we believe that a good society offers opportunities for development and prosperity for its members: a society in which the weight of inheritance has a minimal influence on social mobility, and there is an equitable distribution of wealth, access to health and education services and decent jobs. In this society, gaps of all kinds would be reduced to their minimum expression and we would all have the possibility of achieving our goals and seeing our aspirations become tangible realities.

The conventional view tells us that a good society results in high rates of social mobility; however, the research on mobility through surnames presented in Gregory Clark’s book The Sun Doesn’t Rise for Everyone tells us a story that does not fit with the conventional view. Societies in some countries have been able to significantly reduce the gaps in health, education, income and work of their citizens despite being subject to a low rate of social mobility. In contrast, in other countries with similar rates of mobility, the inequalities are much higher than desired.

The above leads Clark to consider the correlation between social mobility and a good society by calculating the results of the former in the event of reducing inequalities in the latter, reaching the conclusion that low mobility rates and the considerable weight of inheritance are not necessarily indicators of an unjust society in which people’s talents are wasted.

This reality tells us that the emphasis should be placed on public policies aimed at reducing inequalities, but these policies depend largely on the levels of tolerance or aversion that people have towards the conditions of inequality in their environments. This topic is addressed in the working document Perceptions of Inequality and Social Mobility, published in 2020 by the CEEY, which analyses the effect that perception has on people’s preferences regarding the mechanisms that should be implemented to balance the socioeconomic scale through public redistribution policies.

Therefore, if the actions we take with respect to building a good society are linked—among other factors—to our convictions and our points of view about the conditions of inequality and social mobility that we observe, the dissemination of truthful information and relevant education is fundamental to cementing the processes of social justice that we require.