Is Capitalism Holding Back Social Mobility? (Your Radical Questions with Joe Seddon)

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0:37Amol Rajan:Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where I put your questions to one of our very radical guests. This is, remember, if you're listening to this episode or one of these bonus episodes for the first time, this is your chance to really engage and connect directly with the super smart, super clever people that we have on this podcast and to ask them about their ideas for the future. Today, we are joined by a tech entrepreneur who is trying to tackle the issues that hold people back in terms of fulfilling their potential and hold this country back in terms of social mobility. We've just had a terrific conversation in our main episode.

1:13Amol Rajan:He's now ready to take your questions, and I cannot recommend that main episode, which we released last Thursday, strongly enough. We are sat here in the Radical Studio with Joe Seddon, founder of the i would say mission driven tech platform social enterprise would you say joe

1:29Joe Seddon:yeah exactly because we're trying to transform sociability by building technology and i personally think that tech even though it's associated usually with sort of no big glass offices and apps that mainly benefit the rich can be something that democratizes access to opportunity so i don't have any kind of worries about labeling ourselves as a tech startup despite the kind of typical

1:52Amol Rajan:things that's associated the text up is called zero gravity by the way our first question is from Vanessa I am a product of social mobility myself having been born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent before studying at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University and then having a career for a number of years in the city before very recently taking time out to focus on the needs of my eldest child. And so my question for Joe is, does social mobility take people away from their roots and communities to feed a capitalist machine that does not pay much attention to where they came from and the people that brought them up or the people that stay?

2:37Amol Rajan:Wow, Vanessa, thank you so much. It's a classic dilemma you must face, Joe. Do you change the system or do you help the individual navigate the current system? You know, and so the specific question is, does social mobility take people away from their roots and communities to feed a capitalist machine that does not pay much attention to where they came from?

2:57Joe Seddon:Well, the first thing I'd say is that the system that people talk about is actually just human beings across a country making decisions day to day. So it really does matter who are the people who are in these top jobs, whether it's in politics, the media, banking, or law. So even though there's a conceptual distinction in terms of the day-to-day reality if you want to change the system you've got to change the people and that's why i think who actually gets into these top jobs even though it might seem like a sort of a fetish sort of thing just to look at the rags to riches stories rather than to look at sort of what people might call shorter range social ability which is just taking people slightly up the socio-economic ladder the reason i think it's so important is because it shapes the system moving forward so conceptually different but I think highly, highly interrelated.

3:45Amol Rajan:Because there are people, I mean, it sounds like Vanessa is not a huge fan of capitalism, which we should get to, but there is also, though I don't want to project if that's not true, Vanessa, and sorry if I misrepresent you, but one of the big arguments within, if you like, policy discussions about social mobility is, you know, some people say that people are just too focused on elite entry. This rags to riches, you know, the dustman who becomes the duke is not what social mobility is for most people. For most people, it's making incremental changes in the middle. You know, your parents stack shelves at Iceland, you now run the local Iceland.

4:19Amol Rajan:That's real social mobility. It's more achievable. It's more real. It's more likely to happen. And therefore, we should focus on that rather than getting from the bottom to the top. But you say getting to the top does matter, A, because it's people's aspiration, and B, because who's at the top shapes society.

4:36Joe Seddon:A hundred percent. It really matters in terms of the people making decisions. but also like if all we focused on was just short distance social ability like what a depressing world that would be to live in like every single person i believe has some form of unique talent where if it's able to be fully realized they can make a game-changing impact on society and like that might not always be in academia it might not always be a knowledge job but i believe everybody has something inside them and we should be trying as a society to fully unlock that we shouldn't just be focused on making incremental changes so i'm with you insofar as like we shouldn't fetishize highly selective universities we shouldn't exclusively fetishize knowledge jobs but what we should fetishize is actually making people the best person they can be can i just

5:25Amol Rajan:ask you to address vanessa's point about the capitalist machine do you think that capitalism is inherently anti-social mobility no i think you've got these twin forces which we spoke about

5:36Joe Seddon:a little bit in the episode which is you've got one part of capitalism which is the kind of human nature of the individuals within it who want to accumulate wealth for themselves and their children and that is a kind of negative force for social mobility that tries to sort of maintain the social order but then you also have the other part of capitalism which is like the creative destruction which is the entrepreneurial activities that people are pioneering every day to try and make a change in society and that is a positive force for social mobility because in many ways it challenges the established economic order so i think capitalism isn't inherently bad for social ability but you do have those twin forces what i would say is that the former force the people they're focusing just on accumulating wealth and passing that on to the kids has been the one which i'd say has been predominant over the past 30 years and we need to get back into a world in which the latter force of that creative destruction entrepreneurialism is the key one and that's why the new era we're stepping into with AI is both exciting and daunting because I believe like it's all there on the table to be taken like we can find a way to make AI work for working class people and be that force of creative destruction but I could also see a different world in which AI is used by the already rich the already elite to sort of cement their place in society and we have to

6:53Amol Rajan:make sure that it's not the case have a look at the stock market if you doubt that Vanessa thank you so much for a brilliant question I really appreciate it and by the way if I may say huge Congratulations on the life journey that you describe. Our next question is from Vinay. This is another voice note from Vinay in Manchester. Do you think social mobility is about climbing the ladder or just being allowed into the building in the first place? And the subsequent question is when we talk about moving up, who's in charge of the elevator and who decides when it's out of order? Vinay, thank you very much indeed.

7:27Amol Rajan:Indeed, a lot of metaphors there and images doing some work. So to split it in two, is it about climbing the ladder or just being allowed into the building in the first place?

7:37Joe Seddon:It's much easier to climb the ladder if the people who built the ladder thought about people like you climbing it. And that's why I think employers, universities in particular, really need to look hard about how they conceptualise talent and merit. I don't believe that employers and universities are inherently discriminatory. I don't believe that a university admissions officer at Oxford or Cambridge University sits in their room and deliberately chooses private school students over smart students from working class backgrounds. A lot of these issues are very implicit and almost unconscious built into the system in terms of how people conceptualize talent and merit now we spoke a little bit on the episode about how accent plays into that and if you have a bit of a regional accent people might associate you as being dumb or silly or or naive and and that that is not necessarily something that is deliberate discrimination that is something that is a kind of implicit wrong assumption about what talent and merit looks like so it's much easier to climb the ladder if the people making decisions in the organizations get how the ladder should be built but what i would say is the easiest way to do that is get working class people to the top an organization that has a ceo from working class background or even just hiring managers who come from the same place as you are going to be far better at recognizing these implicit assumptions than a hiring team exclusively made up of people

9:07Amol Rajan:from affluent backgrounds then i think that answers the second half of the question which is when we talk about moving up in social mobility, who's in charge of the elevator? Who decides when it's out of order? I'm not going to follow you all the way to the out of the order, out of order kind of analogy, but who's in charge of the elevator matters. And I think Joe's saying very clearly that there would be benefits to be reaped if the people in charge were often from a working class background as well. You might get real diversity as opposed to surface level diversity. Vinay, thank you very much indeed for that question.

9:36Amol Rajan:I hope you're satisfied by the answer. Here's another one from Lindsay. Hi, Amel. My name is Lindsay Smith and my question is, how do we encourage the confidence or even audacity to see themselves as socially mobile? Brilliant question. Brilliant question. My favourite question, partly because it was a, should I say this? Shall I say this? Yeah, I'll say it because one of the ones that my wife asked me on our first date actually, which I found myself asking you in the main episode, Joe, take that how you will, is where does confidence come from?

10:04Joe Seddon:this is going to sound awfully cliche but confidence is a muscle that you build over time rather than something that you can sort of directly teach in a lecture hall what i don't like is people offering sort of confidence lessons or audacity lessons or how to change your accent lessons it's impossible to change any of these things in an hour-long seminar because in many ways by trying to teach it directly all you're doing is sort of bringing to life that the issue is there in the first place if you try and teach someone to change their accent they're constantly going to be double guessing how they speak if you try and make someone more confident they're going to be sat here nervous in the podcast studio sort of thinking about their body language and how they come across in a better better way the only way you build confidence is by over time allowing people to get in that flywheel of taking actions and seeing those actions have positive results so i won't be trying to give people artificial lessons i'd be breaking down the journeys for them into the sort of bite-sized steps and then when they're actually able to achieve those steps and i'm really celebrating that and show like wow look what you've been able to to do and the confidence will naturally accumulate over time and i think to go back to my own journey i think one of the reasons why so many of these oxbridge graduates that come out so polished and so confident is that getting into oxbridge is almost like the ultimate vote of confidence now it tells you that you're in the sort of academic intellectual elite in the country and suddenly hanging out with all these people who are like you and these world leaders come and they sort of speak to you as if you're on a peer level like that is naturally something that leads you to kind of imbibe the sort of confidence drug every single day so it's got to be something which is organic and natural it can't be something that's taught in a seminar

11:47Amol Rajan:it is this kind of elixir that all crave but few possess you know everyone everyone wants a bit of is I think you can persuade people of something which is true, which they don't give enough thought to, which is that they do actually have agency in their lives. And I'm not saying, you know, obviously if you grew up in some of the poorest parts of Britain, you have less agency. But there's a brilliant, brilliant pollster called James Kanagasurium, who we used to have on the Today podcast. He's the guy who came up with the idea of the Red Wall. And he wrote this long, he's got a sub-stat called the Political Whiteboard.

12:21Amol Rajan:And he wrote this long, pretty influential sub-stat poster just before Christmas, saying that one of, he'd done a huge amount of research and one of the biggest ideas in British politics and indeed maybe Western politics is this idea of agency. People feel they don't have much agency over their lives. They're not able to affect their circumstances, which is one reason they might vote for high agency people like Donald Trump because in the parlance they get stuff done. Whatever you think about Trump's politics, he's somebody who says, I'm going to do X and then does it. And that sort of, it's almost like you kind of outsource this agency to a politician because they're able to, whether he or she are able to do things you don't have.

12:57Amol Rajan:And one thing that I found useful saying to people from poorer backgrounds is, albeit maybe, you know, not the poorest backgrounds, but people who are able to affect their lives, you do have agency. You can go out in the world and be somebody.

13:08Joe Seddon:Looking at it in the UK context as well, the referendum in 2016 was in many ways a kind of working class rebellion against the status quo. The biggest predictor of people's voting patterns in the referendum them was their level of education attainment and the the catchphrase of the vote leave campaign was take back control absolute genius in terms of landing the idea of agency that it is possible to change the economic and political status quo that if you have the right ideas and you're able to execute it so i think putting agency at the absolute heart of social ability has to be the case which is why we've got to try and find a way to surface these problems but not try and create this almost culture of victimhood or victimization because even though the problems are real and people are right to be angry about them it's not necessarily a productive thing for people to have that mindset in their own individual lives.

14:04Amol Rajan:Lindsay thank you so much for that question it's wonderful to hear from you I think you got in touch with me on Instagram so it's very nice to be connected with you there we've got another voice note here from Dave.

14:15Joe Seddon:Hi I'm Alinjo, Dave here from Stafford. I'm a hospice leader and like most charities we're massively reliant on volunteers but volunteer capacity hasn't fully bounced back since Covid at the same time demand for services has risen. Could charities like hospices become talent accelerators for young people? We can offer short skills-based projects that produce real outputs, build a varied portfolio and are accredited in a way that universities and employers actually recognise. If we can and that's obviously such a big win-win, why isn't this already mainstream? And what do you think are the biggest blockers?

14:48Amol Rajan:Dave, what a fantastic question. Do you know, Dave, as I was listening to you, I hadn't seen that question before, actually. Sometimes too. As I was listening, I kind of got to the end of the question before you did. And I was thinking, this is so obvious. If it's such a big win-win, why isn't it already happening? Why isn't it mainstream? So Dave's question, Joe, is could charities like hospices become talent accelerators for young people? They can offer short skills based projects that produce real outputs build a varied portfolio and are accredited in a way that universities and employers actually recognize 100 i'm very passionate about how to kind of

15:20Joe Seddon:unlock talent in the voluntary space because the platform i started zero gravity you know we've hosted over a million one-to-one mentoring sessions on our platform now between school students and then university undergraduate postgraduate and career mentors and what i've sort of learned through that process is that even amongst younger generations who people sometimes look at and say these people don't care as much about charity or volunteering there still is that kind of altruistic strain within them which is they want to do something to give back however the sort of traditional models of volunteering i think often just don't work for them their young people are kind of time strains if they're at university or in the first job they're used to They're engaging with things digitally.

16:04Joe Seddon:They want these kind of like micro volunteering experiences, not necessarily something where they have to be at a certain place at a certain time. So I would encourage anyone in the charity sector who really wants to make use of a sort of broader swathe of talent in their work to think about how do you make volunteering work for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, not just make volunteering work for the sort of baby boomer generation who are kind of used to what I've called the classic model of volunteering, which has been in a certain place at a certain time.

16:31Amol Rajan:In our main episode released last Thursday, you talked about how in America there's been this sharp rise in the pay for electricians. And that's partly owing to the demand for them because of data centers that these AI giants are building. We've got an aging population and we've got, you know, I think I can say impartially a social care situation. And there's this huge question about how do you get the status of carers to be higher? But during the pandemic, we all stepped out on a Thursday and gave this nice round of applause to people working in our health service and our carers. They'd love to get paid more.

17:07Amol Rajan:Is there a world in which, because care is the thing that AI can't do, the status of care, those jobs of the heart as opposed to head or hand, the jobs of the heart haven't elevated, you know, as Dave works in a hospice, those jobs can actually be seen to be routes to social mobility.

17:24Joe Seddon:I think 100%. I think what we're potentially going to see over the next five to ten years is this sort of blue-collar rebellion or the revenge of the blue-collar worker. Or uprising, yeah. Or uprising, where jobs which have historically been maybe looked down upon and poorly paid are actually going to be some of the things that are most protected from AI automation. and what that should mean across the economy, which is as the sort of skills of being an accountant or lawyer become more abundant, but the skills of being a care worker become more scarce, you should see wages rise in those professions.

17:57Joe Seddon:And I would be sort of encouraging government in particular to look at what more we can do to support the British population to learn some of these skills that we need. I think too often, historically, we've tried to pull the lever of immigration to solve some of these supply shortages in certain sectors. We need to be thinking about that far more carefully when it comes to industries like care. And also think about the financial incentives as well. I don't know as much about the care sector, but when looking at teaching, for instance, the teaching is a really difficult job. You have to be in a classroom with 30 pesky kids every day.

18:29Joe Seddon:There's a huge amount of administrative work. There's a huge emotional burden and toil. And teachers aren't paid very much, especially outside London. and one reason for that is because the pension system for teachers for instance is incredibly lucrative and that takes away a lot of the money that goes directly into people's salary you know the the minimum employer contribution for a pension in the private sector is three percent but if you're in a teacher's pension scheme you're getting 29 and that's taking away money that could go directly into the salaries of a lot of teachers so i would be encouraging government to also think carefully about how do we move financial incentives around to make some of these jobs better paid rather than just sort of stuffing a lot of money into long-term incentives that don't make a difference to people's lives until they get into their 60s can i just finally

19:15Amol Rajan:abuse my proximity to this microphone to ask you a related question we've had lots lots of questions which we're not going to get to because you probably don't have time and questions about things like accents which by the way we addressed in the main episode if anyone's interested in that um i just want to ask a question which is a shameless you know i'm a 42 year old trying to understand the lives of 28 year olds type question, which is, I see these numbers around the number of young people, your generation, who are off work long term and moving into welfare. And I feel so sad, because, you know, every one of those lives, you know, which this is very strong evidence that if you move into welfare, you might never come off welfare, whether you call it social security, benefits, whatever you want to call it.

19:55Amol Rajan:And there's very, very sharp rises in anxiety and depression. And you think for every single person, you could move from the column of welfare back into the column for work. You could transform a life and then you make savings that compound over the years. Why is there this huge seeming crisis with so many young people unable to work or as some people would put it, unwilling?

20:18Joe Seddon:We've got over almost a million young people now who are not in education, employment or training. It's a huge, huge number of young people. I think what's most concerning is when you look at the employment rate of people coming out of school and university, it's been contracting over the past 10 to 15 years. And the big sort of political flashpoint of this has been the increase of the number of young people on disability benefits. I'd say part of this is just really bad policy design. I think Fraser Nelson's done some fantastic work really bringing this to life, which is over the past 15 years, governments have cut back quite drastically on support for the unemployed.

20:59Amol Rajan:Things like one-to-one meetings, whereas now you might be, don't want to misrepresent it, but now you can do it over the phone and people who are on the other end of the phone often get incentivized to get people signed up. Exactly.

21:09Joe Seddon:So we've been actually really frugal on how much support we provide to people who are unemployed to get them into work. but disability benefits that have been protected by subsequent governments and that has created this perverse incentive amongst a lot of people which is if they're really struggling to get a job which is a naturally anxiety inducing event and something that can lead you to to feel depressed there's almost a perverse incentive for people to get onto disability benefits now rather than the sort of beyond unemployment support so i think there's a policy design issue here but then i think more widely than that we need to like really look at the the wider system we have around work in the in the uk like we don't put anywhere near enough um government support into things like trying to provide skills training like looking at the sort of de-industrialization of the economy from the sort of 50s onwards all of those people who used to be dockers or working in factories like where were the big sort of skills programs to retrain those people um for the sort of jobs of the future they just weren't there and they're still not there today and the reason that concerns me is we are about to enter this new world of AI where there is going to be a lot of structural unemployment there's going to be a lot of need for re-skilling and I'm really worried we're about to make the same mistake again that we made you know 70 years ago of not investing heavily in skills based retraining for people we've got to do that to cure this problem.

22:33Amol Rajan:Joe it's such a privilege talking to you you know I'm someone who when I became aware of the work that Zero Gravity did I took a great interest in what you do and I knew that we'd get on. But maybe it's because you're the stereotypical gruff, blunt Yorkshireman. It tells it like it is. I find the clarity with which you've spoken absolutely riveting. And I know our listeners will as well. So thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Massively, massively appreciate it. And by the way, thank you for all your fantastic questions for Joe. We're going to be back with another episode of Radical on Thursday.

23:03Amol Rajan:For now, thank you so much for your time and for listening. And we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

23:19Amol Rajan:I'm Noel Titheridge and for BBC Radio 4 from Shadow World this is Impulsive what happens when someone's personality changes completely it was completely out of character never done it before, never done it since and it's because of a prescription drug I asked myself, why would you do such a thing? What were you thinking? I've been uncovering the shocking side effects linked to medications called dopamine agonists. For BBC Radio 4, from Shadow World, this is Impulsive. Subscribe to Shadow World Impulsive now on BBC Sounds.