Does social mobility make up for class inequality?
Faced with the massive differences between classes under capitalism we highlighted in the last section, many supporters of capitalism still deny the obvious. They do so by confusing a caste system with a class system. In a caste system, those born into it stay in it all their lives. In a class system, the membership of classes can and does change over time. Therefore, it is claimed, what is important is not the existence of classes but of social mobility (usually reflected in income mobility). According to this argument, if there is a high level of social/income mobility then the degree of inequality in any given year is unimportant. This is because the redistribution of income over a person’s life time would be very even. Thus the inequalities of income and wealth of capitalism does not matter as capitalism has high social mobility. Milton Friedman puts the argument in this way: “Consider two societies that have the same distribution of annual income. In one there is a great mobility
