Welfare-state programs, not markets, produced extreme social mobility in the UK

Evidence

Today I am a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere. What made it possible for me to become the man I am today is the very thing now blamed for creating the crisis itself: the state, more specifically, the so-called runaway, bloated, paternalist, out-of-control, welfare state. This claim doesn’t pass the sniff test. Because of the British welfare state, threadbare though it is in comparison to its more affluent European cousins, I was never hungry. My grandmother’s pension plus free school meals took care of that. I never lacked shelter because of social housing. The schools I attended were free and actually acted as ladders of mobility for those randomly given the skills in the genetic lottery of life to climb them. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 18

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the reader’s core focus on austerity critique — welfare state as mobility engine, the causal claim austerity theory inverts. — connects to: Welfare-state cuts halt the intergenerational mobility they once enabled — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 19; The mid-twentieth-century welfare state extended middle-class access to the previously excluded — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1740; British leaders justified welfare programs as business investments in labor — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1656 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: A foundational, personal counterexample to the framing that the welfare state caused crisis — the biographical-experience-inverts-ideology move is worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Welfare-state cuts halt the intergenerational mobility they once enabled #expands (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 19
• New Liberalism directly produced Britain’s pensions, insurance, and welfare state #qualifies (0.75) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 314
• The mid-twentieth-century welfare state extended middle-class access to the previously excluded #corroborates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1740
• British leaders justified welfare programs as business investments in labor #corroborates (0.70) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1656