Life is a game of chance. Or that’s what I tell myself when I’m losing at my newest hobby, poker. Of course it’s a different story when I win the pot: then I chalk it up to skill. So it was crushing to hear an experienced player’s take when I fessed up to the fact I seem to do worse when I’m trying to play well. “That’s because no strategy is better than a bad strategy: it makes you harder to predict than a very basic game plan.” That’s me told.
This is partly what it is to be human. We like to attribute our successes to effort and talent, but when we fail it’s more comforting to blame bad luck. The more successful someone is, the more marked this tendency becomes and it has a knock-on impact on how we understand the world more generally.
Research published last week by the Fairness Foundation – whose advisory board I sit on – highlights that most people believe we live in a meritocracy, in which hard work is a much stronger determinant of outcomes in life than luck. The reality is very different: some estimates are that parental income alone explains around 40% of an individual’s earnings; add in other circumstantial factors and that figure is probably much higher.
This belief that success is generally associated with hard work may explain why, far from disliking the wealthy, people tend to admire them, unless they see their wealth as unearned. What’s interesting is that when asked about their own lives, many more people say that luck has had a net negative impact on their lives than a net positive one; perhaps a reflection of how pessimistic people are feeling in 2024.
These are important insights for campaigners and politicians who want to build public support for policies that address social and economic inequalities. But there is more: in recent years, researchers have tried to develop a deeper understanding of how people think about the world – and how these patterns of thinking frame their political views. The Frameworks Institute has embarked on a new project to track people’s mindsets and how they shift. Early findings suggest that, like in the US, individualist mindsets, which attribute success to individual effort, dominate over “structuralist” mindsets, which recognise the importance of contextual factors such as parental resources and education, but that Brits are much less polarised than Americans, with less variation across the political spectrum.
The way we think about one issue – like immigration – can relate to how we think about other, seemingly unrelated issues – like health outcomes. Critically, it’s not one or the other: most of us have individualist and structuralist aspects to our understanding of the world. This echoes research in other areas, for example on race, which finds that the same individual can simultaneously deploy ways of thinking that are very helpful to combating racism and ways of thinking that help prejudice bed in; sorting people into “good” and “problematic” categories is far too simplistic an exercise.
So far, so theoretical, but these sorts of pointers really underscore the harm politicians can do through the way they talk about issues. One well-founded critique of the last Labour government is that, while it did a lot of good things to reduce inequality – redistributing cash to poor families with children through tax credits, introducing targeted early years support for parents and children living in low-income areas that we now know worked incredibly effectively in boosting those children’s education outcomes – it didn’t invest energy in making the case to voters. This made it easier for the Conservatives to roll back.
The reality is worse than that. While Tony Blair did sometimes reference the structural drivers of societal problems – “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” – from benefit claimants to asylum seekers, there was a strong Labour narrative about some deeply unfortunate people being lazy, or trying to cheat the system, reinforcing the idea that people suffer disadvantage overwhelmingly as a result of their own failings. These efforts to make Labour look tough will have bedded in people’s natural tendencies to cleave to individualist mindsets, with spillover effects for other domains like housing and health. This is a tough challenge for a future Labour government: not just how to do the things like Sure Start, which require urgent upfront investment at a time when money is tight, but how to make the case for them. Governments on the left face multiple challenges in doing so: the individualist mindset comes more naturally to many of us in the first place, and it’s much easier for the right to shore up through powerful rags-to-riches stories.
There are traps for the left at the other extreme too. One is thinking that hitting the top 1% will be popular simply because most people don’t fall into that category. Jeremy Corbyn’s “for the many, not the few” 2019 slogan bombed because the public aren’t generally anti-wealthy unless there is a specific reason, as with bankers after the financial crisis.
Another is to simply bang on about how rigged the world is, to the extent that it implies there’s no role for individual agency; not only does this not shift thinking, but risks making people more fatalistic about the world, as well as paternalistically portraying some groups as nothing more than victims. It’s also a harmful message, given that research shows that an internal locus of control – a belief that you have the power to affect your own life – is associated with better health outcomes.
There could be a sweet spot for a Keir Starmer government if Labour politicians can find ways of tapping into the structural worldviews many of us can access, but that are so often subservient to individualist ways of thinking. One question will always overhang this, though: to what extent should politicians expend energy on trying to shift the way we think rather than responding to existing patterns of thinking, as Labour did under Blair?
The answer, for Starmer, may ultimately lie in the fact that the economy isn’t buoyant and there aren’t the tax revenues that would allow Labour to tackle inequality on the quiet. That will mean he will need to try harder than his predecessors to bring the public onside.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
