 I'm Salvatore Bobona, and today's lecture is Social Policy Tools for Fighting Social Exclusion. Social exclusion exists and has negative effects in every society. African and Native Americans, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, and sexual minorities the world over are just some examples of socially excluded populations. But people are also socially excluded in less visible ways through income, education, language, appearance, even behavior. We can't eliminate social exclusion, but we can reduce its prevalence through good social policy. Social exclusion is, quote, exclusion from the prevailing social system, typically as a result of poverty or the fact of being longing to a minority social group, and that's from the OED. Minority group exclusion can be highly visible and is often the focus of public education and awareness campaigns. We learn not to discriminate against people on the basis of race and ethnicity, on their sexual minority status, on their gender. But other kinds of social exclusion can be harder to see and measure, but are no less powerful in their effects on people. Lack of income and wealth, often you can't see it, but nonetheless it has a massive impact on people's ability to integrate in society. The inability to speak in polite, standard language, it's not something that's easy to measure on a census form or easy to identify across the whole population. But when you meet somebody who doesn't speak the language in a standard polite way, you certainly notice immediately and you're much more likely to exclude that person from friendship, from job opportunities as a tenant. It's not a person you want necessarily in your life. And finally, lack of knowledge about how to use financial and educational systems. It may sound obvious in the internet era that everybody knows how to manage a bank account, how to manage a credit card, how to get into a university, how to pay for a university, but it's not so obvious for people who don't have that knowledge. And for people who come from families where maybe no one has ever had a credit card or no one's ever had a mortgage, nobody has ever gone to a university that handicapped against such people. And here, to some extent, I include myself as an example, a handicap is really profound and, again, very difficult to capture on a social survey. The solution is universal social policies. Universal policies that redress that second kind of social exclusion also tend to reduce the more visible social exclusion that is usually the focus of our attention. So, for example, free public education helps reduce the social exclusion of someone who doesn't speak proper language by giving them 12 or 16 years of education in using proper language. So, no matter what family you come from, everybody is exposed to how to speak standard proper language. But free public education also tends to reduce the gap between majority and minority populations or between men and women. Higher minimum wages, all the same things apply. Workplace regulation, consumer protection, consumer protection in the United States, for example, is often focused on protecting targeted minority groups like African Americans, yet everybody benefits from better consumer protection laws. Public parks make it possible for everybody to learn to play golf, everybody to learn to swim, everybody to be part of the activities undertaken by richer people in society. And maybe the greatest level of all that we often take for granted, public transportation in many cities and many countries, people who have resources are able to get places and people who don't have resources can't or can only do so with much difficulty or by taking a much longer amount of their time to do it. Free, efficient, high volume, high frequency public transportation is one of the great levelers of society. These universal social policies often reduce both the extent of inequality in society and also the salience of inequality for social exclusion. So the extent of inequality we all know about, that's the difference in resources between bottom and top. People have different incomes, some people inherit wealth while other people don't. And keep in mind some people inherit houses, which is a lot of wealth when other people have to buy their own from scratch. The difference in educational qualifications achieved by people is a massive inequality in society. The degree of social mobility between generations, in some societies it's very easy to get ahead, in some societies it's very difficult to get ahead if you start at the bottom of the ladder. These differences in inequality tend to reinforce social exclusion. Like universal social policies tend to reduce the extent of inequality in effect by giving everybody the same resources so that people's initial position or people's place in society just doesn't matter as much. If there's a public golf course that's inexpensive to use, everybody can play golf, not just the rich. However, universal policies also reduce the salience of inequality, the importance of inequality, the degree to which a given level of inequality leads to social exclusion. So for example, consider the importance of people's jobs for their health care, vacation time, sick leave. In the United States, people's health care, vacations and sick leave are all tied to their unemployment. If you have a professional job with a good company, free free and free. If you work as a casual employee at a low quality company, you get no health care benefits, you get no paid vacation time and you get no paid sick leave. Well, if you have a universal policy for the whole country that assures everybody universal health care, that ensures everybody four weeks of annual vacation time, that gives everybody a mandated two weeks of annual sick leave, if you have those universal social policies, then it doesn't matter what job you have. You can have a good job or a bad job, a good employer or a bad employer, you have the same lived reality of life. Similarly, universal education can reduce the importance of income for people's educational outcomes. If universities are free, if graduate schools are free, then it doesn't matter what background you come from. That starting position no longer matters as much as it did previously. Even more difficult to see, but maybe even more important, is the openness of institutions to people of diverse backgrounds. Many top employers, the highest wage jobs, the most rewarding jobs, only recruit from a narrow slice of the top universities in a country. Well, that closed recruiting process makes it very difficult for people who can't access those universities or who maybe didn't have the social capital to know to access those universities. It makes it very difficult for them to get on the ladder. So when institutions are open, when they have open recruitment procedures, an advertisement in the newspaper or on the newspaper website, instead of recruiting at a university campus, that tends to, again, reduce the salience of inequality. People who are ambitious, talented or hardworking, who may not have the right qualifications, nonetheless at least have an opportunity to break into those institutions. This is especially important in places where universities like in Australia and the UK, where top universities mainly take students from feeder schools, from high schools that they know to be high quality high schools. Well, if that's the case, then obviously the system is reinforcing the effect of inequality rather than reducing the effect of inequality. If instead universities rely on an open testing mechanism to recruit students like the SAT test in the United States, that tends to equalize opportunities across different groups in society. The necessary social policies are well known and well understood, but they can be difficult to implement unless people have a very strong commitment to their societies. Most people want, or most people are selfish. Most people want to keep their own money. Most people don't care much about creating opportunities for others. Now, social exclusion by definition means that those at the top, those who are doing the excluding benefit by monopolizing the best positions in society for themselves and their children. Now, the desire to pass on advantage to your children may seem natural and innocent enough, and we all admire things like family businesses that have been in the family for hundreds of years. This is the Likla Bakery in the confectionary in Warsaw, Poland that has been in the same family for 150 years even throughout the communist period. They were able to maintain their family business and their family dedication to this small business in the heart of Warsaw. And that's really admirable and we all love stories like that of the family business being handed down through the generations. But what if your family business is a major New York investment bank? And maybe what if you're handing down incredibly privileged positions at the top of society's economic and power hierarchy to your children? Well, that's much less socially redeeming. It's something that we have much less respect for, but also it's something that tends to undermine social solidarity. Whenever we see positions at the top of the social hierarchy being monopolized by people in a family over generations, we know that they're not caring to see their children drop down the hierarchy to make room for someone else coming up. Whenever you hear the phrase, someone comes from an old family or a good family, I think it's worth remembering that every family is equally old and many families are good. An old family is used to mean a family that has had money for a long time. And any society where you have old families, meaning the same family has had money for generations, implies that there's very little mobility in that society. Those old families have the ability to monopolize the top positions in society for themselves. Social mobility and the reduction of social exclusion implies not just that people are able to move up the hierarchy, but that others have to move down the hierarchy to make way for them. We can't all be at the top of the hierarchy and when we reduce social exclusion, we dismantle the hierarchy. And while that's very attractive for many people at the bottom of society, that's very threatening to many people at the top of society. Key takeaways. Social exclusion is exclusion from the prevailing social system, typically as a result of poverty or the fact of belonging to a minority social group. And that definition is from the Oxford English Dictionary. Social exclusion is best addressed via universal social policies that benefit everyone in a society. These universal policies can be used to reduce both the extent of inequality and the salience of inequality for people's lives in a society, thereby leveling people's opportunities and outcomes across groups. Thank you for listening. I'm Salvatore Bubonis. You can find out more about me at my website, SalvatoreBubbonis.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asia newsletter.