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View all search resultsThe economics of social mobility: Capability and cost of climbing the ladder
Mobility rests on two conditions, both necessary and neither sufficient alone. Individuals must possess the capability to climb, and the cost of climbing must be low enough for that capability to be exercised.
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Students drink milk as they eat lunch on Jan 6, 2025, the first day of the free nutritious meal program, at SMPN 12 Cimahi state junior high school in Cimahi, West Java. (AFP/Timur Matahari)
P
resident Prabowo Subianto has placed the gap between the rich and the poor at the center of his economic agenda. The concern is legitimate and overdue. But an instinct to narrow inequality is only as good as the instruments chosen to act on it — and two of the administration's flagship programs, the free nutritious meals program and the Red and White cooperatives, risk widening the very gap they are meant to close.
The reason lies in how we frame the problem. Much of the inequality debate is conducted in the language of distribution — who receives a transfer, who pays for it and how much redistribution an economy can bear.
These matters concern how the pie is sliced after it has been baked, not a prior question: what determines whether someone born on a low rung of the ladder can ever reach a higher one?
That is the question of social mobility. Redistribution treats the symptom; mobility addresses the structure.
Mobility rests on two conditions, both necessary and neither sufficient alone. Individuals must possess the capability to climb, and the cost of climbing must be low enough for that capability to be exercised.
Capability is, at root, human capital — the stock of health, nutrition, knowledge and skill that, as Amartya Sen argued, expands the real freedoms people have to live as they value. It is formed early and deployed late. Stunting is therefore a mobility problem, not only a health one.
This is why the impulse behind the free meal program is sound: child nutrition is a genuine constraint on capability. The trouble is the design, which ignores both who is poor and where the need actually lies.
