6

The invisible foot: why inequality increases impact

Inequality and environmental impact go hand in hand, but what is the causal mechanism? Is it human nature always to want more? Is it a matter of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’? This chapter introduces the idea that our excess consumption is largely forced on us by ‘positional’ forces that are beyond our individual control, unleashed by policies that prioritize competition over community.

Whether or not the market has an ‘invisible hand’, as the 18th-century economist Adam Smith maintained, today’s market economies certainly contain an ‘invisible foot’: inequality, which bears down on all people of all classes, forcing them into choices that often seem irrational.

Ignoring inequality’s role leaves an explanatory void, which is then filled by psychological and moralistic judgements. Environmental activists often argue that the climate crisis is caused by a failure of people in general to ‘wake up’ to the problem, and that anyone, no matter how poor, can live in a sustainable manner if they really put their minds to it.¹ Or people argue that human nature itself is the problem (so draconian solutions are needed, or we are simply doomed).

The Victorian economist William Stanley Jevons (mentioned in the last chapter) thought that people had an inexorable tendency to consume more when more was available. In 1880, he wrote:

There is no end nor limit to the number of various things which a rich man will like to have, if he can get them. He who has got one good house begins to wish for another: he likes to have one house in town, another in the country. Some dukes and other very rich people have four, five, or more houses. From these observations we learn that there can never be, among civilized nations, so much wealth, that people would cease to wish for any more. However much we manage to produce, there are still many other things which we want to acquire.²

Few mainstream economists challenged this view. But we now know that rich people’s acquisitiveness is not as strong everywhere, at all times. For example, in Britain and the US in the 1950s and 1960s, top executives were content with much more modest salaries and lifestyles than those they sought, with increasing success, in the 1980s and beyond. Their mushrooming salaries had nothing to do with radically increased productivity – the reverse if anything. Instead, as Thomas Piketty has shown, their salaries soared purely because of a radical transformation in the tax structure – from the near-confiscatory rates that had been introduced during the Second World War (98 per cent for highest earners in the UK in 1941-52 and 1974-78) to something approaching a flat tax rate of 30-40 per cent, after the rightwing shift of the 1980s.³

Before the 1970s, big increases were fairly pointless, because most of the extra income would go in tax. Afterwards, there was lots for top executives to go for, and they went for it (no doubt reassuring themselves that if they didn’t, others would). Their ‘human nature’ changed with the tax regime, and with the intellectual climate that developed around it. A similar situation prevailed when Jevons was writing: inequality within advanced European economies was riding at extremely high levels (similar to the global level today) and there were almost no constraints on individual wealth accumulation (as Piketty points out, this is also the case nowadays at the global level).

Another explanation blames humanity’s weakness for ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Adam Smith described an obsession with ‘frills and trinkets’; anthropologists speak of ‘status goods’: things you buy to feel good about yourself, and avoid feelings of shame. In his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class the US economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term ‘emulative consumption’, describing how, in an unequal world, ‘everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of the ability to pay’. In 2008 Le Monde’s environmental editor, Hervé Kempf, applied Veblen’s analysis to the environmental crisis in his book How the Rich are Destroying the Earth. Kempf showed that the rich not only spur each other on in their amazing feats of overconsumption, but also transform consumption all the way down the social pecking-order. He also draws links between rising inequality and state violence and the erosion of democratic rights via interlinked processes: the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a rich elite, and the globalization, since the fall of the Soviet Union, of a culture that promotes individualistic aggression and consumption. His analysis is fact-filled and persuasive (the original French edition from 2007 sold over a million copies). His hopes are pinned on a reborn European Left ‘unifying the causes of inequality and ecology’.

Emulation is a powerful force, but it is nothing like the whole story. This chapter and the next one seek to ‘de-psychologize’ the link between economic activity and impact, and show how inequality, in and of itself, makes it difficult or even impossible for people to avoid environmentally and socially destructive choices, irrespective of any moral or intellectual deficits they may or may not have. We find a continuum of compulsion at work, ranging from the family that buys clothes it suspects were made in a sweatshop (because that’s all they can afford, and alternatives are extremely expensive), to the landless people who cut down trees in the Amazonian forests, even though they know exactly what the consequences will be (because, as the Brazilian activist Chico Mendes pointed out, if they didn’t do it, their families would starve⁴), to the chief executive of a British manufacturing company who transfers production to a Special Economic Zone in a poorer country, even though it violates his instincts (because if he didn’t his firm would be out of business).

To be sure, personal morality and courage can overcome all of these things – but only to the same extent that strength of character will get you up Mount Everest.

TECHNOLOGY PLUS INEQUALITY EQUALS MELTDOWN

Much if not all so-called emulative consumption is to a greater or lesser extent enforced – for example because car ownership has become so prevalent that normal life is no longer possible for someone who holds out against it. This kind of coercion is an integral feature of unequal societies because they are unconducive to the sort of collective provision (for example, of public transport) that would make the decision to buy a car or not less important. Expectations are important. The feeling that society is about to become less equal forces people to consider individual solutions that work against the common good. The ethos can change quite suddenly from ‘all hands to the pump’ to ‘every man for himself’.

The economist Fred Hirsch explored this kind of economic activity in a 1977 book called Social Limits to Growth. Like Richard Wilkinson (whose discoveries about health and inequality began at about the same time), Hirsch had noticed a flaw in the story of rising post-War prosperity. Incomes had risen immediately after the War and, at first, so had living standards. But from the early 1960s, while incomes continued to rise, living standards failed to go up at the same rate. More and more of the extra income was being spent on what he called ‘positional goods’: ones whose value is reduced, or which cease to be luxuries and become necessities, when enough other people have them as well.

Positional goods such as cars are, of course, very desirable as well as useful. But it is an overstatement to say that people only buy and use them because they have ‘a love affair with the car’. A recognizable example might be someone who would rather use public transportation, and is ideologically committed to it, but who buys a car. She does so not because she is confused or hypocritical, or has fallen in love with cars, but because it has become impossible to do a week’s shopping, be an adequate parent and do a full-time job otherwise (her work, and the nearest adequate supermarkets, are now several bus-rides away, having relocated to more profitable out-of-town locations on the grounds that ‘everyone has a car these days’; taking a family on holiday or just for a day out on public transportation has become a major challenge for the same reason).

There’s a similar mixture of motivations in computer and mobile-phone ownership – with the element of coercion perhaps more salient. Once enough other people own one, it becomes increasingly hard to do without one. More and more firms and public services assume that you have access to the internet. Jobs are advertised and often must be applied for online, so to get a job you often need a computer or access to one.

The element of coercion is most extreme at the bottom of the economic pile. A 2012 report by the mobile-phone operator O2 found that more than a fifth of young people in Britain would rather go without food than without their phone, so vital had it become to preserving quality of life.⁵ In the same year, a World Bank study said that among those earning less than $2.50 a day (known in World Bank jargon as ‘the base of the pyramid’, or ‘BOP’) it is not unusual to spend a quarter of household income on mobile-phone charges. The study found that in Kenya ‘at least 20 per cent of respondents felt it was necessary to make real sacrifices to recharge their mobile credit. In the majority of cases (more than 80 per cent), that meant buying less food, at least once a week.’⁶

‘POSITIONALITY’ AND ‘HUMAN NATURE’

Positionality is a valuable concept for anyone who is interested in making society more fair, because it highlights the fact that the system is not composed entirely of people who believe in it and want it, but perhaps very largely of people who have been dragooned into it and would love to be free of it. This may even be true of some members of the rich elite. Positionality, said Hirsch, turns even a wealthy economy into a ‘frustration machine’.

Hirsch died in mid-career, not long after his book was published. The economist and writer Robert Frank revived the concept in his 2007 book Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class.⁷ Frank’s phrase for this kind of consumption is ‘smart for one, dumb for all’ – but it’s important to recognize that people do not necessarily embark on this kind of consumption because they are dumb, but because they have to.

Positionality affects our behavior deeply, insidiously and inexorably. It makes human societies destructive irrespective of what kind of people we think we are, by ‘tilting the landscape’ so that it becomes extremely difficult to behave in a virtuous way without heroic personal effort. Positional behavior achieves only marginal or no improvement in what one gets out of life, yet it requires a greater and greater expenditure of energy and resources to maintain it. As we will see, this expenditure escalates as more powerful technologies are brought into play. Furthermore, once one is caught up in positional competition there is no way an individual can easily escape from it, unless society as a whole decides to call a halt to the proceedings.

To borrow a signoff that was current in the early days of the World Wide Web: ‘when the avalanche has started, it’s too late for the pebbles to vote’.⁸

Hirsch thought the positional principle applied just to a subset of goods that were intrinsically scarce, but (to take one of his examples) the scarcity of beautiful places in which to live is by no means self-evident. Cities are quite capable of being beautiful, for example. What is more, the reason why so many of them are so ugly is a positional one: they are built by construction firms whose design options are constrained by the practices of their rivals. Once one firm finds a cheaper way of building, others must follow suit, even if the result is a bit less attractive. Should one of them decide to buck the trend and build the kinds of houses people prefer (generally, ones that contain more of the kind of detail and variety produced by human labor⁹) they would either have to cater exclusively for a very wealthy elite, or go bust. It is certainly also true that nasty, grasping developers who despise popular taste play their part – but even they are a positional phenomenon. When a firm’s survival may depend on decisions that go against the common good, having a sociopath at the helm can offer significant competitive advantage, at least in the short term; by the same token, a non-psychopathic chief executive might be a risky choice.

Positionality describes a very wide range of familiar situations where one person’s gain is another’s loss: ‘diminishing returns’ situations; ones where people find they have to run to stand still, push to the front or be left behind; and ‘tragedies of the commons’, in which a common resource goes up for grabs and no individual can change things, or avoid losing out, by refusing to join in the plunder. This kind of activity is often called ‘competitive behavior’ and blamed on human nature. But, often, it goes against our nature. We feel ashamed of these actions and inactions, if we accept personal responsibility for them (as we are constantly encouraged to do), and this is politically disabling.

People who occupy different parts of the wealth spectrum are likely to believe wildly different things, exacerbating the situation. The beliefs found in the highest echelons can be wildest of all – and these people are able to deploy enormous resources (including those of the state) to defend their notions of reality, and exclude, stigmatize and undermine rival ideas. Piketty often refers to the importance of the ‘justificatory systems’ that develop around inequality. These can become more and more bizarre. At the peak of European inequality in the late 19th century, the popular and influential French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu maintained that his country was well on the way to achieving the equality proclaimed in the French Revolution, and that introducing even a mildly progressive tax would stop this desirable development in its tracks.¹⁰ Similarly, in 2015, it seemed a complete mystery to many people that economic policy was still based on an alleged need to cut the incomes of the poor and boost those of the rich still further, supposedly in the interests of general prosperity.

TRAFFIC WAVES AND WHY FASTER IS SLOWER

The concept of positional consumption makes it possible to see the problem of human impact in more broadly scientific terms, as one of many phenomena resulting from energy being poured into a system that cannot absorb it adequately – for example, the ‘bow-wave effect’ known to sailors and naval architects, which negates efforts to drive a ship faster. As the vessel’s speed increases, the wave at the bow gets bigger, requiring a disproportionate increase in energy to overcome its resistance. Beyond a certain point (‘hull-speed’), there is no point driving a vessel harder because its bow-wave weighs as much as the ship itself. You can open the throttle as wide as you like but all you will do is generate heat, carbon dioxide, noise and vibration, and deafen the fish.

‘Traffic waves’ are another example, which most of us now experience from time to time in the form of hold-ups that have no apparent cause. These are like the standing waves that form in rivers – easily appreciated from a traffic helicopter or on a test-track, but completely mysterious to those affected. They explain why it is impossible for a transport system based on private vehicles to achieve anywhere near the efficiency of a centrally organized one (like a railway or, even more, the internet, with its huge throughput of data packages over cables that were once thought incapable of handling so much traffic). They also provide a key to other major problems of liberalized economies, such as boom-bust cycles and speculative bubbles – and, of course, their environmental impacts.

Traffic waves might be blamed on bad or aggressive drivers, whose behavior disrupts the flow of traffic, but an experiment carried out in Japan in 2008 showed that even very good drivers, earnestly trying to co-ordinate their efforts, are prey to the phenomenon. The least fluctuation in the velocity of one vehicle sets up a chain reaction that amplifies the original perturbation until everyone is at a standstill, irrespective of the drivers’ personal qualities. The ‘human nature’ explanation proves, again, to be a red herring. The experiment involved stationing 22 identical cars at equal intervals on a circular test-track, and instructing their drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometers per hour (kph). No matter how hard the drivers tried to maintain distance and speed, the cars always ended up in a slower-moving cluster, which always came to a momentary standstill – which moved backwards, like a wave, against the direction of travel at about 20 kph – the same speed observed on motorways.¹¹

German sociologist and physicist Dirk Helbing has built computer models of traffic waves,¹² and argues that they are part of a much larger category of phenomena: the ‘self-driven, many-particle systems’ that include fluids, flocks and herds of animals, and financial markets, with their analogous tendencies to boom and slump, even in the absence of an actual shortage or glut. Helbing has also studied pedestrian behavior, which contrasts with that of vehicles in its much stronger tendency to self-organization – people spontaneously form themselves into streams in each direction on crowded walkways, so that hold-ups are avoided, except in very extreme and unusual disaster situations.

A speeded-up system composed of self-directed elements consumes more and more energy for less and less benefit (a ‘faster is slower’ effect) and can even lock itself up solid (the phenomenon known as ‘freezing by heating’: very apt considering that it is happening in an economy that has more or less frozen solid, in the sense of meaningful economic activity, while heating its surroundings to a perilous degree).

During the past century, the positional nature of the automobile has provided the leitmotif of a very general positionalizing trend, which has changed the nature and fabric of life. First, the process of suburbanization and urban sprawl, as car ownership increases; then the rearrangement of the economy’s infrastructure with its motorway networks, container ports, and so on, while the liberalization of investment through privatization, marketization and globalization of trade rules has ‘freed up’ other aspects of life to behave in the same way. Computers and electronics have made it possible to intensify and accelerate these processes, and extend them into every area that can be monetized (see Chapter 7).

COMPUTERS AND THE POSITIONAL ECONOMY: OBSOLESCENCE GONE MAD

Obsolescence is like suburbanization in that your environment changes as the result of the actions of others – and obsolescence has burgeoned since the arrival of microelectronic devices, and their incorporation into products.

We associate microprocessors and microchips with computers, yet these contain a mere two per cent of all the chips that are produced. The rest go into appliances of every kind and size.¹³ By 2000, industry journals reported that ‘20 per cent of the cost of a luxury car is now in the electronics’¹⁴ and that ‘The Volvo S70 has not one, but two CAN [Controller Area Network] buses running through it, connecting the microprocessors in the mirrors with those in the doors with those in the transmission. The mirrors talk to the transmission so that they can tilt down and inwards when you put the car in reverse. The radio talks with the antilock brakes so that the volume can go up and down with road speed (the ABS has the most accurate speed information)’.¹⁵

Efficiency, reliability and comfort are improved to varying degrees, but you can’t repair a computerized car or washing machine as easily as a pre-electronics model. Very likely it would not be cost-effective to repair it anyway, because a whole sub-assembly would be needed, costing more than the machine is worth. Many car drivers would like to be able to buy vehicles without electronics (and certain vehicles, like pre-electronics versions of the Toyota Hilux, continue to command premium re-sale prices). But as soon as most manufacturers adopt electronic subsystems, all must do so, for a plethora of reasons: not to do so would mean retaining old and increasingly hard-to-replace productive capacity and skills, forgoing all the highly promoted sales advantages of the new technology, and allowing lucrative after-sale income (from servicing and repairs) to flow into the pockets of small garages, or be avoided by skilled amateurs, instead of being retained by the company via the car-specific computer diagnostic systems that come as part of the electronics deal. This in turn has a knock-on effect on the wider society, because small garages and repair shops are cut out of the food-chain, and disappear because there is less and less in a car that they can repair.

When it comes to personal computing devices, obsolescence becomes extreme. The normal life of a personal computer is now less than four years, and two years for a smartphone – and this is not because people are slaves to novelty. As soon as any new development becomes widely adopted – new services like social media, or a new form of connectivity or data storage – a whole generation of machines is made obsolete. No manufacturer can afford to continue to fit machines with older storage or connectivity options because that would destroy their slim profit margins.

The manufacturers, while benefiting from being able to sell new versions of the same products to the same customers every couple of years, also have obsolescence forced on them by the constant obsolescence of their basic components, their microchips, as chip manufacturers battle to increase speeds and densities (I will explain how this works in Chapter 8). Chip manufacturers in turn are under constant pressure to find new and exciting roles for their latest offerings.

This has led to whole industries – photography, video, audio – being effectively annexed by the electronics industry. This is not necessarily to those industries’ benefit: the camera or audio manufacturer’s role can be reduced to ‘badge-engineering’, to assembling components and sub-assemblies made higher up the ‘food chain’, by the electronics firms. Their only alternative is to leave the industry altogether.

Obsolescence and indispensability are two sides of the same coin. Online shopping requires a reasonably up-to-date computer; but it also becomes increasingly necessary to shop online as that’s where the best bargains are to be had (because ‘everybody now shops online’), and certain kinds of items become harder to find anywhere else. So electronic devices become obsolete at the same time as their ownership becomes indispensable in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The same goes for finding and applying for a job, keeping in touch with your friends, and even finding a phone number (printed phone directories having quietly faded away).

Buying a computer becomes less like acquiring an asset than incurring an ongoing liability that wasn’t there before, but which one can less and less avoid as time goes on: a positional phenomenon.

Computers could be used to increase the size of the ‘economic pie’ for everyone while reducing human environmental impact. This was the confident expectation in the 1970s – but it would have required a large-scale, determined commitment to mutuality that failed to develop, and which is extremely hard to achieve in a society that has turned inter-personal rivalry into a cardinal virtue. Instead, the technology becomes a tool for appropriating bigger shares of the pie that already exists, by those who have the power to do so. Hence the lack of real economic growth identified by Robert Gordon, described in the last chapter. Industries and businesses are forced to look at each other as possible sources of food, and invest their effort accordingly. Computers have been used less to increase efficiency in everyday life than to concentrate economic power and wealth – which is disproportionately extracted from the poor and precarious.

THE RISE OF FINANCIAL SERVICES, TRAILED BY WOMEN IN OLD CARS

By augmenting businesses’ ability to gain economies of scale, computers were a large factor in the consolidation into larger and larger units of retail, leisure and other public facilities that took place through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and their migration to the outskirts of towns. The financial-services sector (a newly coined concept dating from this period) is a case in point.

In Britain, banking and finance were deregulated in the ‘Big Bang’ of October 1986 (whose consequences are explored further in Chapter 7). Rules separating investment and retail banking were abolished. Trading in the City of London was opened up to international business. Face-to-face trading was replaced by electronic, screen-based trading. Computerization made it possible to turn mortgages and pensions into tailored commodities (or at least, seem to do that) and sell them as lucrative alternatives to ‘old fashioned’ repayment mortgages and state and job-based pensions. Slick selling assumed paramount importance, and in many cases this meant investing in new, prestige headquarters, located out of town to give an enlarged sales-force easier access to motorways and airports.

A financial organization where I worked in the mid-1990s moved its headquarters out of the center of a lackluster town into a new, steel-and-glass atrium-style building, amid landscaped car-parks, close by the motorway. This meant that several hundred low-paid and mainly female clerical, catering and ancillary staff could no longer travel to work easily by bus, or do family shopping in their lunch-hours. So, over a period of three to four years, the car parks steadily became fuller and fuller – mainly with fairly old, low-status cars like Vauxhall Astras and Ford Fiestas and Escorts, which these poorly paid women had somehow managed to afford. I once overheard two executives complaining that their car-parks were being filled up with ‘bangers’. Tennis courts and flower-beds were paved over to make way for them. Even so, it became necessary to arrive at work earlier and earlier to be sure of getting a place to park. Low-paid staff had been coerced into the automobile economy, to play their part in the ramping-up of carbon emissions that marked that decade.

This turned out to be part of a national and even global trend. Oxford geographer Amanda Root examined UK car-usage statistics for the 1980s and 1990s and found that the numbers of women with driving licenses rose by 90 per cent. For the first time there were as many female drivers as men (there had been only half as many in 1975-6); but the women only drove one fifth as many miles as men did¹⁶ – reflecting the same car usage pattern that I had seen at first hand.

Work of all kinds has been relocated in a similar way. In her influential 1997 book The Death of Distance, Frances Cairncross assured her readers that the internet would bring people’s work closer to where they lived, ‘saving time and resources, and improving the quality of life’.¹⁷ Yet, even as she was writing, work was moving further away, and had been for some time. More time was being spent in cars, creating a need for more reliable and safer models, leading, for example, to a 20-per-cent increase in the size of automobiles in the US between 1985 and 2007,¹⁸ plus a tripling of commuting time in the 20 years between 1983 and 2003. The UN’s State of the World’s Cities report for 2008/9 found that US commuting times had increased again by a comparable amount (236 per cent) in the 10 years to 2009 (the actual miles driven in that time, however, had only risen by 25 per cent).¹⁹ It is all of a piece with the intensified, long-distance traffic in goods and raw materials described in Chapter 4, adding to an already huge carbon footprint.

PUTTING A GIRL ON THE MOON: THE COST OF EDUCATION

Education does not look like an energy-intensive activity but social competition turns it into just that, and negates its purpose at the same time. In 1977, Fred Hirsch observed that education had already become a resource-hungry activity aimed more at providing individuals with saleable credentials, than at improving society’s overall levels of wisdom and skill.

Hirsch was particularly interested in the way entry requirements for ‘good jobs’ (such as that of lawyer or doctor) had risen since the expansion of secondary education after the Second World War.

Whereas young people of elite parentage could more or less walk into Oxford or Harvard in the 1950s, and party their way through to some kind of a degree and then a plum job, their children found themselves up against competition from state-educated children, and had to take their education seriously. Parents started pouring more and more money into extra and better tuition and a sort of educational arms race commenced. Top grades all the way through one’s school career became obligatory, and at least a 2.1 degree, as well as all sorts of extra-curricular accomplishments to make one’s CV look more interesting.

Fred Hirsch called this the ‘absorption of additional resources in credentials-producing educational activities’ and observed that although it had gone through the roof, it had produced only a marginal increase in the numbers of doctors or their quality. (It may in fact have reduced their quality. More intense competition for the job of surgeon is thought to attract the exact types of people who should not be surgeons²⁰). As we will see below, this also has a measurable and large effect on total human environmental impact – and thanks to our economies’ continuing commitment to inequality, it has grown at an even faster rate since computer technology arrived on the scene.

In her 2012 book Plutocrats, the Reuters news-agency researcher Chrystia Freeland cited research showing that ‘the wage premium for a college education [in the US] increased from 0.382 in 1970 to 0.584 in 2005, an increase of more than 50 per cent’; in other words, getting a college degree of any kind added an extra million dollars to a person’s lifetime earnings.²¹ But this conceals huge discrepancies: much of the premium goes to those who attend elite institutions. The Economist has reported that ‘For grand places like Caltech and MIT, the 30-year return on a bachelor’s degree is around $2m. But attending institutions near the bottom of the list actually diminishes earnings. Graduates of Valley Forge Christian College can expect to be made $148,000 worse off for their trouble.’ Nonetheless, families feel they must invest in higher education in some form, for fear their children will end up even worse off.²²

The cost of getting a child into an elite institution is extreme, although we hear about it through striking anecdotes that lack detail on the physical impacts. Freeland mentions an extremely wealthy Wall Street analyst who was so anxious about his daughter’s future that he falsified a major company’s share valuations so as to get his two-year-old child into the same nursery school as the child of the company’s boss.²³ As Freeland explains, elite education at this level leads overwhelmingly to careers in finance rather than more productive areas of work, and is tightly integrated with the carbon-intensive lifestyle of the wealthiest 0.1 per cent, where private jets are the norm, along with multiple homes and offices in two or three different continents.

The physical impact of educational competition becomes more apparent when we look at how it affects ordinary wage earners’ budgets. In 2002 Steve Gibbons and Stephen Machin worked out what educational competition among UK primary schools was costing them, in terms of house prices (a quintessentially unproductive expense that wage earners nonetheless have to pay). They found that ‘a one-percentage-point increase in the neighborhood proportion of children reaching the target grade pushes up neighborhood property prices by 0.67 per cent’.²⁴ In 2006, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors calculated that parents were ‘willing to pay a £16,000 premium to live near a good school’.²⁵ By 2014 the premium had risen to £21,000 on average, and approaching half a million pounds in some areas.²⁶ These differentials flow from delegating the allocation of educational resources to inter-family competition. They represent a huge increase in what is shrewdly termed ‘economic activity’: activity that can be measured in cash terms, irrespective of what the activity actually achieves.

One can be certain, however, that this competition caused people to generate an impressive amount of carbon dioxide for marginal benefit, or just in the hope of not falling behind in the struggle for an acceptable standard of life: a purely positional phenomenon.

The struggle becomes self-sacrificial – and resource-intensive – among the least advantaged. I was told not long ago of a taxi-driver, from a largely South Asian inner-city area of Bristol, who had worked double shifts since his daughter was two years old to get her into and through one of the city’s five private-sector all-girl secondary schools. He did this not only because he wanted his daughter to do well, but also because he feared she would sink without trace if she went to the local state secondary school, which was said to be ‘rough’. He had to make this choice because recent UK governments have encouraged a private educational sector to flourish and, in wealthier places like Bristol, the trend has drawn funds and social commitment away from the state sector.

It might be supposed that major investment in elite secondary education would at least produce better educated people, but in 2011 Danny Dorling found that Bristol, with its huge proportion of private schools, was sending slightly fewer of its children to university than the similar-sized northern English city of Sheffield – which had a negligible private sector.²⁷

This taxi-driver’s choice was one that he and his daughter would be very much better off without. For example, a study published in 2011 suggests that he was over 50 per cent more likely to have a heart attack – simply as a result of working all those extra hours.²⁸

But what about the environmental impact of his decision? A rough-and-ready calculation²⁹ suggests that, over the 16 years between his daughter’s 2nd and 18th birthdays, his extra daily shift might have added more than 360 tonnes of CO₂³⁰ to the atmosphere. An economist might say that this should be set against all the extra, wealth-creating activity that taxi drivers make possible, in terms of getting people to appointments and so on. The burgeoning taxi population has itself been seen as an indicator of economic health (and it grew by 31.2 per cent in England, during the decade 2005-15³¹). But when we look at the kinds of journeys taxi users actually make nowadays, the picture changes completely. Taxi journeys are, increasingly, made by poorer people who do not have cars, and they use them for shopping, entertainment and hospital visits that could previously be made much more cheaply by public transport or on foot – before the iron laws of profit and loss extracted those facilities from town centers and suburban high streets, and concentrated them in out-of-town sites.

A 2011 survey carried out in Sydney, Australia, found that only 24 per cent of all taxi journeys were work-related; the overwhelming majority (52 per cent) were for ‘recreation (such as entertainment, social visits, “going out”, including getting back home)’.³² A 2014 study by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that the heaviest users of taxis in the UK were now the poorest fifth of households – and they were using taxis mainly for want of adequate public transport.³³

There is still the argument that taxi-driving at least offers a ‘leg up’ to unskilled people from the Global South, whose old ways of existence are no longer viable – but this, too, does not stand up against the actuality. A friend of mine turns out to be fairly typical: he is a medical scientist who came to Britain as a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan. Apart from a few months as a temporary research assistant, the only steady work he has been able to find in his 10 years in Britain is driving taxis, and many of his colleagues have similar stories.

It is the same in other wealthy countries, and reflects a very general phenomenon: ‘over-skilling’. A 2013 report says that as many as half of people who drive taxis in rich countries hold degrees, including doctorates, and a third of people admitted to the UK as ‘highly skilled migrants’ end up doing unskilled work.³⁴ In 2012, the UK’s Office for National Statistics reported that ‘35.9 per cent of those who had graduated from university in the previous six years were employed in lower-skilled occupations… This compares with 26.7 per cent, or just over one in four, in 2001.’³⁵

The process that insidiously changed education from a means of personal and social development into a ‘credentials-producing activity’, designed to help job applicants out-bid each other, is the same one that sets medical scientists to work driving taxis and fills their taxis with poor people who can’t really afford the fares, but have to. This is what happens when there is societal tolerance of rising inequality, and political fear of confronting it, in a time of radical technological advance.

HOW ‘E-LEARNING’ REBOUNDED ON THE POOR

At the start of the electronics revolution there was enormous enthusiasm for computer-based learning. Seymour Papert’s Logo computer language and his 1980 book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas, were emblematic of the benign and almost made-in-heaven relationship that was felt to exist between the new technology and education.

Education became an important area for the nascent industry (perhaps not least because, like defense, education is normally funded by governments). Britain’s Open University (OU, set up by a Labour government in 1969) exemplified a possible development path. The OU used TV and radio, and then videotape and home computers – notably the BBC microcomputer, launched in 1981, which became an important ingredient in British computing culture in the 1980s and eventually led to the ARM microprocessors that now power so many mobile phones. The OU is now one of the world’s biggest research and teaching universities, yet its purpose was emphatically not to be a ‘credentials-producing activity’. Instead, its aim was simply to give higher education to whoever wanted it, whatever their age or ability, wherever they lived – not to provide skills considered necessary for the economy (although it turned out to be very successful at doing that).

The OU ethos had ceased to be dominant by the 1990s, when the terms ‘learning economy’ and ‘lifelong learning’ entered use – along with a more instrumental attitude to education. John Schmitt, chief economist of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued in 2009³⁶ that ‘lifelong learning’ played an important part in justifying increased inequality and the replacement of secure, well-paying jobs with lower-paid, less secure and usually de-unionized ones – for example, in call centers, which became a major global phenomenon from the late 1990s.³⁷ Ursula Huws and colleagues say that the occupational category ‘call-center worker’ first appeared in UK official statistics only in 2000 but calculated that there were already more than a million of them by 2003, and that call centers experienced phenomenal growth in virtually every country around the world in the first decade of this century.³⁸

Organizations such as the OECD started to explain the rise of income inequality as the result of lower-paid workers’ alleged failure to improve their skills to meet the requirements of the high-tech age. Schmitt wrote that this explanation was attractive because:

[it] removed policy, politics, and power from the discussion of inequality, by attributing rising economic concentration to ‘technological progress’, a force that could be resisted only at our peril. The skills-biased technical change explanation also put significant limits on the terms of policy debates: the problems of the three-fourths of the US workforce without a university degree were either the result of the poor personal decision not to pursue enough education, or, at most, a sign that, as a society, we needed to invest more in education.

This explanation became conventional wisdom, promoted in magazine articles, and in the new genre of creativity and management books. Guy Claxton, author of Wise Up: The Challenge of Lifelong Learning put it bluntly: ‘tomorrow’s poor will be those who have not learned to keep up’.³⁹ In practice, this could mean keeping up with totally unnecessary changes created by obsolescence. For one IT worker interviewed by Chris Benner and his colleagues in their 1999 report, Walking the Lifelong Tightrope, ‘lifelong learning’ meant a psychologically and financially ruinous process of ‘having to constantly “learn” the same old thing over and over’.⁴⁰

Higher education became a particular target for IT firms. With the concept of ‘distance learning’ came the idea that universities could ‘expand their markets’ without expanding the numbers of teachers (or even while reducing their numbers, or getting more ‘value’ out of each teacher – as described by historian David Noble in his 2001 book Digital Diploma Mills: the Automation of Higher Education⁴¹). Government ministers (who usually knew very little about computers) made suggestible subjects for corporate lobbying.

The new world of computers offered a seductive option to politicians daunted by the growing moral challenge of inequality: blame it on the failure of ‘those less equal’ to keep up with the technology, and let the electronics industry ride to their rescue with computerized solutions. From the employee’s or would-be employee’s point of view, computers, and learning how to use them, became an essential cost of the business of ‘keeping up’.

The billions spent on e-learning systems in schools and in universities did not radically improve the availability of many important skills. Instead of training and employing more doctors, teachers, care workers and so on, the less contentious route was chosen, of targeting and weeding out inefficiency and extracting more useful work from existing employees. Computers lent themselves all too easily to this task, eroding the security and autonomy that had made many jobs desirable and which often, in the eyes of the workers themselves, were essential to doing the jobs well.

At the confluence of these trends we see a ‘bow wave’ of wasted and unpaid human effort: the rising amount of work required simply to get a qualification, and then a job (or benefits, if you are unable to find work or cannot work).⁴² Thanks to the power imbalances that guided the project, the thrust of development as the technology advanced became more and more about testing and checking on people, and less and less about empowering them – defining the future character of the technology in the process.

There are no good reasons why there should ever be a shortage of ‘good jobs’, other than lack of political will. The more good doctors, teachers, plumbers and so on, the better. Numbers of doctors per 1,000 patients vary considerably from country to country, with the more egalitarian (and lower-impact) countries tending to provide more than the less equal ones. Whereas the US and UK had only 2.4 and 2.7 doctors per 1,000 patients in 2010, France had 3.4, Denmark 3.5, Sweden 3.8, and Norway 4.2. Cuba, with one of the world’s most egalitarian societies, provided 6.7 doctors per thousand of its population.⁴³

Doctors in Cuba are paid a lot less than they are elsewhere, yet the profession still has no difficulty attracting recruits – and in 2006 Cuba achieved slightly better health outcomes for its people than the US did, for just under a 20th of the expenditure per patient.⁴⁴ Cuba has regularly been able to lend doctors abroad to help with crises and to build up local services, providing ‘more medical personnel to the developing world than all the G8 countries combined’.⁴⁵

Cuba’s success has been helped by a different approach to e-learning. During the ‘special period’ in the early 1990s, when the Cuban economy faced collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union, an international award-winning, Linux-based e-learning and knowledge-sharing system (INFOMED) was created to empower health workers and disseminate information. The system treats qualifications as a side-issue. The main focus is the sharing of information between clinics, and between workers of all grades, in order to identify emerging health trends and diffuse good ideas rapidly.⁴⁶ The contrast in approach with the e-learning trends outlined above could not be more stark.

1    George Marshall’s book Don’t even think about it! Bloomsbury, 2014, exemplifies this tendency.

2    William Stanley Jevons, Political Economy, 1880, Chapter 2.

3    Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014, pp 509-510, and notes on p 638. During the presidential election campaign of 1972, Richard Nixon’s opponent, the Democrat George McGovern, was proposing a top tax rate of 100 per cent on inherited wealth.

4    Andrew Revkin, The Burning Season, Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

5    O2 ‘Young Brits Take Mobile Attachment to the Extreme’, nin.tl/O2young Accessed 27 Mar 2014.

6    T Kelly, ‘Mobile phone credit instead of bread? For many Kenyans, a real dilemma’, 2012, nin.tl/mobileorbread Accessed 28 March 2014.

7    RH Frank, Falling Behind, University of California Press, 2007.

8    According to Wikipedia, the phrase comes from a character in the Babylon 5 TV series, broadcast in the early 1990s.

9    Stephen Bayley, ‘Let’s start thinking outside the box’, The Observer, 15 July 2007. He refers to preferences given by home owners in a study by the Royal Institute of British Architects: ‘No more shoddy Noddy boxes’.

10  Piketty, op cit, p 503.

11  M Glaskin, ‘Shockwave traffic jam recreated for first time’, New Scientist, 2008, describing the work of Y Sugiyama, Minoru Fukui, et al (2008). ‘Traffic jams without bottlenecks’, New Journal of Physics 10, 2008. The video of their demonstration, which uses cars on a circular test-track, is available on the web.

12  D Helbing, ‘Traffic and Related Self-Driven Many-Particle Systems,’ Reviews of Modern Physics 73, Oct 2001.

13  J Turley, ‘The Two Percent Solution’, 2002, nin.tl/TwoPercent

14  Anonymous, ‘Tantalum Capacitors: Global Trends in 2000’, Passive Component Industry, Jan/Feb 2000, pp 24-27.

15  J Turley, ‘Embedded Processors by the Numbers’, 1999, nin.tl/TurleyEmbedded.

16  Amanda Root, ‘Transport and Communication’, in Twentieth Century Social Trends, ed Arthur Halsey and Jo Webb, St Martin’s Press, 2000.

17  Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance, Harvard Business School Press, 1997, p 217.

18  Richard Frank, ‘Falling Behind: how rising inequality harms the middle class’, University of California Press, 2007. The weight of a Honda Accord (an average car) increased from 2,500 pounds in 1985 to 3,200 pounds in 2007.

19  State of the World’s Cities 2008/9: Harmonious Cities, Taylor & Francis, 2012.

20  For example, see Irina Shlionskaya, Plastic Surgery, nin.tl/Shlionskaya

21  Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats, Penguin, 2012, p 48.

22  ‘Wealth by degrees’, The Economist, 28 Jun 2014, nin.tl/wealthbydegrees

23  Freeland, op cit.

24  Steve Gibbons & Stephen Machin, ‘Valuing English Primary Schools’, July 2002, nin.tl/valuingschools

25  ‘Parents pay on housing for a “good school”’ The Guardian, nin.tl/parentspay

26  Jonathan Owen, ‘Parents Pay Half a Million in Housing Premium for State School Education,’ The Independent, nin.tl/housingpremium Accessed 26 Aug 2014.

27  Danny Dorling, So you think you know about Britain? Constable, 2011.

28  Medical Research Council News, ‘Working 11-hour days increases your risk of heart disease by over 50%’, nin.tl/11hourdays

29  Assuming a normal shift involves driving 1,500 km per week (75,000 km per year, if he works 50 weeks out of 52), and this man’s taxi averaged a typical 8 kilometers per liter of diesel, he would get through 9,377 liters per year. According to the Belgian website Ecoscore, each liter of diesel produces 2.64 kilos of CO₂, – making a grand total 24.75 tonnes of CO₂ in a year for a taxi working normal shifts.

30  Carbon figures from nin.tl/carbonfigures; Fuel consumption figures from nin.tl/1Lyko6d; The 1,500 km/week figure was supplied by a taxi-driver.

31  UK Government Statistics, ‘Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle Statistics England 2015’, nin.tl/taxistatistics

32  Taverner Survey Report: ‘Taxi Use Sydney’, Nov 2012, nin.tl/taxiuseSydney

33  Mark Rowney & Will Straw, ‘Greasing the wheels’, Institute for Public Policy Research, 26 Aug 2014, nin.tl/IPPRbuses

34  S Pegiou, ‘Over-qualification of immigrants’, Migration for Development, 2013, nin.tl/migrantbraindrain

35  Graham Snowdon, ‘A third of recent graduates in unskilled jobs’, The Guardian, 6 March 2012.

36  J Schmitt, Inequality as Policy? Oct 2009, nin.tl/inequalitypolicy

37  David Holman, Rosemary Batt & Ursula Holtgrewe, Global Call Center Report, 2007, nin.tl/callcenterreport

38  Ursula Huws, Simone Dahlmann, Jörg Flecker, Ursula Holtgrewe, Annika Schönauer, Monique Ramioul & Karen Geurts, Value Chain Restructuring in Europe in a Global Economy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, HIVA, 2009.

39  Guy Claxton, Wise Up: The Challenge of Lifelong Learning, Bloomsbury/St Martin’s Press, 1999.

40  Chris Benner, Bob Brownstein, Amy B Dean, Walking the Lifelong Tightrope, Working Partnerships USA, Economic Policy Institute, 1999.

41  David F Noble, Digital Diploma Mills, Monthly Review Press, 2001.

42  As a small indication of the rate at which this kind of work has been increasing, the Randstad employment agency reported in 2013 that in the previous four years the amount of time people were spending on getting a new job had risen from just over 8 weeks to over 10 weeks. See: Louisa Peacock, ‘Jobhunters spend over 10 weeks searching for new job’, Telegraph, 26 Feb 2013, nin.tl/10weeksearch

43  Data drawn from WHO by World Bank at data.worlldbank.org Accessed 3 June 2015.

44  On numbers of doctors and health expenditure, see Guardian Fact File UK, 6: Health and Food, 29 April 2010; On life expectancy, see WWF Living Planet Report 2009 et passim; on Cuban doctors, see Wikipedia entry on Cuban Medical Internationalism (accessed 5 Aug 2011).

45  Robert Huish and John M Kirk, ‘Cuban Medical Internationalism and the Development of the Latin American School of Medicine’, Latin American Perspectives, 34; 77.

46  Ann C Seror, A Case Analysis of INFOMED, Cité Universitaire, Quebec, 2006, jmir.org/2006/1/e1