Social inequality within rich countries persists because of a continued belief in the tenets of injustice, and it can be a shock for people to realise that there might be something wrong with much of the ideological fabric of the society we live in. Just as those whose families once owned slave plantations will have seen such ownership as natural in a time of slavery, and just as not allowing women to vote was once portrayed as ‘nature’s way’, so too the great injustices of our times are, for many, simply part of the landscape of normality. For instance, while it is still accepted and seen as acceptable that there should be a few Ivy League universities for those with the ‘greatest minds’ to study at, below them prestigious institutions for the next tier, lesser institutions for the next tier, intermediate training for the next, school certificates for those below and possibly prison for those below them, all because of what is thought to be inherently within people, then there is little hope for greater justice. What matters most is not just how deep those beliefs of inherited difference remain, but how coded is the language we now use to talk of them, and how many who do not superficially think of themselves as elitist clearly believe in elitism.
Books on injustice, of which there have been many, usually begin by listing the books’ antecedents: the great thinkers who have gone before, works that have inspired. This book makes no claim to be visionary or novel; it pulls together a small collection from a large array of mostly very recent writing about a greater argument, the case for which is slowly becoming widely accepted. This is the case about the nature of, and widespread harm caused by, injustice, of new social evils and of the rising inequality that both results from injustices and also underlies their rise.
It has already been well established that the dividing of labour into smaller and smaller parts both minimises wages and generates monotony.1 We also know that the world has enough for everyone’s needs but not for their greed.2 There is no utopian revelation here because we are no longer living in a world where the people who argue for justice are in a tiny minority.3 Most great utopian visions came about during times when far fewer people were permitted to voice opinions, and most who were so permitted believed that the day would never come when we would really hold it as a self-evident truth that all people are created equal. Most of us now say we hold that truth but, as I pull evidence together in what follows, I demonstrate that those with power increasingly do not mean it when they say it, because such belief is inconsistent with what else they say they believe about other people. Often stated beliefs in equality and justice are mere platitudes or refer to a very limited definition of the concepts.
The new injustices in affluent countries have several things in common: all are aspects of rising social inequalities; all have arisen from a surplus of riches; and all suggest that so far we have come up with the wrong answer to the question of what we should do now that we are so rich. In rich countries we are almost all well off compared with our parents. On a worldwide level we would all be well off if only we could share the surplus.4
We now know that we have enough for everyone’s needs, as we know with some precision how many of us there are on the planet, and we have a good idea of how many of us there soon will be – the central projection of the United Nations’ (UN’s) world population estimates show human population growth is coming to an end within the lifetime of most people alive today.5 It will be the result not of pandemic or war but simply of most women today having three offspring, and of their daughters being expected to have two.
As we become fewer in rich countries, many are now arguing that further increases in our wealth are not necessarily producing greater happiness, longer healthy lives, a better informed population or a freer society.6 We live in times when we are now told very different stories about our history as a species and its ‘progress’ than those told to our parents. For instance, we now know that we are only just today regaining the average heights of humans 13,000 years ago because we are at last again able to eat a wide enough variety of nutrients (with enough reliability of supply) for our bodies to grow to full height. The hunger began when we first farmed, and harvests periodically failed – past skeletons show this. We then shrank in stature even further due to the privations and famines that came with early industrialisation and lives increasingly lived on factory floors, in slums or as peasants in the country.
In 1992 it was claimed, using the examples of ancient skeletons found in what is now Greece and Turkey, that modern Greeks and Turks had still not regained the average heights of our hunter-gatherer ancestors due to average nutritional levels still not being as good as those found before antiquity. The heights to be re-attained were 5'10" (178 cm) for men and 5'6" (168 cm) for women.7 These average heights had fallen by 7 and 5 inches respectively when agriculture was introduced.8 By 2004, however, the average heights of people living in Greece and Turkey had grown; although women were still an inch behind the average heights of those alive 13,000 years earlier,9 Greek men had finally regained the average height that our ancestors reached.10
We can be optimistic about the possibility of change because today we are living in very different circumstances compared with just one generation ago. In rich countries average human heights have shot up only very recently to be back to what our skeletons evolved to support. Even the middle class only one generation ago were mostly slightly stunted; the upper classes a generation before that also were and lost a tenth of their infants to disease in the richest countries of the world.11 Those nine tenths of upper-class infants who survived were not as well fed or cared for medically as are many poorer people in more equitable rich countries today.
If you wrote about injustice in 1910 or in 1960 you were writing in remarkably different times. Write now, and for the first time in human history a majority of people worldwide can read what you write. Some five out of every six children in the world are now taught to read and write to a degree that only a minority of their parents were; a majority of their children will probably have internet access.12 A hundred million young adults worldwide now study in universities each year.13 Education may still be hugely unjust in how it is distributed, but there are many more people alive in the world today who have been given the freedom to learn right through to college. This is not just many more than before, it is many more than all those who ever went to university before combined.
University degrees are wonderful things; it is the arranging and valuing of them by hierarchy of institution that is problematic, when people study for the label, for the university brand, rather than actually to learn. Because there were so few of them, the forerunners of today’s university graduates almost all became part of a tiny elite, governing others and being rewarded with riches as a result. Because there are so many more graduates now, only a very small minority of today’s university graduates can become rich at the expense of others.
Table 2 shows the categorisation of injustices described in this book in 2010 and how it relates to categorisations made in 1942, and various subsequent attempts to update them made in 1983, 2007 and 2008. The 10 examples of social woes that respond most closely to social inequalities listed in 2009 under the headline of ‘Inequality: mother of all evils’ in one newspaper14 could also be slotted into the table, with a little stretching. The old social evils were: lack of education (ignorance), lack of money (want), lack of work (idleness), lack of comfort (squalor) and lack of health (disease). The new injustices have arisen out of a glut of: education (elitism), money (exclusion), scorn (prejudice), wealth (greed) and worry (despair).
The five forms of injustice are each in turn amalgams of others’ lists of concerns and perils. For simplicity each new injustice can be said to have arisen most strongly a decade after the last (in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s respectively), and out of the ashes of past evils that have largely been overcome in material terms. Tolerance of, acceptance of (even advocating) the new injustices is at the heart of social injustice in rich countries today. Poor countries remain bedevilled by the old social evils, not because they are on some developmental ladder waiting for their problems to become problems of riches, but increasingly because of the ignorance, want, idleness, squalor and disease caused in most of the poor world as a side effect of the elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair which are now endemic within rich countries.
Sources: First column: this book. Second column: past evils, William Beveridge’s well-known labels and popular additions in brackets. Third column: political labels from socialists (Cockshott, W. P. and Cottrell, A. [1983] Towards a new socialism, Nottingham: Spokesman, pp 11, 12). Fourth column: philosophical labels from philosophers (Wolff, J. and de-Shalit, A. [2007] Disadvantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 38-9). The most important are claimed to be: 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 10, see pp 106 and 191, and for some extra ones, 11-14, see p 198, footnote 9). Fifth column: public labels from newspapers (Mackay, N. [2008] ‘Our 10 modern evils’, Sunday Herald, 20 April) and think-tank projects and surveys (Watts, B. [2008] What are today’s social evils? The results of a web consultation, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, p 6). Numbering is from original publications.
Well-meaning attempts to eliminate very poor education have had the unintended by-product of fuelling the rise of a new injustice by beginning to promote the widespread acceptance of elitism. This has occurred over many years through providing most extra educational resources to those whose parents had generally themselves received the most – in Britain this took place through the provision of more grammar schools, then sixth form colleges, new and expanded universities and now a multitude of new postgraduate degrees. All these extra resources were provided following the introduction of secondary education for all, and then, comprehensive education for most. Those whose families had in the past secured slight educational advantages were now able to secure much greater advantages through amassing more and more qualifications within selective awarding institutions. In 1942 a tiny minority of adults had a university degree and it was normal to have no formal qualifications. Now, although many young adults still have no or few formal qualifications, there are also many who hold a long list of school and university certificates. Pick two young people at random and they are far more likely to be qualified to very different levels today as compared to any point in the past.
The mass schooling of children through to their late teens in rich countries marked an end to the acceptance of illiteracy as normal. This school movement grew in strength right through the gilded age, through the crash and depression, and came out of the Second World War with a victory for children, especially for girls, who became seen as educable through secondary school age. However, almost immediately after the war, in the beginnings of the Cold War (and in an era of vehement anti-communism), with men feeling threatened by women who had shown that they could do men’s jobs, and with the well-off feeling threatened by the poor who had shown that, if taught, they too could read and write, the injustice of elitism began to be propagated. It was more pernicious than previous class, religion, ‘race’ and gender bars to advancement because it was claimed that the elite should rule and be differently rewarded because they were most able to rule due to their advanced knowledge and skill rather than because of some feudal tradition (because their father was part of the elite too). Elitism became a new justification for inequality.
Before the 1950s there was no need to argue for elitism. Women were rarely admitted to college, and girls very often left school earlier than boys. It was often said that girls were a different breed – in actual fact, everyone was a different breed from the few allowed to talk about ‘breeds’ of human then.15 However, as Table 2 shows, by the 1980s the fact that people were paid differentially according to perceived differences in their skills and supposed abilities had been identified as a new social evil. A quarter of a century after that, contemporary philosophers listed threats to people being able to use their imagination or being able to express emotion as ‘disadvantages’ that could easily be placed under this same heading. This illustrates just how quickly our demands can be raised, even to the point of including as part of what is new about social evils being denied the opportunity to use imagination and express emotion. There are many bad jobs where these disadvantages prevail.16 However, when surveyed,17 the public talked less of this and more of a fall in compassion and respect, and of problems emerging for young people caused by poor parenting, which resulted in seeing some as inferior, as nowhere near part of ‘the elite’. In affluent nations which have become even more unequal, following the rise of elitist thinking in the 1950s, people came to be socially segregated more and more by educational outcome.
Elitist thinking not only determines children’s life chances but also has an effect on everything that is seen as decent or acceptable in a society.
Where elitist thinking was allowed to grow most strongly, social exclusion became more widespread. Again, as Table 2 illustrates, social exclusion is a new face of injustice that grew out of the general eradication of the bulk of an old social evil, ‘want’, going hungry, wanting for clothes and other basic possessions, warmth and other essentials. It was in the 1960s that the widespread eradication of old wants, which came with near full employment, pensions and more decent social security benefits, inadvertently resulted in new forms of exclusion, such as trying to exclude people for ‘not being like us’; this was seen most clearly in rising racism during the 1970s.18
By the 1980s the categories of new injustices included ‘the exploitation of those who work’. Those in work were almost all able to eat enough, but as wages at the bottom declined in relation to those above, although those with no work did worst, many families of people in work but in bad jobs also began to become excluded from the norms of society, such as not having an annual holiday or not always getting breakfast before going to school. Being excluded from the norms of society was first seriously suggested as a definition of poverty in the 1960s by Peter Townsend.
As income inequalities grew, the numbers excluded by having too little also grew and the numbers who could afford to exclude themselves grew slightly too. Those who categorised injustices in 2006 saw how such exclusions threatened people’s well-being, their bodily integrity and their ability to play, to relax and to take holidays (Table 2, column 4). The public defined the problems of social exclusion as being caused by individualism and consumerism, which had then led to more problems of drugs and alcohol corroding society (Table 2, column 5). To look at the wider context in the rich countries, which have become more consumerist, more people have been made poorer as the need to get into debt to try to keep up rises.
The tendency for the affluent in rich countries to exclude themselves from social norms results in ever greater consumption, both as these people buy more and as they raise the expectations of others. That, in turn, causes want to rise elsewhere, including the old evil of the most basic of wants rising as peasants are made into paupers in poor countries when poor countries are impoverished to satisfy the desires for wealth within rich nations. Many now see pauperisation as the direct end result of massive economic polarisation on a world scale,19 and part of this pauperisation is the conscious de-linking of a few countries from the world economy in attempts to evade such polarisation.20
Prejudice grows like mould, based on elitist myths in times of exclusion.21 As inequalities began to fall after the last gilded age, it became radical and then acceptable to argue in the 1930s that ‘It is the mark of a civilised society to aim at eliminating such inequalities as have their source, not in individual differences, but in its own organisation’.22 What was unforeseen in such arguments was that 40 years later, as the trend in inequality turned upward once again in the 1970s, creating the antecedents for what would later be a new gilded age, the argument would be reversed and some people would begin to preach that inequalities were simply reflections of individual differences in ability, and if inequalities grew wider, well, that was just a clearer expression of those inherent differences.
By the 1990s prejudice had reached such heights that it needed to be more and more clearly explained by those opposed to elitism that human beings were not born with inherent differences. Rather, people were born with plasticity – unlike other species, human infants have very few of their ‘… neural pathways already committed’23 at birth; they are then able (and have) to adapt to the conditions they find themselves born into. Those human beings born with fixed inherent traits would have been less likely to survive through the rapidly changing environments that they found themselves in over the course of (human) history. We evolved to become more flexible. We inherited the ability not to inherit particular abilities! Those now born into times of scarcity and brutality are malleable infants who quickly learn to be selfish and to grab what they can, if that is what they learn from watching the actions of others. Born into times, or just into families, of good organisation and plenty, infants are capable of growing up to be cooperative and altruistic. But born into times of free market organisation and plenty, we often just learn to want more and more and more. And there is more and more to want.
The same flexibility that allows newborn infants to learn in a few years one of thousands of possible languages, and in most of the world two or more languages, also allows them to adapt to finding themselves born into one of thousands of different cultures where survival was and remains best protected by new members quickly and inherently learning to behave in a way which fits their surrounding environment. Because so few of our neural pathways are committed at birth we respond well to being nurtured, whether that nurturing is brutal or caring. Where nurturing is caring, growing up to care too has become a more cherished trait. More survive when there is wider caring, and so caring survives by being among the most appropriate behaviours to be taught and to evolve, including evolution beyond our genes, cultural evolution.
It is the very fact that human societies can change in collective behaviour over such short times that suggests that our destinies are not in our genes. We can move in just a few generations from being feudal or cooperative, to being competitive or totalitarian. We move within lifetimes from seeing large groups of people persuaded to take part in wars, to not resisting conscription, to marching and singing for others’ rights. Prejudices rise and fall as people preach to promote them or teach against them. Prejudice is nurtured, a product of environments of fear, which is easily stoked up and takes years to quench. One manifestation of prejudice is that when great numbers are seen as less deserving, as slaves, paupers, or just ‘average’, a minority can describe their own behaviour not as greed but as simply receiving higher rewards because they are different kinds of human beings, who deserve to be put on a pedestal above those they view with prejudice.
Parts of our destinies can be swayed by our genes if the environment does not mitigate their influence. Greed has been excused as a side effect of otherwise beneficial evolutionary traits. This suggests that just as our hunter-gatherer desire to store calories by stuffing ourselves with fats and sugars was at one time usually beneficial, so too was our ‘cave fire’ interest in the stories of others, reflecting a then vital desire to understand the minds of all those around us. Unfortunately these traits of obsessing over what others nearby have and what they are doing, while beneficial in times of scarcity, leads to greed where and when there is abundance. A preoccupation with the minutiae of others’ lives helped us to survive in small groups, but has now gone awry as we ‘max out’ on celebrity watching, gorging on and mimicking soap operas.24 Similarly, we are said to be trapped by our genes to take perceived status deadly seriously again. Slights to our status cause hurt that possibly has evolutionary origins because they cause us to fear that we are about to lose our position in ancient rank orders with deadly effect. The status syndrome may well have preserved sustainable, if claustrophobic, patriarchal and matriarchal village hierarchies where everyone knew their place. Outside village life it causes misery, but gives us a biological reason to see why it would be to the greater good for all of us to behave justly and to minimise status hierarchies, which we may otherwise have a natural inclination to exacerbate.25 Biologically we come programmed for tribal and village life, alongside our plasticity.
As feudalism ended, our acute abilities to notice slights and our innate fear of being ostracised led, in the new worlds of cities and strangers, to a few seeking to rise ever upwards to be ‘the big man’, and to many feeling abandoned as if they had been placed outside the village to die. Some argue that these traits in turn came from pre-human ranking systems common in mammals that live in groups.26 However, stories conjured up through musing over evolutionary biology only take us so far and are of themselves evidence that all is far from genetic, given how we only recently thought up these stories. Discovering our genes was a product of our cultures. Cultures developed not just to reward work, exploration and discovery but also to protect leisure time through inventing Sabbaths and to prevent the hoarding of wealth; these inventions are as old as cave fires and village hearths. In contrast, it took the early spread of city living before many of our cultures developed enough to see usury, the taking of interest on others’ debts, as a sin.
People have been making their own history for quite some time, despite repeatedly lamenting and finding themselves in circumstances not of their choosing.27 And the histories are made collectively – we collectively gorge now on shopping and soap operas. Status paranoia is reinforced as our people watching is now done through watching television and surfing the internet. Being greedy is offered to us collectively through advertising as a lure to wanting more. Work harder, they say, if you want more, but greed divides people as a result of unequal reward. The rich in greedy societies did not become happier as greed came to be seen again as so good by so many in the 1980s.28 We easily forget that the phrase ‘greed is good’ was evoked in resistance to the mantra that it was supposedly good! Even Hollywood took part in the attempts to resist, to make a different history, to tell a different story, to get a different future. The greedy do not gain happiness but they do fuel others’ misery by reducing everyone’s sense of adequacy.
The rise again of greed was the unforeseen outcome of victory over squalor. Greed and squalor have coexisted for centuries, but it was with the widespread eradication of the worst aspects of material squalor in affluent nations that basic checks and balances on greed were lost. The rise in greed occurred not just because a few might be a little more programmed to be greedy, and a tiny number have always been scurrilous enough to do better in business and then hoard gains. Greed rose because the circumstances were right; what had been in place to control greed had been removed in attempting to eradicate squalor. We pumped out oil to drive cars so we no longer needed to live on streets full of horse manure, to make plastics to wrap around food and slow down its rotting. We mass-produced chickens and refrigerators, so that we could eat better, but also greedily, eating meat almost every day as a result. We ushered in mass consumption, removed the Sabbath and other high-days and declared usury a virtue, and then found there were almost no limits to individual desire for more cars, for more chicken and for more fridges. We ended up with more than people could possibly need in any one home and, for those who could afford them, more homes than they could possibly use, containing yet more fridges, more cars, more chicken, all seen as signs of success. And we ended up with widespread quiet despair.29
Despair is the final injustice of the five new faces of inequality, mutating from the old social evil of widespread physical disease. Health services now exist that effectively treat and contain most physical disease in affluent countries. However, while most physical maladies are now well treated with high-quality care in all but the most unequal of these rich countries, mental illness (including a form of ‘affluenza’) has been rising across the rich world.30 In Britain depression is the most common cause of long-term sickness (followed by a bad back),31 and clinical depression has been growing most quickly among adolescents (see Figure 21, Chapter 7, page 276). Corporate profiteering and the strengthening of paradigms of competition have both been shown to have influenced this rise, and to cause worldwide inequalities in health to be rising, as life expectancy is lower everywhere where economic inequalities are greater.32 A more general malaise of despair has also settled over the populations of rich countries as elitism has strengthened, exclusion has grown, prejudice has been raised a level and greed has expanded. This is despair for the future, a despair that was felt throughout what were seen as the best of economic times, the late 1990s boom, despair which is now very much more palpable since those times have ended.
It can be annoying to read a book with the expectation that it will end in one way, only to find that it ends in an altogether different way. Having our expectations satisfied is part of what makes life good. So you should know now that the argument at the end of this book is that recognising the problem is the solution.
No amount of affirmative action schemes, good schooling, money for computers or textbooks, different curricula or improved parenting methods are going to help improve how we are educated and think if, in our heart of hearts, those who do most of the deciding as to how the rest get to learn harbour elitist pretensions. We should not expect to see any reduction in the numbers of children labelled as ‘modern-day delinquents’ wherever enough of the people who have more control over how others are treated still believe strongly enough that they themselves and their offspring are a little more inherently able than most.33 If you think that you are somehow more than simply the product of your upbringing and the environment into which the little plastic, neurally uncommitted you was thrust, that you might carry some inherited trait that makes you special (not just having a few idiosyncrasies), then you too are part of the problem. Of course, because of differences in upbringing, environment and individual idiosyncrasies, different people do become better suited to doing different jobs by the time they are adults, and they need different training. However, even acknowledging this, it is very hard to justify the extent of educational apartheid we currently tolerate, and we could easily reduce differences dramatically among children if fewer were excluded from birth from what is normal life for most.
Social exclusion cannot be ended by complex schemes of tax credits, child benefits and local area funding when those with most are allowed to accrue even more. In the more unequal of rich countries, as long as we are happy to tolerate wide inequalities in income and wealth, there will always be large numbers of poor people. However, it is not easy to take the step of accepting this fact. We know this because it has not happened. Instead it is easy to divide those with the least into two groups: one you think might be deserving of a little more, and the rest undeserving.
Infants born into poverty almost always feature in the ‘deserving of a little more’ group, unless they were born in the back of a lorry crossing from France to Britain, or Mexico to the US (see Section 5.2). While the lone young feckless woman, sleeping around, stealing and injecting herself with heroin to escape reality is almost always put in the undeserving category, in most cases it is women in her position who give birth to the infants who will have the worse chances in life, and whose deaths cause the greatest outcry when the circumstances are revealed in court. However, understanding that child poverty will not end while we tolerate poverty for anyone is far from simple, otherwise we would have eradicated child poverty by now.
It is not a matter of money but of belief. Eradicating poverty is cheap because a little money goes a long way when you are poor. Poverty, as defined by social exclusion, is a relative measure; people are poor because they cannot afford to take part in the norms of society, and these norms only become unaffordable because the better-off have been allowed to become even better off. This happens, for example, when taxes are reduced, as taxes provide a source of redistribution from rich to poor. What is most costly is maintaining a small group of extremely wealthy people who are able to exclude themselves from the norms of society at great expense, and this is what we do manage to do, despite the huge costs to everyone else. We do this as long as we continue to be convinced that these people are especially worthy of so much wealth. The last time we stopped being so convinced, at the end of the last gilded age following the 1920s excesses, we started to spread out what we all had more fairly and we did not stop spreading it for nearly 40 years.
Although between 1968 and 1978 poverty was far from eradicated, people could at least appreciate each others’ fears, concerns and lives more than many generations had before and any have done since. In the US, the UK and a few similarly rich countries we then did the opposite for the next 30 years, and allowed the rich to take more each year than they had before.34 We need to understand this history before considering what might be sufficient to reverse this growth of injustice.
The argument in this book does not end with a suggestion of how prejudice can be ended; it is not the kind of map of utopia that says ‘turn left at hill marked “recognise institutional racism”, then march up the valley of “reducing the gender gap”, following “gay and lesbian rights” river to find “nirvana” mountain’. What I try to show is how the kinds of prejudices which were previously applied to specific groups, of people said not to be ‘one of us’, have now become expanded to the much wider populace who are now ‘not like us’, as ‘us’ has again shrunk to a small group of winners who excuse their winning as being a mixture of their extra hard work and the inherent failings of others. The poor in particular are now subject to a widespread prejudice whereby, it is nastily and quietly said, they must have something wrong with them if they are not able to work their way out of poverty. In the end the rich have to believe there is something wrong with other people in order for them to believe it is fair to leave so much of their money to their own children rather than do something more useful with it. Historically most people have inherited very little because their parents had very little to leave. To see inheritance as normal we have to behave as only aristocracy once did. To draw maps of the roads to utopia is to foster the belief that a better collective inheritance is possible.
You can love your children and desperately want to spare them hardship, but in aggregate you do not make their world safer if you are rich and leave your money to them as inheritance. Wealth is a measure of inequality, and most wealth in the world is amassed through inheritance and usury, not through work.35 This is wealth that has not been earned by those who inherit and almost all of it was not fairly earned by those who give it. That tiny amount which was originally collected through the sweat of the holder’s own labour is only a miniscule fraction of the wealth of the world. Most wealth comes from routes such as former plantation holdings that cascaded down to families in the US, or from parents finding their home had increased in value because it was located in London, and London contained the bankers who had found a new way of making money, which for a time indirectly increased house prices there. Relying on wealth indirectly amassing through the guile of bankers is not a safe way to live.
Most inheritance of great wealth is justified on the basis of prejudice, of rich people believing that their children have a special right to more because it is somehow their ‘duty’ to be set up to be above others, to pass on the family estate in turn. In this book I argue that it is a myth that the wealthy are the children of those who work hard, take risks, make money and just want to leave it to their family. Not too long ago only a small minority believed this myth about the wealthy. What is new today is how that belief has spread to the middle classes and to many of the poor who (especially in the US) would also repeal inheritance tax laws, not in case they win the lottery, but because they have swallowed the myth that hard work and a little risk-taking makes you wealthy.
Fear has grown as wealth inequalities have grown, resulting in heightened prejudice in deciding who marries whom, how much we collectively care and who now dies youngest in times of plenty. However, often the children of the very rich suffer high mortality rates even in countries we currently see as quite equitable,36 although if you try to argue today that children would be better off not with inherited money but if society as a whole provided better support for all, there will usually be disbelief. It was easier in the past to argue against inheritance, to have the great houses made accessible to the public and to secure land reform around much of the globe. Unlike in the 1940s, many people in affluent countries today are told that they have riches, that their houses are worth a great deal, or they believe that they will have money gained from some other source to inherit. If you point to other societies that are more equal – in Japan, in most of Western and Northern Europe, even in Canada – and show the outcomes to be better, they may suggest that those societies are more equal due to special historical circumstances that cannot easily be replicated in their more unequal country.37 They say they cannot replicate the kind of land redistribution that occurred in Japan after the war, or the stronger sense of trust and belonging that exist in most affluent nations; but why not? All that is required to redistribute land is a significant land value tax, and we now know that trust rises in societies that become more equal.
We have to say again and again that there are no beneficial side effects of one man’s greed. It does not create worthwhile work for others;38 it is not efficient; it does not curtail waste; in fact it causes huge amounts to be wasted. Greed also corrupts thinking, as those who take most simultaneously argue that they fund state services the most through those taxes they cannot avoid. Greed must be seen as an injustice before it is even possible to imagine reining it in, as it has been reined in before. A common theme in the saga of human history is the story of constraining greed, learning to store grain, preaching against usury, cooperating. We last did this when we benefited from contracting inequalities in wealth, as occurred between 1929 and 1978 across the rich world. However, this time the circumstances are different.
Whenever greed has been reined in before, there has later been some foreign land, some internal group, some other way in which exploitation and dominance could rise again. This time every last land has already been colonised in one way or another. There is no one left to have their days brought into the paid labour market; there are no more schemes where you whizz money around the world and pretend more exists in transit than at any one location (as was occurring at the point the banking system crashed in 2008). That was only possible when so many were still illiterate and innumerate. It is harder to sell dodgy home loans, which start off cheap but where interest payments rise greatly later, to a better-educated consumer. That is why such loans could only be sold in large numbers in the most unequal of rich countries where, according to Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s 2009 book The spirit level, there lived the worst educated and most desperate of consumers, in the US and UK. There should be fewer dupes next time but there need not be a next time - another boom to lead to bust in future. It is precisely to ward off forgetting and being duped again that so many write, and say, and shout, and argue, and cry so much today that another future is possible. That conserving, recycling, sharing counter-culture of our recent past is now presented as a preferable general culture to the return of such greed.
And lastly, what solution is there to despair? Again, simply recognising that there is a problem is the first step. Count the pills, measure the anxiety, the alcohol consumption, the nervousness, the thoughts in the middle of the night when it doesn’t all seem possible. Look at the mental state of children today in rich countries and compare that to the recent past, and then ask yourself if this is the progress you had hoped for. Look at levels of self-harm. You may be lucky yourself, fortunate with your friends or family, your simple life or your high degree of self-confidence. But if you are not, and if despite that you just say ‘it isn’t that bad’, ‘get a grip’, ‘grow a stiff upper lip’, if you don’t go back to look at what is wrong in your life but just try to tackle the symptoms of those wrongs, to wash away the worries, then there is no solution to despair. There are many facets to despair: anxiety, fear, mistrust, anger, not quite knowing what might happen to you if you do not perform well enough or fit in neatly enough. How secure do you feel?
You either have to have a remarkably tranquil life by modern standards, a close and highly supportive set of friends and family, or a very high level of self-belief not to worry, not to often feel under strain. There are a set of standard questions routinely asked of people to see if they might be suffering from depression in affluent countries.39 It is an interesting exercise to de-personalise these questions and ask them of those around you.
Are the people where you live, the people who run your country and those not as well off as you, able to concentrate on whatever they are doing? Do they lose much sleep through worry? Do they think they are playing a useful part in things? Are most capable of making decisions about things? Do most feel constantly under strain? Do they often feel that they cannot overcome their difficulties? Are they able to enjoy their normal day-to-day activities? Are they able to face up to their problems? Have they been feeling unhappy and depressed? Are they losing confidence in themselves? Do some see themselves as worthless? Have most been feeling reasonably happy, all things considered? Or not?
As a sign of the times, and certainly a cause for despair, the precise wording of the questionnaire that these questions are derived from is subject to copyright conditions and cannot be reproduced here because a corporation wants to profit from them.40 Nor am I able to reproduce the scoring system that lets you decide if you are depressed. This, the owning of copyright on a test for depression, is yet another of those facets of modern society that our recent ancestors could not have made up as a sick joke. Future generations may find it hard to understand that we ever tolerated this. Nevertheless, although the scoring system cannot be revealed it is unlikely that, if you knew them well, you would describe the lives of many around you as being particularly happy and fulfilled. It is only because we do not know each other well that we can imagine that most around us do appear happier and (at a superficial glance) many appear fulfilled. It is, after all, often because everyone else around you appears to be having so much fun, especially those who live and smile on the television screen, that you blame yourself for not being as apparently fulfilled as them. But do you admit it to others?
In more unequal affluent countries, when asked a single question about their mental condition, most people say they are doing fine, even great, ‘never been better’. In contrast, it is in those more equitable affluent countries where people live the longest, where social conditions are most favourable, that people are most likely to admit to not feeling so great all the time, because they can afford to admit to it.41 In the most unequal of countries, admitting to yourself that you are down is the beginning of a journey on a slippery slope where you can expect little help other than ‘therapy’ at a high financial price and where your ‘therapist’ has no financial incentive for you to quickly recover. The start of the solution to living in places and times of despair is to collectively and publicly admit to despair. The worst thing you and those around you can do is to pretend that all is fine. This just perpetuates injustice.
This book has no great single solution save ‘the impossible’, to offer a map of part of a route to end the injustices of elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair as the latest incarnations of rising inequality. No suggestion is made for a global jubilee where, not just between countries but also within them, debt is written off and the rich are helped to agree to end their claims on so much of the lives of so many of the poor. Such events are absolutely impossible, at least until the moment they happen. However, many people worked hard the last time a gilded age ended to reduce social inequalities and to secure more justice, so the ‘impossible’ has happened before.