1 The affluent or rich world consists of those countries where the best-off billion people live, that is, almost all of the countries in Europe and in North America, and Japan.
2 Table 1, on page 3, gives an indication of how many people suffer most directly from each injustice in rich countries. On the categorisation of injustices see Wolff, J. and de-Shalit, A. (2007) Disadvantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 38, 39, 106 and 191, who in turn refer to Amartya Sen’s listings; and for similar categorisations see Watts, B., Lloyd, C., Mowlam, A. and Creegan, C. (2008) What are today’s social evils? Summary, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation (www.jrf.org.uk/publications/what-are-today’s-social-evils). Both of these tend to produce lists of around 10 modern evils, or sources of injustice and disadvantage, but many are easily paired and so are collapsible to five (as is shown in Chapter 2, Table 2, page 17).
3 A mantra exposed very clearly and recently in Lawson, N. (2009) All consuming, London: Penguin.
4 Health budgets are raided (top-sliced) to fund armies of counsellors to tell us that all is not so bad, family doctors spend most of their working hours dealing with people whose problems are not physical, and the World Health Organization (WHO) ranks mental ill health higher and higher with every assessment it makes of the leading causes of death and distress worldwide, and specifically shows that the rates of prevalence of mental ill health are almost perfectly correlated with income inequality in rich countries. See WHO comparable psychiatric surveys, as reported in Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane, p 67.
5 See Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W. W. Norton, p 18. The height of excess in the last gilded age was seen in the ‘Great Gatsby’ summer of 1922. Money moved more slowly then and the financial crash came seven years later. The height of excess in the current gilded age was recorded in the autumn of 2007 as City bankers partied on their bonuses right up to Christmas. The hangover in 2008 was unparalleled: see Chakrabortty, A. (2007) ‘If I had a little money ...’, The Guardian, 8 December. For the origin of the term ‘new gilded age’ see also Bartels, L.M. (2008) Unequal democracy: The political economy of the new gilded age, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
6 Pearson, K. (1895) ‘Contributions to the mathematical theory of evolution – II. Skew variation in homogeneous material’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A, Mathematical, vol 186, pp 343-414: this paper may have contained the first histogram of human subjects by area.
7 For the cycles to exist, enough people had to be given the opportunity to cycle up the social scales to then be available to fall back down in sufficient numbers, and that circumstance first occurred only in the 1960s, which is why the term ‘cycle of deprivation’ first came into widespread use in the 1970s. With the prejudice of those times it was more often, and erroneously, used to suggest ‘family pathology’ as a mechanism whereby poverty was passed down the generations. This was simply a rehashing of the old claim that paupers mainly bred more paupers. The phrase ‘cycles of exclusion’ here means those shown in Figure 8 (Chapter 4, page 120).
8 The figure varies between times and countries. This particular fraction best fits Britain in 1999 as an estimate of the proportion of households found to be poor by at least two definitions. See Bradshaw, J. and Finch, N. (2003) ‘Overlaps in dimensions of poverty’, Journal of Social Policy, vol 32, no 4, pp 513-25.
9 For the statistics see Dorling, D., Rigby, J., Wheeler, B., Ballas, D., Thomas, B., Fahmy, E., Gordon, D. and Lupton, R. (2007) Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005, Bristol: The Policy Press, and for the mechanism read Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid fear, Cambridge: Polity Press, which provides a very succinct description of the process by which the social distancing between rich and poor occurs as inequalities rise.
10 See Hayter, T. (2004) Open borders: The case against immigration controls, London: Pluto Press, p 151 for examples of what then results, ranging from the building of the Cutteslowe Wall between neighbourhoods within one city to the widespread toleration of an intolerance of international immigration.
11 Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 147, quoting Neil Lawson on consumption.
12 See Section 6.1, in Chapter 6, this volume, and Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 190-6.
13 See Bauman, Z. (2008) The art of life, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 57, 120, 132.
14 See Figure 21 in Chapter 7, page 276, this volume. There are also data from Scotland showing similar results.
15 CEPMHPG (Centre for Economic Performance’s Mental Health Policy Group) (2006) The depression report: A New Deal for depression and anxiety disorders, London: CEPMHPG, London School of Economics and Political Science.
16 Kay, J. (2004) The truth about markets: Why some nations are rich but most remain poor (2nd edn), London: Penguin, p 323.
17 See Clarkson, T. (2001 [1785]) ‘An essay on the impolicy of the African slave trade’, in G. Davey Smith, D. Dorling and M. Shaw (eds) Poverty, inequality and health in Britain: 1800–2000 – A reader, Bristol: The Policy Press, pp 2-6.
18 For an early example of the debunking of those who were supposedly especially great and good, see Strachey, L. (1918) Eminent Victorians, New York, NY: G.P. Putnam and Sons.
19 We have traditions of telling fairy stories that do not state the mundane truth, that all inventions were of discoveries about to be made because it had just become possible to make them, and who exactly made them is largely inconsequential. We also rarely point out how constrained people are by their circumstances, and that ‘… the average newspaper boy in Pittsburgh knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name’ (Gilbert, D. [2006] Stumbling on happiness, London: HarperCollins, p 213). You can argue that most of the now forgotten toilers who were just beaten to the winning post of invention were also equally exceptional people, but that argument fails to hold recursively, as for every one of them, there is another. Elvis Presley is a good example of the right (white) man being in the right place at the right time to become seen as so special later.
20 According to www.geog.ubc.ca/~ewyly/acknowledgments.html, the home page of Elvin Wyly.
21 According to John Bartlett (1820–1905) in his book of Familiar quotations (10th edn, published in 1919), quotation number 9327, this was attributed to Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92). It is attributed to Of physiognomy (book, 3, chapter 12) (see www.bartleby.com/100/731.58.html).
22 See Cohen, G.A. (2008) Rescuing justice and equality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
1 Miller, G. (2000) On fairness and efficiency: The privatisation of the public income during the past millennium, Bristol: The Policy Press; see pp 53-7 on rent.
2 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press; see pp 37-61 on ‘Do we need fat cats?’.
3 Shah, H. and Goss, S. (2007) Democracy and the public realm: Compass Programme for Renewal, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p 83.
4 Kasser, T. (2002) The high price of materialism, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp 110-15.
5 See the projections for the years 2050 and 2300 mapped in Dorling, D., Newman, M. and Barford, A. (2008) Atlas of the real world: Mapping the way we live, London: Thames and Hudson, maps 7 and 8.
6 For a good example see Lawson, N. (2009) All consuming, London: Penguin.
7 Diamond, J. (1992) The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee (2nd edn), London: Random House, p 168.
8 Neolithic farming life appears now to have often been taken up out of necessity rather than choice as it began to develop around the world. We first farmed when we were forced to due to there being too many of us in one area simply to hunt and gather, or due to some change in the climate reducing the supply of what there was to hunt or gather. The story archaeologists tell is that we became a little shorter following our first forays into farming, at first because farming was not very efficient, and later, especially outside the North China plain, as farmers became peasants who became subject to taxes, tolls and population pressures that caused food to be often insufficient. See Davis, M. (2000) ‘The origin of the third world’, Antipode, vol 32, no 1, pp 48-89.
9 Modern women remaining an inch shorter than their distant ancestors may be modern biology faithfully marking the cumulative effects of our remaining gender insults.
10 Greek news report (translated by Dimitris Ballas in 2007) of 19 November 2004 (www.in.gr/news/article.asp?lngEntityID=581606).
11 Dorling, D. (2006) ‘Infant mortality and social progress in Britain, 1905–2005’, in E. Garrett, C. Galley, N. Shelton and R. Woods (eds) Infant mortality: A continuing social problem, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp 213-28.
12 The speed of the rise in internet access would suggest that majority access is possible in a lifetime when that rise is coupled with projections of how many fewer children there soon will be worldwide. The deciding factor is currently the date when the manufacturers of silicon wafers decide it is profitable for them to double the diameter of the discs they produce, discs from which the silicon chips are made. To decide that, they too look at the same rise in access, the spread of money worldwide and projections on population falls. Currently it is only global inequality in incomes that deters them (according to the author’s personal communication with some who advise the manufacturers).
13 At any one time there are now at least one hundred million university students in the world, with a narrow majority being female; see Dorling, D., Newman, M. and Barford, A. (2008) Atlas of the real world: Mapping the way we live, London: Thames and Hudson, maps 221 and 228 on the growth in tertiary education, map 229 on youth literacy and maps 241 and 242 on changing internet access.
14 The title headed The Guardian newspaper’s report of the publication of Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane.
15 Smith, R. (2007) Being human: Historical knowledge and the creation of human nature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p 89.
16 Wolff, J. and de-Shalit, A. (2007) Disadvantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 7.
17 Watts, B. (2008) What are today’s social evils? The results of a web consultation, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation; see p 3 on reciprocity, empathy and compassion.
18 Leech, K. (2005) Race, London: SPCK; and see Leech’s pamphlet on Brick Lane referenced within.
19 Gordon, D. (2009) ‘Global inequality, death, and disease’, Environment and Planning A, vol 41, no 6, pp 1271-2.
20 Amin, S. (2004) ‘World poverty, pauperization and capital accumulation’, Monthly Review, vol 55, no 5.
21 Kelsey, J. (1997) The New Zealand experiment: A world model for structural adjustment?, Auckland: Auckland University Press, p 256.
22 Richard Tawney in his book Equality published in 1931 (p 57 of the 4th edn), quoted in George, V. and Wilding, P. (1999) British society and social welfare: Towards a sustainable society, London: Macmillan, p 130.
23 Rose, S., Lewontin, R.C. and Kamin, L.J. (1990) Not in our genes: Biology, ideology and human nature, London: Penguin, p 145.
24 Baggini, J. (2008) Welcome to Everytown: A journey into the English mind (2nd edn), London: Granta, p 195.
25 Marmot, M. (2004) Status syndrome: How your social standing directly affects your health and life expectancy, London: Bloomsbury.
26 Wilkinson, R.G. (2009) ‘Rank’, D. Dorling, York, personal communication.
27 Or, put properly: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ (‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx, 1852’, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ ch01.htm).
28 The mantra was first coined by Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film ‘Wall Street’.
29 As the counter-mantra of a generation later relayed: ‘Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life ...’, from the 1996 film of the book Trainspotting (www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/trainspotting.html).
30 James, O. (2008) The selfish capitalist: Origins of affluenza, London: Vermilion, p 1.
31 Dorling, D. (2007) ‘Guest editorial: the real mental health bill’, Journal of Public Mental Health, vol 6, no 3, pp 6-13.
32 Dorling, D., Mitchell, R. and Pearce, J. (2008) ‘The global impact of income inequality on health by age: an observational study’, British Medical Journal, vol 335, pp 873-7.
33 The labelling of a seventh as, in effect, modern-day delinquents, is true even in the more equitable of these affluent countries. By the same criteria a sixth of children in the UK and a quarter of all children in the US qualify as modern-day delinquents; see Figure 2 and Table 1 in this volume. These education statistics are derived from OECD publications and are discussed in Chapter 3. The statistics on poverty and exclusion mentioned in Chapter 2 are discussed further and sources are given in Chapter 4. The claims of current levels of debt and prejudice are given in detail in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 provides a breakdown of wealth, housing and automobile statistics. And Chapter 7 is concerned with statistics on rising mental ill health and general despair.
34 Dorling, D., Rigby, J., Wheeler, B., Ballas, D., Thomas, B., Fahmy, E., Gordon, D. and Lupton, R. (2007) Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005, Bristol: The Policy Press.
35 Those who labour hardest in the world have the least wealth. Those who have most wealth need to (and usually do) labour least. The most cursory observation of the lives of the poor in poor countries and comparison with the lives of the rich in affluent nations reveals this.
36 Sabel, C., Dorling, D. and Hiscock, R. (2007) ‘Sources of income, wealth and the length of life: an individual level study of mortality’, Critical Public Health, vol 17, no 4, pp 293-310.
37 Of all the 25 richest countries in the world, the US and the UK rank as second and fourth most unequal respectively when the annual income of the best-off tenth of their population is compared with that of the poorest tenth. In descending order of inequality the 10%: 10% income ratios are: 17.7 Singapore, 15.9 US, 15 Portugal, 13.8 UK, 13.4 Israel, 12.5 Australia, 12.5 New Zealand, 11.6 Italy, 10.3 Spain, 10.2 Greece, 9.4 Canada, 9.4 Ireland, 9.2 Netherlands, 9.1 France, 9 Switzerland, 8.2 Belgium, 8.1 Denmark, 7.8 Korea(Republic of), 7.3 Slovenia, 6.9 Austria, 6.9 Germany, 6.2 Sweden, 6.1 Norway, 5.6 Finland, and 4.5 Japan. This is excluding very small states and is derived from the UN 2009 Human Development Report, Statistical Annex, Table M: http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2009_EN_Indicators.pdf.
38 For instance, in countries with less greed more people can spend more time doing more useful things than working to try to overcome the outcomes of greed.
39 The questions begin: ‘Been able to concentrate on whatever you are doing?’ and end ‘Been feeling reasonably happy, all things considered?’.
40 Shaw, M., Dorling, D. and Mitchell, R. (2002) Health, place and society, Harlow: Pearson, p 59; this book is now available on creative commons general open-access copyright: http://sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/healthplacesociety/ index.html
41 Dorling, D. and Barford, A. (2009) ‘The inequality hypothesis: thesis, antithesis, and a synthesis?’, Health and Place, vol 15, no 4, pp 1166-9.
1 For one of the clearest explanations of why so much is not so complex see the work of David Gordon on child poverty; for example: ‘The absence of any useful economic theory of child poverty is not a result of the complex nature of this subject. In fact, the economics of child poverty are very simple and are entirely concerned with redistribution – where sufficient resources are redistributed from adults to children there is no child poverty; where insufficient resources are redistributed from adults to children child poverty is inevitable’ (Gordon, D. [2008] ‘Children, policy and social justice’, in G. Craig, T. Burchardt and D. Gordon [eds] Social justice and public policy: Seeking fairness in diverse societies, Bristol: The Policy Press, pp 157-79, at p 166).
2 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2007) The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), OECD’s latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD, p 20.
3 Ibid; OECD (2009) PISA 2006 technical report, OECD’s technical report on the latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD.
4 For all of these phrases see OECD (2007) PISA, OECD’s latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD, pp 14 and 7.
5 As in Britain in 2009 when 10,000 ‘extra’ places were made available in universities for science, technology, engineering and mathematics students, but in the small print universities were told that they could also provide more places in business studies and economics. This small print appears to have been kept from the public. Given the huge increase in demand for places that year, and a small increase in cohort size, these ‘extra places’ were, in practice, a cut in opportunity to study.
6 Gerhardt, S. (2004) Why love matters, Hove: Brunner-Routledge, p 127.
7 Glover, J. (2001) Humanity: A moral history of the twentieth century, London: Pimlico, p 382; referring in turn to the works of Samuel and Pearl Oliner and of Emilie Guth.
8 Bauman, Z. (2008) The art of life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 97.
9 The way in which collaboration occurred in the Channel Island offshoots of Britain that were occupied by Germany during the Second World War is only just being acknowledged today. Similarly the fact that the high commands in Britain, the US and the Soviet Union were not overly concerned about genocide in Europe is a tale also only just beginning to be told.
10 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 155.
11 Ball, S.J. (2008) The education debate, Bristol: The Policy Press, p 33; referring in turn to a description of the OECD posted on the web by others in May 2002. As a provider of data the OECD does have some uses, and it does of course have many supporters, but you have to be so careful in looking for the assumptions made in any data it ‘models’ that those uses are limited.
12 OECD (2009) ‘History of the OECD’ (www.oecd.org/document/63/0,3343,en_2649_2 01185_1876671_1_1_1_1,00.html).
13 Such as: ‘what are all the possible factors that could influence global temperature change apart from carbon dioxide emissions?’. The OECD testers give naming one of these as an example of the kind of ‘harder questions’ they set to be awarded a high score, but they do not give a list of what would be considered suitable answers, although they must have given such a list to their markers (see OECD [2007] PISA, OECD’s latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD, p 17).
14 At least since a century ago: see Tuddenham, R.D. (1948) ‘Soldier intelligence in World Wars I and II’, American Psychologist, vol 3, pp 54-6; and the arguments of Flynn, J.R. (1984) ‘The mean IQ of Americans: massive gains 1932 to 1978’, Psychological Bulletin, vol 95, pp 29-51.
15 Flynn, J.R. (1987) ‘Massive IQ gains in 14 nations’, Psychological Bulletin, vol 101, pp 171-91.
16 Two standard deviations below the current mean according to the Psychological Corporation (2003, p 229), as reported in Flynn, J.R. (2007) What is intelligence? Beyond the Flynn effect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
17 Wilkinson, R.G. (2009) ‘ Intelligence’, D. Dorling, York, personal communication.
18 That country with the maximum of 4% of children at level 6 (genius status) being New Zealand (OECD [2007] PISA, OECD’s latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD, p 20), the unsaid implication being that, given this international distribution, even in the best of all possible worlds we should not expect more than, say, 5% of children in rich countries to ever reach level 6. If it were possible for more to do so, then (the testers might argue) that should have occurred somewhere by now. It would not be hard to counter such an argument by pointing to how very high average test scores can easily be achieved for a large group of children simply through hot-housing them in the most expensive of private boarding schools. The outcome often produces children who can pass tests and who have also been led to believe that they should be leaders.
19 Note that the technical report was released three years after the survey: OECD (2009) PISA 2006 technical report, OECD’s technical report on the latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD, p 145.
20 White, J. (2002) The child’s mind, London: RoutledgeFalmer, p 76.
21 You can search the internet and easily find such examples, but it is far more rewarding to be diverted by insights such as that it is: ‘… factors in modernized societies that have made music a specialty – individuality, competitiveness, compartmentalization, and institutionalization [are not found].… In small-scale pre-modern societies (and in any large modern sub-Saharan African city, as well as in children anywhere who are customarily exposed to frequent communal musical activity), everyone participates in music – regularly, spontaneously, and wholeheartedly’ (Dissanayake, E. [2005] ‘A review of The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body by Steven Mithen’, Evolutionary Psychology, vol 3, pp 375-80, at p 379).
22 Jolly, R. (2007) ‘Early childhood development: the global challenge’, The Lancet, vol 369, no 9555, 6 January, pp 1-78, at p 8.
23 The idea of innate intelligence is the idea that human brains are wired so that people who are good at some things are more often good at others and that correlation cannot be greatly influenced by society. James Flynn has recently explained (while discussing Clancy Blair’s findings) that: ‘The only thing that could prevent society from unraveling the correlational matrix would be brain physiology: a human brain so structured that no single cognitive ability could be enhanced without enhancing all of them. As Blair triumphantly shows, the brain is not like that’ (Flynn, J.R. [2006] ‘Towards a theory of intelligence beyond g’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol 29, no 2, pp 132-4, at p 132).
24 Kamin, L.J. (1981) ‘Some historical facts about IQ testing’, in S. Raby (ed) Intelligence: The battle for the mind, London: Pan Books, pp 90-7.
25 Howe, M.J.A., Davidson, J.W. and Sloboda, J.A. (1999) ‘Innate talents: reality or myth?’, in S.J. Ceci and W.M. Williams (eds) The nature–nurture debate: The essential readings, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 258-90, at p 279.
26 Clark, L. (2009) ‘Middle-class children have better genes, says former schools chief ... and we just have to accept it’, The Daily Mail, 13 May.
27 Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane; see Chapter 8 on education and comments on ethnicity on pp 177-9.
28 Some people suggest that it could be genetic similarities in the structure of the brains of identical twins that may cause them to behave slightly differently to other pupils in class and that difference could then be greatly magnified by environmental factors. There is, however, no evidence for this, whereas there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that teachers and other key individuals treat children slightly differently according to their appearance, and of course the one thing we know about identical twins is that they tend to look very much like each other. You might think this point is obvious but it is remarkable how well it has been ignored by those involved in twin studies. The idea that the similarities in the physical appearance of separated identical twins might matter so much is one of the very few ideas in this book that I think might be mine. I am almost certainly mistaken to imagine this! For one of the most insightful discussions, which does not discount the genetic possibilities, but which says they are so tiny that by implicit implication appearance could be as important, see the open-access copy of James Flynn’s December 2006 lecture at Trinity College Cambridge: www.psychometrics.sps.cam.ac.uk/page/109/beyond-the-flynn-effect.htm; the full-length version of the argument is in Flynn, J.R. (2007) What is intelligence? Beyond the Flynn effect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29 Gladwell, M. (2007) ‘What IQ doesn’t tell you about race’, The New Yorker, 17 December.
30 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p vi. The US prison population actually peaked in 1939 and fell then to a low in 1968 when incarceration rates were much less than 10 times below contemporary rates; see Vogel, R.D. (2004) ‘Silencing the cells: mass incarceration and legal repression in US prisons’, Monthly Review, vol 56, no 1.
31 Literally as well as metaphorically, as entertainment and sport were the two fields in which black Americans were allowed to partake. With Ronald Regan’s election, politics and entertainment merged, and as well as B-movie appearances, political bit parts too became possible for a miniscule minority of the black minority. President Obama himself was no great break from elitism. He was educated in the most prestigious private school in Honolulu as a child. See Elliot Major, L. (2008) ‘A British Obama would need an elite education’, The Independent, 27 November.
32 Ball, S.J. (2008) The education debate, Bristol: The Policy Press, p 70.
33 Timmins, N. (2001) The five giants: A biography of the welfare state (new edn), London: HarperCollins, p 380.
34 Downes, T.A. and Greenstein, S.M. (2002) ‘Entry into the schooling market: how is the behaviour of private suppliers influenced by public sector decisions?’, Bulletin of Economic Research, vol 54, no 4, pp 341-71, at p 349.
35 Ibid, p 342.
36 Dorling, D., Shaw, M. and Davey Smith, G. (2006) ‘Global inequality of life expectancy due to AIDS’, British Medical Journal, vol 332, no 7542, pp 662-4, at p 664, figure 4.
37 Dorling, D. (2006) ‘Class alignment’, Renewal: The Journal of Labour Politics, vol 14, no 1, pp 8-19.
38 George, S. (2008) Hijacking America: How the religious and secular right changed what Americans think, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 213.
39 Until 2008 spending in the US was always greater for incumbent Republicans compared to Democrats, and higher in years of rising incomes. The two parties only came close when postwar spending was lowest in 1952. See Bartels, L.M. (2008) Unequal democracy: The political economy of the new gilded age, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p 119.
40 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 70.
41 Perelman, M. (2006) ‘Privatizing education’, Monthly Review, vol 57, no 10.
42 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 158; quoting Jonathan Kozol in Harpers Magazine, September 2005, pp 48-9, in turn quoting from the headteacher who called the pupils he created ‘robots’.
43 See Giroux, H.A. and Saltman, K. (2008) ‘Obama’s betrayal of public education? Arne Duncan and the corporate model of schooling’, Truthout (www.truthout.org/121708R).
44 Tomlinson, S. (2007) ‘Learning to compete’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, vol 15, nos 2/3, pp 117-22, at p 120. The 57 varieties include numerous types of specialist school, ‘beacons’, ‘academies’ and many other flavours of division.
45 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 78.
46 Seton-Rogers, S. (2003) ‘Watson, Crick, and who?’, web Weekly: News from the Harvard Medical Community, 7 April.
47 ‘Lab suspends DNA pioneer Watson’, 19 October 2007, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7052416.stm
48 Connelly, M. (2008) Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p 272; Shockley’s prize was given to him and two others for the invention of the transistor, the key to early computing.
49 ‘Francis Crick’s controversial archive on first public display’, see www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2003/WTD002850.htm
50 Not simply as a result of having no great prizes, but perhaps also as a product of a little more understanding and acceptance of humanity, is the arrangement of prestige in academic journals and departments in the social sciences, arts and humanities, which is far less hierarchical than is often found in other academic disciplines. Of course generalisations such as this are not rules. The only living person to have received two Nobel prizes, Fred Sanger, appears a remarkably humane biochemist despite leading quite a closeted life. Linus Pauling similarly showed it was possible to be more than just a chemist, and won two prizes. These were for such different things that he is the only person counted twice in Figure 4 (this volume).
51 The Post-Autistic Economics Network and the Association of Heterodox Economists have pointed out how ridiculous traditional economics has become. Orthodox economists produce ‘dictionaries’ of their subject where almost 90% of the ‘great economists’ listed are men from just eight US Ivy League universities. Just as it is a little unfair on those with autism to link them to those who have chosen to be economists so too it is a little unfair on the ‘mad’ (who are often far more sane) to repeat the oft-told retort that only the mad and traditional economists believe that growth is forever possible; even prize winners such as Joe Stiglitz now criticise economics as it is traditionally taught. For these stories and more see Scott Cato, M. (2009) Green economics: An introduction to theory, policy and practice, London: Earthscan, pp 25 and 31.
52 Rogoff, K. (2002) ‘An open letter to Joseph Stiglitz’, International Monetary Fund (www.imf.org/external/np/vc/2002/070202.htm); see also Kay, J. (2004) The truth about markets: Why some nations are rich but most remain poor (2nd edn), London: Penguin, p 381 for references to economists slandering one another.
53 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 157.
54 Mayer, S.E. (2001) ‘How did the increase in economic inequality between 1970 and 1990 affect children’s educational attainment?’, American Journal of Sociology, vol 107, no 1, pp 1-32.
55 In Britain in 1997 Gordon Marshall the then head of the nation’s Economic and Social Research Council and his colleagues suggested that there was the possibility: ‘… that children born to working-class parents simply have less natural ability than those born to higher-class parents’, documented in S. White (2007) Equality, Cambridge: Polity Press, at p 66. It may be a tad cruel to the facially disfigured, but it is now often stated that the lie that the upper classes have better genes is simply propagated by ignorant chinless wonders whose only valid claim to special genetic inheritance is their lack of chin. Faced with increasing vocal and sustained opposition to their claims to be innately superior, those who have been told they are superior often retreat into self-supporting social bubbles for security. Within such comfort bubbles it is easier to believe statements such as that children born to working-class parents simply have less natural ability than children born to upper-class parents.
56 ‘… children of different class backgrounds tend to do better or worse in school – on account, one may suppose, of a complex interplay of sociocultural and genetic factors’ (Goldthorpe, J. and Jackson, M. [2007] ‘Education-based meritocracy: the barriers to its realization’, Economic Change, Quality of Life and Social Cohesion, 6th Framework Network [www.equalsoc.org/uploaded_files/regular/gold thorpe_jackson.pdf], p S3).
58 Identifying potential ‘Oxbridge material’ was an old term used in England for such practices before they became institutionalised. The idea that different people are made of different mental ‘material’ was most commonly espoused in the era of 1920s and 1930s eugenics when those who advocated the inheritability of intelligence wrote that it ‘… is seen with especial clearness in these numerous cases - like the Cecils, or the Darwins - where intellectual ability runs in families’ (Wells, H.G., Huxley, J. and Wells, G.P. [1931] The science of life, London: Cassell and Company Limited, p 823). That the offspring of such families do not now dominate intellectual life provides an extra spoonful of evidence to add to the great pile built up since the 1930s that now discredits eugenics and other such ‘… foolish analogies between biology and society [whereby the world’s richest man] … Rockefeller was acclaimed the highest form of human being that evolution had produced, a use denounced even by William Graham Sumner, the great “Social Darwinist”’ (Flynn, J.R.[2007] What is intelligence? Beyond the Flynn effect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 147-8).
59 The number of women expected to be awarded prizes in every decade from 1901 onwards has always been less than five, so the statistical test that is taught to novice students of probability cannot be applied. However, in an exact test, if the process is random, and on average 4.9% of prizes were awarded to women each year before 1950, then over the 15 years 1948–62 (inclusive) and the five prizes then available, the chance that not a single woman would be awarded a prize in any year is (1-0.049)(15*5)=0.023 or 2.3% (if all prize giving is independent).
60 Walter Lippmann, who was also an early critic of IQ testing, quoted in Kamin, L.J. (1981) ‘Some historical facts about IQ testing’, in S. Raby (ed) Intelligence: The battle for the mind, London: Pan Books, pp 90-7, at p 90. Just as Albert Einstein came to regret the work he had done that was later used to develop the nuclear bomb, so Walter Lippmann regretted that which his early work was later used to produce.
61 Howe, M.J.A., Davidson, J.W. and Sloboda, J.A. (1999) ‘Innate talents: reality or myth?’, in S.J. Ceci and W.M. Williams (eds) The nature–nurture debate: The essential readings, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 258-90.
62 Timmins, N. (2001) The five giants: A biography of the welfare state (new edn), London: HarperCollins, p 380. Note that there were also a few technical schools, but they never caught on so are not mentioned further here apart from saying that they were early evidence of beliefs in a continuum.
63 A significant few had been deemed not educable until the Education Act of 1981 decreed that none were to be obviously warehoused (or ‘garaged’) any longer, all having a right to some kind of education.
64 Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane, p 238.
65 Gillborn, D. and Youdell, D. (2000) Rationing education: Policy practice, reform and equity, Buckingham: Open University Press.
66 Hirschfield, P.J. (2008) ‘Preparing for prison? The criminalization of school discipline in the USA’, Theoretical Criminology, vol 12, no 1, pp 79-101, at pp 79, 82.
67 Orr, D. (2008) ‘Proof that we fail too many children’, The Independent, 19 March.
68 Rwanda only ranks similarly to the US if those awaiting trial for war crimes are included; for the ranking by civilian crimes see the Worldmapper website, in particular, www.worldmapper.org/posters/worldmapper_map293_ver5. pdf
69 The likelihood of children from different areas getting to university and to different types of university is mapped in Thomas, B. and Dorling, D. (2007) Identity in Britain: A cradle-to-grave atlas, Bristol: The Policy Press, which uses data from studies that show that in absolute terms almost all the extra places went to children resident in the already most ‘privileged’ areas. In January 2010 the Higher Education Funding Council for England published research showing a reverse in the trend. See Dorling, D. (2010) ‘Expert opinion’, The Guardian, 28 January, p 10.
70 Ball, S.J. (2008) The education debate, Bristol: The Policy Press, p 180, criticising and quoting from p 20, para 1.28 of the 2005 White Paper on Higher standards: Better schools for all, Department for Education and Skills, emphasis added.
71 Stanton, A. (2007) Mr Gum and the biscuit billionaire, London: Egmont, p 66. Incidentally it has been convincingly argued that J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, based her main character on Tony Blair and that Harry’s fortunes mirrored his, so all is still far from utopia in the world of children’s stories. ‘Rowling is Blair’s triumph (single mum becomes billionaire) and dark mirror’ (Kelly, S. [2008] ‘Novelising New Labour’, Renewal, vol 16, no 2, pp 52-9, at p 58).
72 Gillborn, D. and Youdell, D. (2000) Rationing education: Policy practice, reform and equity, Buckingham: Open University Press, p 221.
73 Ball, S.J. (2008) The education debate, Bristol: The Policy Press, p 173, referring to The Independent on Sunday’s release of an unpublished Department for Education and Skills report, during December 2006.
74 Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane, p 115.
75 McCarthy, M. (2008) ‘The big question: is it time the world forgot about cannabis in its war against drugs?’, The Independent, 3 October. Jonathan Adair Turner, who also goes by the title of Baron Turner of Ecchinswell, was a banker who was a Conservative student, but joined the British Social Democratic Party when it was formed, and then became a favourite of the Labour government. This was all possible without the need for him to alter a single conviction, such was the shift in British politics from 1979 to 1997.
76 Crim, K. (2005) ‘Notes on the intelligence of women’, The Atlantic, 18 May. Although Larry was taken to task, within just four years he was appointed to advise President Obama on economics. It is reported that in April 2009 he fell asleep on the job (http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/23/summers-sleep/). Apparently he uses diet coke to try to stay awake. For some advice Larry was given of how to stay awake and be smarter see www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/23/larry-summers-falls-aslee_n_190659.html
77 It is now largely accepted that fertility decline in the world is approaching replacement levels, according to UN central population projections (see www.worldmapper.org on the 2050 projection and technical notes available there). The driving force in this has not been the availability of contraceptives; these have been necessary but are not sufficient. Fertility falls when elitism is overcome enough for women to be allowed to learn and to gain just enough personal power to decide more for themselves. As a result we are now some way past the point where ‘Nearly half of the world’s population … lives in countries with fertility at or below replacement levels’ (Morgan, S.P. and Taylor, M.G. [2006], ‘Low fertility at the turn of the twenty-first century’, Annual Review of Sociology, vol 32, no 1, pp 375-99, at p 375). And, as fertility falls faster during economic slumps, we may be even further past that point than we currently realise. The date of 2052 is given as this article suggests that it will be just after the mid-century when, worldwide, human population stops rising. It may be earlier. It is unlikely to be later.
78 Fertility in China fell from 6.4 children per woman to 2.7 in just that one decade immediately preceding the introduction of the one child policy: Connelly, M. (2008) Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p 570.
79 Wilkinson, R.G. (2009) ‘Rank’, D. Dorling, York, personal communication.
1 Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane, p 143.
2 Alesina, A., Tella, R.D. and MacCulloch, R. (2004) ‘Inequality and happiness: are Europeans and Americans different?’, Journal of Public Economics, vol 88, pp 2009-42.
3 Wolff, J. and de-Shalit, A. (2007) Disadvantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 110, using arguments from Bradshaw, J. and Finch, N. (2003) ‘Overlaps in dimensions of poverty’, Journal of Social Policy, vol 32, no 4, pp 513-25.
4 Dorling, D., Rigby, J., Wheeler, B., Ballas, D., Thomas, B., Fahmy, E., Gordon, D. and Lupton, R (2007) Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005, Bristol: The Policy Press.
5 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 189. A fifth of the entire population had outstanding debt on credit cards by 2007; they were no longer a middle-class-only niche: ONS (Office for National Statistics) (2008) Wealth and Assets Survey: Initial report, London: ONS.
6 The 1968/69 Poverty Survey of Britain showed this to be the case. See Dorling, D., Rigby, J., Wheeler, B., Ballas, D., Thomas, B., Fahmy, E., Gordon, D. and Lupton, R (2007) Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005, Bristol: The Policy Press.
7 Ballas, D. and Dorling, D. (2007) ‘Measuring the impact of major life events upon happiness’, International Journal of Epidemiology, vol 36, no 6, pp 1244-52, table 3, which suggests that in essence bad and good holiday experiences tend to balance out, and that holidays not taken with family tend to be associated with a slightly more positive outcome.
8 In 1759 Adam Smith wrote about the linen shirt and shoes and has been endlessly quoted thereafter. In 1847 Karl Marx wrote on how homes would appear as hovels if a castle was built nearby. In 1901 Seebohm Rowntree wrote on the necessity of being able to afford a stamp to write a letter to a loved one.
9 Karl Polanyi’s writing of 1944 quoted in Magdoff, H. and Magdoff, F. (2005) ‘Approaching socialism’, Monthly Review, vol 57, no 3.
10 Almond, S. and Kendall, J. (2001) ‘Low pay in the UK: the case for a three sector comparative approach’, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, vol 72, no 1, pp 45-76, at p 45.
11 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 234, 292.
12 Frank, R.H. (2007) Falling behind: How rising inequality harms the middle class, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p 4.
13 Burns, J. (2007) The descent of madness: Evolutionary origins of psychosis and the social brain, Hove: Routledge, pp 99, 136, 184-5.
14 GLA (Greater London Authority) (2002) London divided: Income inequality and poverty in the capital, London: GLA; p 11 of the summary reported that some 20% of children were living in families that could not save £10 a month nor afford to take a holiday other than by visiting and staying with family.
15 Ibid, see p 64.
16 Raymond Baker, director of the Global Financial Integrity and an expert on money laundering, quoted in Mathiason, N. (2007) ‘Tax evasion taskforce to probe UK: international group will track $1 trillion of illicit funds’, Observer, 1 July.
17 Shah, H. and McIvor, M. (2006) A new political economy: Compass Programme for Renewal, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p 110.
18 Take, for instance, the Enlightenment taste for ranking races: ‘Immanuel Kant could wedge “the Arab”, “possessed of an inflamed imagination”, between the basest of (Southern) Europeans and the far East, but significantly above “the Negroes of Africa”’ (Goldberg, D.T. [2009] The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 163).
19 See Chapter 3, note 58, page 345, this volume.
20 Karl Pearson, the man who gave it that name, apparently thought of calling it ‘normal’ to try to end the dispute between those who termed it ‘Gaussian’ and those who called it ‘Laplacian’. Ending that dispute would in hindsight not appear to have been his only motive in choosing such a loaded term.
21 Over time the curve tends to move up the grades. Students perform better at tests when teachers can teach better to the test, which they can with each year that passes and, as there are always pressures on those who mark to be more generous as compared with last year, especially if their students are supposed to be especially able, markers have a tendency to become more lenient over time. A department in an elitist university in Britain may now award as many first class degrees as lower second class degrees. The most elite universities do not subdivide second class degrees, presenting yet another shape to the outcome distribution. In general, as we know more, we have become cleverer, but we still have huge difficulty in trying not to constantly claim that within any generation some of us are much cleverer than others.
22 Unemployment is only possible in countries that have chosen to afford unemployment benefit. Unemployment rates fall when benefit levels are so low that they are very hard to live on. People will then do any work, no matter how demeaning, and will more often turn to crime. The rates of unemployment in a country, and who is unemployed, are thus the results of choices made as to how many jobs to provide for whom, and how punitive a rate of benefit to set. Often fewer jobs are provided for younger adults, who consequently experience higher unemployment and crime rates (Gordon, D. [2008] ‘Unemployment’, D. Dorling, Bristol, personal communication).
23 Known more commonly as a chi-squared test, usually attributed to Karl Pearson although Stephen Stigler’s law of eponymy, that ‘no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer’, may well apply (Bibby, J. [2009] ‘Karl Pearson’, D. Dorling, York, personal communication).
24 The chances are at least ten times less likely than the chance of tossing a coin 100 times and counting exactly 50 heads and 50 tails. The chance of that is about 8% (not to be confused with the chance of counting exactly 50 heads then exactly 50 tails, which is extremely small). I’m unsure how many times precisely as my computer dislikes calculating factorials over 170. The figure of 8% is calculated as 100!/50!/50!/2100.
25 MacKenzie, D. (1999) ‘Eugenics and the rise of mathematical statistics in Britain’, in D. Dorling and S. Simpson (eds) Statistics in society, London: Arnold, pp 55-61.
26 Pearson, K. (1902) ‘On the fundamental conceptions of biology’, Biometrika, vol 1, no 3, pp 320-44, at p 334.
27 Cot, A.L. (2005) ‘“Breed out the unfit and breed in the fit”. Irving Fisher, economics, and the science of heredity’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol 64, no 3, pp 793-826. There have been too few female economists for a test to be undertaken as to whether they would have been drawn to eugenics had they been greater in number. What is important to remember is that some people were more resistant to eugenicists’ ideas than others and that presumably remains the case today.
28 Ellis, L., Hershberger, S., Field, E. et al (2008) Sex differences: Summarizing more than a century of scientific research, New York, NY: Psychology Press; see p 405 on autism, p 321 on mathematics, p 324 on science and p 355 on males rating their abilities highly during adolescence.
29 Livesey, R. (2007) Socialism, sex, and the culture of aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 75, 80, 81, referring explicitly to Karl’s doubts over women’s ‘capacity’ and his arguments of 1894 with Emma Brook). Note that Karl was not the worse of the eugenists. For that mantle Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, is widely regarded as a more ‘able’ contender. Charles Darwin’s son (Leonard Darwin) and grandson (Charles Galton Darwin) are also contenders.
30 Ibid, p 188, quoting from writers in The new age editions published in 1911. In this case the so-called ‘race’ being discussed was the ‘British race’, a thing we hear little of today thankfully, as Scots and Welsh and Irish balk at being racially incorporated so crudely (and those three five-letter labels are also now very rarely discussed as if they described ‘races’).
31 Whereas just as the things which matter with ethnicity are not ‘race’ differences but the difference that ‘race’ makes, what matters with sex ‘... is not the gender difference; it is the difference gender makes’ (MacKinnon, C.A. [2006] Are women human? And other international dialogues, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, p 74).
32 The war made planning for a National Health Service in Britain possible far earlier than might otherwise have been the case, planning that was not simply a theoretical pipedream. See for example Morris, J.N. (2001 [1944]) ‘Health, no 6, Handbooks for discussion groups, Association for Education in Citizenship’, in G. Davey Smith, D. Dorling and M. Shaw (eds) Poverty, inequality and health in Britain, Bristol: The Policy Press, pp 245-62.
33 Connelly, M. (2008) Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p 163. Because it was largely used in secret (and in the past), you won’t find many mentions of the term ‘crypto-eugenics’ using Google, but there are some.
34 Kamin, L.J. (1974) The science and politics of IQ, New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
35 Kamin, L.J. (1981) ‘Some historical facts about IQ testing’, in S. Raby (ed) Intelligence: The battle for the mind, London: Pan Books, pp 90-7.
36 Smith, R. (2007) Being human: Historical knowledge and the creation of human nature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p 89.
37 ‘Questions of nature versus nurture are meaningless.… For human behavioural disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, the inherent plasticity of the nervous system requires a systems approach to incorporate all of the myriad epigenetic factors that can influence such outcomes’ (Gottesman, I. I. and Hanson, D.R. [2005] ‘Human development: biological and genetic processes’, Annual Review of Psychology, vol 56, no 1, pp 263-86, at p 263).
38 Miller, D. (2005) ‘What is social justice’, in N. Pearce and W. Paxton (eds) Social justice: Building a fairer Britain, London, Politico’s, pp 3-20, at pp 14-15.
39 See Chapter 3, note 28, page 342, this volume.
40 As quoted in White, S. (2007) Equality, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 66, which gives the details of who these people were and the wider context. Stuart White’s book is also itself an example of welcome evidence that exceptions to this contemporary prejudice exist even within the hallowed halls. See also Chapter 3, note 55, page 333, this volume.
41 Goldthorpe, J. and Jackson, M. (2007) ‘Education-based meritocracy: the barriers to its realization’, Economic Change, Quality of Life and Social Cohesion, 6th Framework Network (www.equalsoc.org/uploaded_files/regu lar/goldthorpe_jackson.pdf), p S3. See also Chapter 3, note 56, page 345.
42 Tony Blair disguised his geneticist beliefs by talking of them as the ‘God-given potential’ of children, but it is clear from the policies he promoted, his ‘scientific Christianity’, and the way he talked about what he thought of his own children’s special potential (see Chapter 5, note 18, page 356, this volume), that his God dealt out potential through genes. For the full wording of his text about children’s abilities delivered in 2005 see Ball, S.J. (2008) The education debate, Bristol: The Policy Press, p 12.
43 Dixon, M. (2005) Brave new choices? Behavioural genetics and public policy: A discussion document, London: Institute of Public Policy Research.
44 Bourdieu, P. (2007) Sketch for a self-analysis (English edn), Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 8, 9. Pierre Bourdieu does admittedly go on to criticise French colleagues too, particularly over how the support of some for Stalinism and Maoism was only made possible due to their geographical exclusion from more usual places and people.
45 Gordon, D. (2007) ‘Want 1999–2005’, D. Dorling, Bristol, personal communication; comparison made between the 1999 Joseph Rowntree Foundation Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey and the 2004–05 equivalent questions asked in the official ONS Family Resources Survey.
46 Dorling, D. (2008) ‘Worlds apart: how inequality breeds fear and prejudice in Britain through the eyes of two very different teenage girls’, The Guardian, 12 November.
47 Hills, J. and Stewart, K. (2009) Towards a more equal society? Poverty, inequality and policy since 1997, Bristol: The Policy Press.
48 See Chapter 8, note 26, page 383, this volume.
49 These are taken from the categories used in Dorling, D., Rigby, J., Wheeler, B., Ballas, D., Thomas, B., Fahmy, E., Gordon, D. and Lupton, R. (2007) Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005, Bristol: The Policy Press.
50 The graph was due to appear first in Gordon, D. (2000) ‘The scientific measurement of poverty: recent theoretical advances’, in J. Bradshaw and R. Sainsbury (eds) Researching poverty, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp 37-58, but was not reproduced correctly. Later a full description was provided in Gordon, D. (2006) ‘The concept and measurement of poverty’, in C. Pantazis, D. Gordon and R. Levitas (eds) Poverty and social exclusion in Britain: The Millennium Survey, Bristol: The Policy Press, pp 29-70.
51 Abdallah, S. (2008) ‘Family Resources Survey’, D. Dorling, London: New Economics Foundation, personal communication. His analysis of the Family Resources Survey shows that what is called the ‘mean average net unequivalised for household structure weekly income’ for the five quintile groups in Britain in 2005/06 were: £150.69, £270.31, £398.13, £576.09 and £1,104.09, not that the nine pence matters at that point. Equivalised for household composition there is no meaningful difference in the resulting ratios; the national arithmetic mean income, which also happens to be that which more than 60% of households lived on less than in 2005, was £499.15 a week. See Chapter 2, note 37, page 339, this volume, for the latest international decile ranges and how widely they vary between countries.
52 George, S. (2008) Hijacking America: How the religious and secular right changed what Americans think, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 209-12.
53 Kraemer, S. (1999) ‘Promoting resilience: changing concepts of parenting and child care’, International Journal of Child and Family Welfare, vol 3, pp 273-87.
54 Dorling, D. (2008) ‘Cash and the class system’, New Statesman, 24 July.
55 The private cars were commandeered. They had only recently become one of the key symbols of status. For a précis of Orwell’s account see Harman, C. (2002) A people’s history of the world (2nd edn), London: Bookmarks, p 500.
56 Peter Jones talking on the BBC show ‘Top Gear’ during 2008. For information on the man and his views of his offspring, see www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/dragons/peterjones.shtml
57 Beck, U. (2000) World risk society (2nd edn), Cambridge: Polity Press, p 6, on how the richest fifth of people on the planet consume six times more than did their parents.
58 Wade, R.H. (2007) ‘Should we worry about income inequality?’, in D. Held and A. Kaya (eds) Global inequality: Patterns and explanations, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 104-31, at p 109.
59 Frank, R.H. (2007) Falling behind: How rising inequality harms the middle class, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, annual figures derived from graphs on pp 17 and 19.
60 Between 2000 and 2005, according to George, S. (2008) Hijacking America: How the religious and secular right changed what Americans think, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 211.
61 Dickens, R., Gregg, P. and Wadsworth, J. (2003) ‘Introduction’, in R. Dickens, P. Gregg and J. Wadsworth (eds) The labour market under New Labour: The state of working Britain 2003, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 1-13, derived from figure 1.2, p 11.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 BBC (2008) ‘UK income gap “same as in 1991”’, 16 December (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7786149.stm).
65 George, V. and Wilding, P. (1999) British society and social welfare: Towards a sustainable society, London: Macmillan, p 37.
66 Elliott, L. and Curtis, P. (2009) ‘UK’s income gap widest since 60s: Labour admits child poverty failure, incomes of poorest fall’, The Guardian, 8 May.
67 George, V. and Wilding, P. (1999) British society and social welfare: Towards a sustainable society, London: Macmillan, p 110.
68 Kelsey, J. (1997) The New Zealand experiment: A world model for structural adjustment?, Auckland: Auckland University Press, p 333, far from agreeing with, but quoting the views of Alan Gibbs from 1994.
69 Ibid.
70 Somers, M.R. and Block, F. (2005) ‘From poverty to perversity: ideas, markets, and institutions over 200 years of welfare debate’, American Sociological Review, vol 70, pp 260-87.
1 People who were seen as having the wrong colour skin were more frequently stabbed; see Leech, K. (2005) Race, London: SPCK, pp 79-84, 141-5.
2 Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p 160.
3 So soon after dictatorships were overthrown in Greece (1974), Portugal (1974) and Spain (1975).
4 Dorling, D. (2001) ‘Anecdote is the singular of data’, Environment and Planning A, vol 33, pp 1335-40, at pp 1336-9, mentions the National Front as viewed by a child.
5 The National Front vote collapsed in 1979 as far-right voters voted with the Conservative Party.
6 Ballescas, R.P. (2003) ‘Filipino migration to Japan, 1970s to 1990s’, in S. Ikehata and L.N. Yu-Jose (eds) Philippines–Japan relations, Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, chapter 15, at p 563. Indirectly related is Adolf Hitler’s description of women’s work as kinder, küche and kirche (children, kitchen and church) from an earlier time of prejudice. Incidentally, in Britain, in more recent years, the work for which migrant labour has been most needed has been described as ‘picking, plucking and packing’.
7 See Hayter, T. (2004) Open borders: The case against immigration controls, London: Pluto Press, p 49, on how the 1960s immigration controls inadvertently encouraged immigration. The rise in prejudice ensured that it was soon forgotten that these immigrants were also deliberately brought to Europe to work night shifts in mills and car plants, to drive buses and to be nurses. By 1989 MORI polls in Britain found over 60% of respondents saying there were too many immigrants. By 2007 that had risen to 68%. It is easy to stoke up prejudices about numbers of people; see Finney, N. and Simpson, L. (2009) ‘Sleepwalking to segregation’? Challenging myths of race and migration, Bristol: The Policy Press – these particular statistics are from p 53.
8 Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p 133. The quote begins ‘But for reasons that remain somewhat unclear…’. Migration replacement of fertility decline is a possible reason to explain the trend across most of the rich world; the pull of money and huge demand for service labour are other reasons.
9 That particular claim, it is suggested on Wikipedia, is made in the biography by Simon Heffer (1999) Like the Roman: The life of Enoch Powell, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
10 Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p 210.
11 Dorling, D. (2007) ‘The soul searching within new Labour’, Local Economy, vol 22, no 4, pp 317-24.
12 Goody, J. (2006) The theft of history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p 15.
13 Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane; see Chapter 9 on teenage pregnancies.
14 Thoburn, J. (2000) A comparative study of adoption, Norwich: University of East Anglia, p 5; the number of children placed in non-family care doubled in the US between 1987 and 1999, was higher than in other affluent nations, and more children were consequently adopted. More are also given up for adoption in the US without being placed in care than in Western Europe or Australasia.
15 See Basic Income Earth Network (www.basicincome.org/bien/) on how all could be paid a living income.
16 In the few cases where this was not the case it is remarked on as a problem. As the Public Broadcast Service in the US explains to its browsers: ‘Slaves were the lowest class in Athenian society, but according to many contemporary accounts they were far less harshly treated than in most other Greek cities. Indeed, one of the criticisms of Athens was that its slaves and freemen were difficult to tell apart’ (www.pbs.org/empires/thegreeks/background/32b.html).
17 James, O. (2009) Contented dementia, London: Vermilion, p 23.
18 Presumably this was also the view of his wife, or she was not strongly enough opposed to prevent the school choice, but that has not been documented. Blair’s comments about the work which would be beneath his children are recorded in Steel, M. (2008) What’s going on, London: Simon & Schuster, p 8. It is now often repeated on the web: ‘There’s a great quote in Robin Cook’s memoir. He was talking to Blair about [Blair’s] son’s selective school and Roy Hattersley was there and they said Harold Wilson had sent his children to a comprehensive and one became a headmaster and the other was a professor in the Open University and Blair said, “I rather hope my sons do better than that!”’, as recorded by John Paul Flintoff (www.flintoff.org/what-happened-to-meritocracy). Flintoff repeats online Mark Steel’s now widely spreading comment: ‘For Blair, status and wealth are everything. It’s beyond him to think that education might be worthwhile for itself. He can’t possibly think along those lines.’
19 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 64.
20 For a few years in the 1970s it was touch and go. Across the Atlantic the population centre of Britain oscillated between moving north or south at this time and voting became much more unpredictable. Thousands of individual decisions swung one way and another in that decade 1968–78. The most equitable year was probably 1976, but even by then the underlying trajectory on inequality had almost certainly shifted direction. It was within those years in the 1970s that the direction of long-term social change turned. See the argument in Section 4.5 of this book (pages 136-7) as to why 1971 is a key date in the US; many other years can also be singled out. In Britain the discussion of Figure 13 in this volume (pages 174-9) suggests the choice was made in 1974. Worldwide the year 1973 is the year nearest to the knife edge, to the point when the pendulum was hovering most still, pulled almost equally in all directions, and the future was most shrouded.
21 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 65.
22 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 325.
23 James, O. (2008) The selfish capitalist: Origins of affluenza, London: Vermilion, p 152.
24 Rose, M. (2005) ‘The cost of a career in minutes and morbidity’, in D. Housten (ed) Work–life balance, London: Macmillan, pp 29-54, at p 42.
25 Rutherford, J. and Shah, H. (2006) The good society: Compass Programme for Renewal, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p 37.
26 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 87, Figure 4.2; and p 118.
27 In her television interview for Granada’s ‘World in Action’ (‘rather swamped’) on 27 January 1978 (www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=103485). Unlike Enoch Powell she did not even suggest allowing in just enough others to meet what she saw as the country’s needs.
28 James, O. (2007) Affluenza: How to be successful and stay sane, London: Vermilion, p 72.
29 Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 142. This wording was often used by Goran Persson, Prime Minister of Sweden (1996–2006).
30 According to Gøsta Esping-Andersen, as described in Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 103.
31 Many could describe themselves as English in London, but do not because of the connotations in such a mixed city. In cities where people mix less well, such as in some of the towns and cities of Yorkshire, people often do not describe themselves with a single word that says they are from a particular city, but as a ‘Yorkshire man’, for instance. Levels of tolerance are particularly high in London and are a little lower than average in some parts of Yorkshire. See the survey studied in Kaur-Ballagan, K., Mortimore, R. and Sapsed, E. (2007) Public attitudes towards cohesion and integration, Ipsos MORI Report for the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, London: The Commission on Integration and Cohesion, p 50. This survey predated the rise in BNP votes in Yorkshire.
32 Pálsson, G. (2002) ‘The life of family trees and the book of Icelanders’, Medical Anthropology, vol 21, pp 337-67, at p 345.
33 The figures for Japan are now widely known following the publication of Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane. This book also includes the original argument that equality reduces ethnicity (p 178). Similarly statistics of a 3.5 : 1 inequality ratio for Iceland can be derived from Statistics Iceland (2007) ‘Risk of poverty and income distribution 2003-2004’ (www.statice.is/Pages/444?NewsID=2600).
34 Mazumdar, P.M.H. (2003) ‘Review of Elof Axel Carlson. The unfit: a history of a bad idea’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol 77, no 4, pp 971-2.
35 Connelly, M. (2008) Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp 347-8.
36 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 26, referring to the work of Ruthie Gilmore on racism as premature mortality. Her definition can even be extended to patterns in murder. See Dorling, D. (2005) ‘Prime suspect: murder in Britain’, in P. Hillyard, C. Pantazis, S. Tombs, D. Gordon and D. Dorling (eds) Criminal obsessions: Why harm matters more than crime, London, Crime and Society Foundation, pp 23-38, on how supposedly individually motivated murder reflects wider changes in prejudice over time, with rates reducing for women and rising for the poor, as the status of both groups changes.
37 Hayter, T. (2004) Open borders: The case against immigration controls, London: Pluto Press, p 103.
38 According to the 2001 Census; see Thomas, B. and Dorling, D. (2007) Identity in Britain: A cradle-to-grave atlas, Bristol: The Policy Press, p 46.
39 Green, R. (2007) ‘Managing migration impacts’, Presentation to the Migration Impacts Forum, 17 October, on Community Cohesion by Rodney Green, Chief Executive, Leicester City Council, London: Home Office, p 6. Last found (11/10/09) at: www.communities.gov.uk/documents/communities/pdf/ communitycohesion.
40 Cohen, S. (2006) Standing on the shoulders of fascism: From immigration control to the strong state, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, p 114.
41 Cohen, N. (2004) Pretty straight guys, London: Faber and Faber, p 74.
42 Dorling, D. (2008) ‘London and the English desert: the grain of truth in a stereotype’, Geocarrefour, vol 83, no 2, pp 87-98.
43 Figures from Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p 16; extra math(s) is derived: 17/(44-17)×(10-1).
44 Dorling, D. (2006) ‘Commentary: the fading of the dream: widening inequalities in life expectancy in America’, International Journal of Epidemiology, vol 35, no 4, pp 979-80; Dorling, D. (2006) ‘Inequalities in Britain 1997-2006: the dream that turned pear-shaped’, Local Economy, vol 21, no 4, pp 353-61.
45 Galbraith, J.K. (1992 [1954]) The great crash 1929, London: Penguin, p 194 on the unsoundness of the economy.
46 Short, J.R., Hanlon, B. and Vicino, T.J. (2007) ‘The decline of inner suburbs: the new suburban gothic in the United States’, Geography Compass, vol 1, no 3, pp 641-56, at p 653.
47 Kesteloot, C. (2005) ‘Urban socio-spatial configurations and the future of European cities’, in Y. Kazepov (ed) Cities of Europe: Changing contexts, local arrangements, and the challenge to urban cohesion, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 123-48, at p 141.
48 For John McCain, it was at least seven but may have been as many as 11. All 11 ‘family’ properties were listed by the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/ref/us/politics/mccain-properties.html) on 23 August 2008 (by reporter David M. Halbfinger). David Cameron and his wife owned at least four in 2009, maybe more. David asked the reporter who revealed this please ‘… not to make me sound like a prat for not knowing how many houses I’ve got’. The Times newspaper revealed this in 2009 (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6267193.ece?token=null&offset=84&page=8).
49 Frank, R.H. (2007) Falling behind: How rising inequality harms the middle class, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p 136.
50 Even if you say you believe in inheritance because you believe that your offspring are somehow inferior, incapable of surviving without your help, they would do far better under such circumstances to live in a society that was more equal, where inheritance of wealth was less tolerated. This would be one of those societies that already exist where the living look out for each other more, rather than just for themselves or their families. Such societies are found in most rich countries such as Finland, Sweden, Austria, Korea, Belgium, France, Ireland and Greece. In more unequal societies those few fortunate ‘inferior’ ones who have to rely on the generosity of their dead relatives live hoping not to be duped out of their inheritance by their unscrupulous and not so financially fortunate neighbours. If you believe in inheritance, even though you do not see your offspring as superior, you still help create division, and help create and maintain suspicion, mistrust and racism.
51 The story is well known but usually still told as a valiant feat of exploration. The exact date is debated as the date line was not in existence at this time and Cook had travelled from the East.
52 James I also ruled over Wales, which had been overrun by the English conquest in 1282–83, was treated as a principality from 1301, but was in effect a colony, and had its law replaced by English law in 1536. The idea of Britishness would not even begin to become popular until another century had passed and the Kingdom of Great Britain was created in 1707. Britishness as an identity was not widespread until a century later again, when its rise in popularity was brought about to help with wars against France. The ‘British race’ is in fact a very recent invention. The Britons originally all spoke Welsh.
53 Taken from an assessment by three Harvard economists that more calmly says ‘a major reason’ but which does think of race as widely defined. The quotation is from Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p 178. It is worth noting that it could similarly be argued that race is the reason for much of the absence of a Japanese welfare state because pay is so equal due to assumptions of racial unity.
54 Gordon, D. (2009) ‘Global inequality, death, and disease’, Environment and Planning A, vol 41, no 6, pp 1271-2.
55 As the medical geographer Peter Haggett used to describe the process whereby sexual diseases were spread (Haggett, P. [1996] ‘Sex’, D. Dorling, Bristol, personal communication).
56 Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
57 The rich have always known this. However, when three decades later even the poorest were recorded as saying they looked ‘for the image not the face’, the brands of clothes each other wore, it caused some shock; see Lawson, N. (2009) All consuming, London: Penguin, p 56.
58 Frank, R. (2007) Richi$tan, New York, NY: Random House, p 231.
59 In Britain prenuptial agreements, contracts drawn up prior to marriage to prevent the sharing of wealth if the marriage is dissolved, were described as a ‘valuable weapon in the armoury of the wealthy’ by one lawyer on Valentine’s Day 2009 (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/columnists/article3368933.ece, as reported in The Times, 14 February 2009), and it was later announced on 5 July 2009 in the case of one woman, Katrin, who had married a banker, that the agreements were binding under British law: ‘Nicolas was then a banker at JP Morgan, earning about US$500,000 a year. As Katrin has argued during her legal battle, he too stands to inherit a substantial amount of money. His father is a former vice-president of IBM. She has said his parents are worth £30m; he says £6m’. In this particular relationship it was Nicolas who was the ‘poor’ one; she was said to be ‘worth’ between £55 million and £100 million (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6634106.ece). Despite her wealth she is reported to have ended up sleeping on a mattress on the floor of her flat at one point when Nicolas would not move out of the bedroom. It does not sound as if she was particularly happy. The point of recounting this tale is to remember how little great riches increase happiness.
60 Only one dollar in twenty that North Americans give to charity goes to charities that carry out work for ‘public and societal benefit’; see Edwards, M. (2008) Just another emperor? The myths and realities of philanthrocapitalism, London: Demos and The Young Foundation.
61 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 238.
62 This version of her words is taken from the Daily Mail and was printed just a few days before the 30th anniversary of her first general election victory; see Phibbs, H. (2007) ‘Harman’s crazy class war will make us all poorer’, Daily Mail, 27 April.
63 Margaret Thatcher first became well known as the government minister who took free milk away from all British school children in 1971; presumably she thought most were not destined to grow tall and hence all did not need to be given milk, that milk should be only for those whose parents could afford it. An argument was put forward that parents should be responsible for the nutrition of their own children – it was not the state’s responsibility. But the state continued to provide free school meals to those deemed poor enough and religious instruction to all who did not opt out. The British state provides mostly free healthcare, just as it once gave children free milk. Where the line is drawn depends on what is thought to be fine for some to go without.
64 Connelly, M. (2008) Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp 258-61.
65 Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p 170.
66 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 337; emphasis in original.
67 Wars provide a fog that allows other atrocities to take place. Among the many reasons to try to avoid war this one is not often stated. Even if a war may appear just, in taking part in that war the smokescreen in which genocide is possible is created. In 1935 Adolf Hitler explained that ‘if war came, he would take up and carry out this question of euthanasia, because it was easier to do so in wartime’ (Glover, J. [2001] Humanity: A moral history of the twentieth century, London: Pimlico, p 352).
68 Ibid, p 333. Recent reports suggest that this one Ron was two different men with the same name (see the Ron Ridenhour entry in Wikipedia as of 16 August 2009 in which the doubts are highlighted). If it were two different men then the cause for optimism is ratcheted up a fraction higher as such behaviour, even at that time, was less rare than we thought.
69 Abhorrent enough for those in power to do something to curb it, which they did by passing the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and installing CCTV in police stations and vans.
70 Wilkinson, R.G. (2007) ‘Commentary: the changing relation between mortality and income’, International Journal of Epidemiology, vol 36, no 3, pp 492-4, 502-3, at p 493; referring to the evidence collected by an historian of childhood, DeMause, L. (ed) (1974) The history of childhood, London: Condor.
71 Both the examples of racism being attractive in circumstances of inequality, and of a poor family where the parents were jailed when video evidence was found of their teaching their toddlers to fight each other to harden them, are discussed in detail in Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane.
72 The sad personal details of the lives of many men at the head of British industry are described in Peston, R. (2008) Who runs Britain? How the super-rich are changing our lives, London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp 46, 82-3, 129, 201-2.
73 Spinney, L. (2004) ‘Snakes in suits’, New Scientist, 21 August.
74 Moran, M. (2008) ‘Representing the corporate elite in Britain: capitalist solidarity and capitalist legacy’, in M. Savage and K. Williams (eds) Remembering elites, Oxford: Blackwell, pp 64-79, at p 74.
75 Reiner, R. (2007) Law and order: An honest citizen’s guide to crime and control, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 6.
76 Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 118, quoting from Orwell’s 1953 collection of essays.
77 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 95.
78 Pogge, T.W. (2007) ‘Why inequality matters’, in D. Held and A. Kaya (eds) Global inequality: Patterns and explanations, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 132-47.
79 Leech, K. (2005) Race, London: SPCK. See introductory pages.
1 Peston, R. (2008) Who runs Britain? How the super-rich are changing our lives, London: Hodder & Stoughton, p 336.
2 It was said that he had himself become ‘a market force’ through his pronouncements that year: Treneman, A. (2009) ‘Appalling delivery, rambling replies but the Robert Peston show is a masterclass’, The Times, 5 February.
3 ‘Today Programme’, 2 May 2009, BBC Radio 4.
4 Quote from a poorly titled article: Toynbee, P. (2007) ‘Balls’s bold plan to end child poverty could revive Labour’, The Guardian, 11 December, written three days after this article on the most expensive of drinks: Chakrabortty, A. (2007) ‘If I had a little money...’, The Guardian, 8 December.
5 The chief vice of the affluent has switched from smoking to drinking because of health concerns; and more now avoid cocaine. It was during Herbert Spenser’s tour of the US that the cigarette story was first told; see James, O. (2008) The selfish capitalist: Origins of affluenza, London: Vermilion, p 193.
6 ONS (Office for National Statistics) (2008) Wealth and Assets Survey: Initial report, London: ONS.
7 Ibid. It is worth speculating on why ONS chose this particular headline at this time. Later, on 10 December 2009, when the full results were released, their headline was ‘Household wealth in GB £9 trillion in 2006/08’.
8 This is calculated as 4% divided by (4%+2%) and assumes equal numbers of children in each household type with children.
9 Foster, J.B. (2006) ‘The optimism of the heart: Harry Magdoff (1913–2006)’, Monthly Review, vol 57, no 8 (www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/foster020106.html), quoting figures revealed by Harry Magdoff, chief statistician of the New Deal Works Progress Administration in the 1940s, and an American socialist.
10 Frank, R.H. (2007) Falling behind: How rising inequality harms the middle class, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p 90.
11 James, O. (2008) The selfish capitalist: Origins of affluenza, London: Vermilion, p 153.
12 PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) (2006) Living on tick: The 21st century debtor, London: PwC.
13 Edwards, S. (2008) ‘Citizens Advice response to latest repossession figures’, Creditman.biz report on remarks of Citizens Advice Head of Consumer Policy, Sue Edwards, London: Citizens Advice Bureau.
14 BBC (2009) ‘Personal insolvency at new record’, 7 August (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8189053.stm).
15 Frank, R. (2007) Richi$tan, New York, NY: Random House, p 153.
16 The figures for British university students are given in GLA (Greater London Authority) (2002) London divided: Income inequality and poverty in the capital, London: GLA, p 80.
17 Press Association (2008) ‘Watchdog to investigate “payday” loans’, The Guardian, 28 July.
18 Yates, M.D. (2006) ‘Capitalism is rotten to the core’, Monthly Review, vol 58, no 1.
19 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 183.
20 The cover of the May/June 2009 issue of the journal in which these claims were made had the by-line: ‘One repossession claim every half hour: non-high street lenders only want to get their money back’. See Roof, vol 34, no 3, and for more details of the wider losses, Dorling, D. (2009) ‘Daylight robbery’, p 11 of that issue.
21 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 90.
22 Foster, J.B. (2006) ‘The household debt bubble’, Monthly Review, vol 58, no 1 (www.monthlyreview.org/0506jbf.htm), reporting on data released in the biennial The state of working America, written by economists at the Economic Policy Institute (www.epinet.org) in Washington, DC: Mishel, L., Bernstein, J. and Allegretto, S. (2005) The state of working America: 2004/005, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
23 George, V. and Wilding, P. (1999) British society and social welfare: Towards a sustainable society, London: Macmillan, p 147.
24 Pogge, T.W. (2007) ‘Why inequality matters’, in D. Held and A. Kaya (eds) Global inequality: Patterns and explanations, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 132-47, at p 143).
25 Cohen, G.A. (2002) If you’re an egalitarian how come you’re so rich?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
26 Frank, R. (2007) Richi$tan, New York, NY: Random House, p 34.
27 Blastland, M. and Dilnot, A. (2007) The tiger that isn’t: Seeing through a world of numbers, London: Profile Books, p 17.
28 Nast, H.J. (2006) ‘Critical pet studies?’, Antipode, vol 38, no 5, pp 894-906, at p 900 and p 903, n 1. Pets also rose to the fore in their importance to the rich during the last gilded age. For this and how pet cemeteries arose see the work of Philip Howell (2002) ‘A place for the animal dead: pets, pet cemeteries and animal ethics in late Victorian England’, Ethics, Place and Environment, vol 5, pp 5-22.
29 Edwards, M. (2008) ‘Just another emperor? The myths and realities of philanthrocapitalism’, London: Demos and The Young Foundation, p 91, using as his source the work of Kevin Philips.
30 A hedge fund manager interviewed in November 2005 and reported in Peston, R. (2008) Who runs Britain? How the super-rich are changing our lives, London: Hodder & Stoughton, p 205.
31 Kitson, M. (2005) ‘Economics for the future’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol 29, no 6, pp 827-35, at p 827.
32 The paper is referred to and discussed further in Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 127.
33 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press; paraphrasing and quoting both Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith on p 53.
34 Ibid. It has been suggested that the population rise that caused Thomas Malthus such consternation was partly created by the greed that drove the enclosures of the Commons. Personal communication with Molly Scot Cato, referring to Neeson, J.M. (1996) Commoners: Common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700–1820, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35 Patel, R. (2008) Stuffed and starved: From farm to fork, the hidden battle for the world food system, London: Portobello, p 85; see also his n 34 on p 334 for a short essay on Thomas Malthus’s mistakes, including how they were partly an English reaction to the French revolution, reflecting an old English fear of, and fascination with, ‘the untamed and fecund flesh of the destitute’ French revolutionaries.
36 There are already studies showing that economics students find moral behaviour hard and that less morally inhibited students perform better in learning the subject. See Zsolnai, L. (2003) ‘Honesty versus cooperation: a reinterpretation of the moral behavior of economics students’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol 62, no 4, pp 707-12, and Frank, R.H., Gilovich, T. and Regan, D.T. (1993) ‘Does studying economics inhibit cooperation?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 7, no 2, pp 159-71.
37 Prendergast, R. (2006) ‘Schumpeter, Hegel and the vision of development’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol 30, no 2, pp 253-75, at p 254, n 1. In this context it is also worth noting that John Maynard Keynes was director of the British Eugenics Society, now known as the Galton Institute, from 1937 to 1945.
38 Frank, R.H. (2008) The economic naturalist: Why economics explains almost everything, London: Virgin Books, p 101. Contrast this book to Frank’s masterpiece of a year earlier (Falling behind: How rising inequality harms the middle class, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, cited in notes 10 above and 52 below) for a good example of great variance within a single person’s capabilities.
39 Harford, T. (2009) Dear Undercover Economist: The very best letters from the ‘Dear Economist’ column, London: Little Brown, p 15, letter to Cecilia.
40 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 373), referring to Hannah Arendt’s description of the thoughtless man, that ‘greatest danger to humankind’.
41 Collier, P. (2007) The bottom billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 90.
42 Magnason, A.S. (2008) Dreamland: A self-help manual for a frightened nation, London: Citizen Press Ltd, p 53. The ‘dreamland’ in the title of this book refers to Iceland. Note that Milton Friedman’s influence on Icelandic politics following his 1984 visit is now seen as pivotal among the antecedents of the 2008 financial crash there.
43 The New Testament (Mark 8:36); for a full explanation see Cohen, G.A. (2002) If you’re an egalitarian how come you’re so rich?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p 181.
44 Pogge, T.W. (2007) ‘Why inequality matters’, in D. Held and A. Kaya (eds) Global inequality: Patterns and explanations, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 132-47, at pp 139-40.
45 Prentice, C. (2009) ‘“Econocide” to surge as recession bites’, 11 March (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7912056.stm), quoting Manhattan psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert.
46 Bertrand, E. (2006) ‘The Coasean analysis of lighthouse financing: myths and realities’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol 30, no 3, pp 389-402
47 Bruni, L. (2000) ‘Ego facing alter: how economists have depicted human interactions’, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, vol 71, no 2, pp 285-313.
48 Kay, J. (2004) The truth about markets: Why some nations are rich but most remain poor (2nd edn), London: Penguin, p 361.
49 Wintour, P. (2009) ‘Labour stakes its reputation on second gamble’, The Guardian, 19 January.
50 Kay, J. (2004) The truth about markets: Why some nations are rich but most remain poor (2nd edn), London: Penguin, p 162. The argument presented is that you should only go to an economist to learn about the economy because you would not go to a DIY dentist to have your teeth fixed. As most people in the world, and increasing numbers even in rich countries, cannot afford to go to dentists due to the inequalities created by free market economics, and as so many dentists, following their accountant’s advice, are concentrating now on cosmetic work rather than ending pain, this is hardly a convincing analogy. Worldwide most people who want their teeth fixed have to go to a DIY dentist. Orthodox economists have not improved that situation.
51 John Kay is the author of a book that explicitly says it is aimed downmarket (of John) at the supposedly ‘normally intelligent people’: Kay, J. (2009) The long and the short of it: Financial investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry, London: Erasmus Press. He also provides a good example of how orthodox economists, when they have their arguments upset, complain in aggrieved tones in public; see Kay, J. (2009) ‘The spirit level (review)’, The Financial Times, 23 March.
52 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 284, 285. See also Frank, R.H. (2007) Falling behind: How rising inequality harms the middle class, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, who explains ‘The price of the median house has escalated not just because houses have gotten bigger, but also because of the higher premium that desirable locations now command’ (p 56).
53 Tatch, J. (2007) ‘Affordability – are parents helping?’, Housing Finance, no 3, pp 1-11, at p 6, chart 6.
54 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press; see p 190 on bathtubs and p 196 on Robert and Helen Lynds’ quote from 1929.
55 I am grateful to Bob Hughes for this argument. He draws on articles including: Fisher, F.M., Grilliches, Z. and Kaysen, C. (1962) ‘The cost of automobile model changes since 1949’, Journal of Political Economy, vol 70, no 5, October, discussed in Baran, P. and Sweezy, P.M. (1966) ‘Monopoly capital: an essay on the American economic and social order’, Monthly Review, pp 138-41.
56 Crawford, E. (2007) Beyond 2010 – A holistic approach to road safety in Great Britain, London: Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, p 80.
57 Baggini, J. (2008) Welcome to Everytown: A journey into the English mind (2nd edn), London: Granta, p 98; £5,539 to be exact, £427 more than average housing costs. These are mean averages; the median would be lower, the mode lower still.
58 Frank, R. (2007) Richi$tan, New York, NY: Random House, p 137 (prices given on p 123).
59 Frank, R.H. (2008) The economic naturalist: Why economics explains almost everything, London: Virgin Books, p 145 (see also note 38 above).
60 Baggini, J. (2008) Welcome to Everytown: A journey into the English mind (2nd edn), London: Granta, p 107.
61 According to one multi-billionaire quoted in Frank, R. (2007) Richi$tan, New York, NY: Random House, p 134.
62 Shah, H. and McIvor, M. (2006) A new political economy: Compass Programme for Renewal, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p 48.
63 That seven-fold ratio is found in Sheffield where it is partly also caused by almost all affluent children under the age of 10 no longer being allowed to play on pavements or walk to neighbours’ homes. A similar ratio was reported nationally in evidence given in 2008 to the House of Commons Transport Committee (2009) Ending the scandal of complacency: Road safety beyond 2010: Further government response to the Committee’s Eleventh Report of Session 2007-08, London: The Stationery Office. In this report MPs said ‘We urge the Government to renew its focus on tackling the appalling level of child road traffic deaths associated with deprivation’. In April 2009 the government responded that ‘We are proposing to amend our guidance on speed limits, recommending that local highway authorities over time, introduce 20 mph zones or limits into streets which are primarily residential in nature’ (see pp 2 and 14 for the Committee’s concerns and the government response in www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/ cmtran/422/422.pdf). Evidence that the major single cause of mortality in Britain for those under the age of 35 is road traffic accidents was given in Dorling, D. (2008) ‘Supplementary memorandum, ending the scandal of complacency’, House of Commons Transport Committee, Ending the scandal of complacency: Road safety beyond 2010, Eleventh Report of Session 2007–08, pp EV 323-4. For more of the underlying studies see Graham, D., Glaister, S. and Anderson, R. (2005) ‘The effects of area deprivation on the incidence of child and adult pedestrian casualties in England’, Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol 37, no 1, pp 125-35.
64 Dorling, D. (2006) ‘Infant mortality and social progress in Britain, 1905–2005’, in E. Garrett, C. Galley, N. Shelton and R. Woods (eds) Infant mortality: A continuing social problem, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp 213-28.
65 ‘What’s going on’ is one of the favourite lyrics of celebrity, from Marvin Gaye asking ‘why there’s so many of you dying (brother)’, to the 4 Non-Blondes ‘praying for a revolution’. It has always been a popular question to ask why social inequality persists and what might be done to increase justice.
66 Frank, R. (2007) Richi$tan, New York, NY: Random House, pp 49, 143.
67 Blastland, M. and Dilnot, A. (2007) The tiger that isn’t: Seeing through a world of numbers, London: Profile Books, p 112; £7,500 is derived by dividing £150 billion by the authors’ 20 million homeowner estimate.
68 Smith, S.J. (2007) ‘Banking on housing? Speculating on the role and relevance of housing wealth in Britain’, Paper prepared for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation ‘Inquiry into Home Ownership 2010 and Beyond’, Durham: University of Durham, p 22.
69 Frank, R. (2007) Richi$tan, New York, NY: Random House, p 132.
70 Diamond, J. (2006) Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive (2nd edn), London: Penguin, p 61. See also Chapter 5, note 48, page 359, this volume, for the 4th and 11th home-owning tendencies of two leading politicians.
71 Connelly, M. (2008) Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp 70, 90, 411.
72 Although only for a certain elite, according to Major-General Hugh Stott of the Indian Medical Service in a letter to the British Medical Journal published on 13 December 1958 (vol 2, p 1480).
73 Hughes, B. (2008) ‘Land’, D. Dorling, Oxford, personal communication; see ‘Country for sale’, Guardian Weekend, 26 April 2008 (www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/26/cambodia) and on the Virgin Islands: www.thepetitionsite. com/takeaction/119884382?z00m=15374441
74 Frank, R. (2007) Richi$tan, New York, NY: Random House, p 131). When a wardrobe is this large it becomes potentially so much more than a receptacle for the storage of clothing. Most wardrobes do not have many other uses, but these monster closets could each be a very large sitting room, 20 ft by 20, four decent-sized bedrooms, and much more besides.
75 Berg, M. (2004) ‘Consumption in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain’, in R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds) The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain: Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 357-87, at pp 377-9.
76 James, O. (2007) Affluenza: How to be successful and stay sane, London: Vermilion, p 35.
77 Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 101.
78 Baggini, J. (2008) Welcome to Everytown: A journey into the English mind (2nd edn), London: Granta, p 225.
79 Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 13, reporting a teacher’s description.
80 Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane, p 117, quoting Gillian Evans, in turn quoting an anonymous teacher.
81 Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid fear, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 162.
82 George, S. (2008) Hijacking America: How the religious and secular right changed what Americans think, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 248 and the footnote on that page referring to Mark Buchanan’s 2007 article, ‘Are we born prejudiced?’, New Scientist, 17 March.
83 Zsolnai, L. (2003) ‘Honesty versus cooperation: a reinterpretation of the moral behavior of economics students’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol 62, no 4, pp 707-12. See also note 36 above.
84 Frank, R.H., Gilovich, T. and Regan, D.T. (1993) ‘Does studying economics inhibit cooperation?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 7, no 2, pp 159-71.
85 George, V. and Wilding, P. (1999) British society and social welfare: Towards a sustainable society, London: Macmillan, p 132; the fraction is derived from table 5.1.
86 Keister, L.A. and Moller, S. (2000) ‘Wealth inequality in the United States’, Annual Review of Sociology, vol 26, no 1, pp 63-81. The ratio of 1:1,600 is derived from calculating the fraction 40/(1/40).
87 See Chapter 5, note 38, page 359, this volume.
88 ONS (Office for National Statistics) (2008) Wealth and Assets Survey: Initial report, London: ONS, Table 2 and p 3 of press release.
89 Williams, P. (2008) Please release me! A review of the equity release market in the UK, its potential and consumer expectations, London: Council of Mortgage Lenders, p 26.
90 Wyly, E.K., Pearce, T., Moos, M. et al (2009) ‘Subprime mortgage segmentation in the American urban system’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, vol 99, no 1, pp 3-23, at p 3. For those interested see also: Wyly, E.K., Atia, M. and Hammel, D.J. (2004) ‘Has mortgage capital found an inner-city spatial fix?’, Housing Policy Debate, vol 15, no 3, pp 623-85; Wyly, E.K., Atia, M., Foxcroft, H., Hammel, D.J. and Phillips-Watts, K. (2006) ‘American home: predatory mortgage capital and spaces of race and class exploitation in the United States’, Geografiska Annaler B, vol 88, no 1, pp 105-32; and Wyly, E.K., Atia, M., Lee, E. and Mendez, P. (2007) ‘Race, gender, and statistical representation: predatory mortgage lending and the US community reinvestment movement’, Environment and Planning A, vol 39, pp 2139-66.
91 Kloby, J. (2002) ‘Wealth gap woes’, Monthly Review, vol 53, no 8.
92 Scott Cato, M. (2009) Green economics: An introduction to theory, policy and practice, London: Earthscan, pp 126-7.
93 Ibid, which provides an excellent introduction to how the majority have been deceived about how reserve currencies are manipulative.
94 Diamond, J. (2006) Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive (2nd edn), London: Penguin, p 150. The term ‘pueblo people’ is also used and continues to be used today by some groups as, although civilisations die out, whole peoples rarely do in their entirety.
95 Berg, M. (2004) ‘Consumption in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain’, in R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds) The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain: Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 357-87, at p 366.
96 Cockshott, W.P. and Cottrell, A. (1983) Towards a new socialism, Nottingham: Spokesman, p 23.
97 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 94.
98 Diamond, J. (2006) Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive (2nd edn), London: Penguin, p 75.
99 Magnason, A.S. (2008) Dreamland: A self-help manual for a frightened nation, London: Citizen Press Ltd, p 274.
100 Liu, J., Daily, G.C., Ehrlich, P.R. et al (2003) ‘Effects of household dynamics on resource consumption and biodiversity’, Nature, vol 421, 30 January, pp 530-3.
101 Buonfino, A. and Thomson, L. (2007) Belonging in contemporary Britain, Report for the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, London: Commission on Integration and Cohesion, p 5; unclaimed bodies information from personal communication, John Mohan, University of Southampton, work in progress; finding mortality rates to be especially high for young men with few friends living in bedsits in the largest cities, exactly how high to be determined.
102 Dorling, D. and Gunnell, D. (2003) ‘Suicide: the spatial and social components of despair in Britain 1980-2000’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol 28, no 4, pp 442-60.
103 Calcott, A. and Bull, J. (2007) Ecological footprint of British city residents, CarbonPlan, Godalming: World Wildlife Fund UK (www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/city_footprint2.pdf), p 8.
104 See Chapter 5, note 15, page 356, this volume for links to resources that show how basic incomes for all are possible.
105 James, O. (2007) Affluenza: How to be successful and stay sane, London: Vermilion; a remix of pp 158-9, with the final sentence from p 148 (having consulted the author about taking such liberties – or ‘making posies’, see page 10, this volume).
1 The strongest evidence comes from the US where, using data from 2002–06 and having taken into account absolute income, it was recently found that for the odds of reporting poor health, ‘… regardless of how the reference group was defined, there was a “dose–response” relationship; with individuals in the highest quintile of relative deprivation more likely to report poor health than individuals in the next highest quintile and so on’ (Subramanyam, M., Kawachi, I., Berkman, L. et al [2009] ‘Relative deprivation in income and self-rated health in the United States’, Social Science & Medicine, vol 69, pp 327-34, at p 329). This study concerns reporting ill health of all kinds. Among younger adults in affluent countries the majority of serious poor health is poor mental health.
2 Burns, J. (2007) The descent of madness: Evolutionary origins of psychosis and the social brain, Hove: Routledge, p 74. The reference here is to Erich Fromm’s In fear of freedom (1942) and ends with the suggestion that following industrialisation and individualisation, we are now ‘… witnessing the psychological consequences of human isolation and dislocation’.
3 Ibid, p 197.
4 CEPMHPG (Centre for Economic Performance’s Mental Health Policy Group) (2006) The depression report: A New Deal for depression and anxiety disorders, London: CEPMHPG, London School of Economics and Political Science. The figure is derived by doubling 16.4% given in a table at the end of that source based on the survey of 2000. If this appears too crude a method, as in some families more than one adult will be suffering poor mental health and in others there will be only one adult, then take Oliver James’ estimate of 23% of individuals suffering emotional distress in Britain, based in turn on World Health Organization estimates and then, clearly, at least a third of families are affected (James, O. [2008] The selfish capitalist: Origins of affluenza, London: Vermilion, p 1; James, O. [2009] ‘Distress’, D. Dorling, Oxfordshire, personal communication).
5 As revealed by the most comparable World Health Organization psychiatric surveys reported in Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane, p 67.
6 The statistics for Britain in this paragraph and the previous one are derived from the Office for National Statistics (ONS): ONS (2001) Psychiatric morbidity, London: ONS; ONS (2003) Better or worse: National statistics, London: ONS; ONS (2005) Mental health in children and young people in Great Britain, London: ONS; MIND (2009) Statistics 1: How common is mental distress? (www.mind.org.uk/help/research_and_pol icy/statistics_1_how_common_is_mental_distress); National Statistics Online (2004) Mental disorder more common in boys, London: National Statistics Online; and MHF (Mental Health Foundation) (2005) Lifetime impacts: Childhood and adolescent mental health, Understanding the lifetime impacts, London: MHF. They were kindly made available by Dan Vale ([2008] ‘Mapping needs’, Project seminar presentation, The Young Foundation, 24 June, D. Dorling, London, personal communication).
7 Collishaw, S., Maughan, B., Goodman, R. et al (2004) ‘Time trends in adolescent mental health’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol 45, no 8, pp 1350-62.
8 West, P. and Sweeting, H. (2003) ‘Fifteen, female and stressed: changing patterns of psychological distress over time’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol 44, no 3, pp 399-411, at pp 406, 409.
9 Costello, E.J., Erkanli, A. and Angold, A. (2006) ‘Is there an epidemic of child or adolescent depression?’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol 47, no 12, pp 1263-71.
10 The one in 25 estimate can be reached either by extrapolating backwards or by taking the lowest rates recorded in the past which both produce similar results as the extrapolation is based on those rates.
11 In fact they found that ‘Only fathers’ educational attainment and family financial status remained significant (odds ratios: 3.28–5.30 for grade school of fathers and 2.62–2.78 for being worse off economically)’ (Doi, Y., Roberts, R., Takeuchi, K. et al [2001] ‘Multiethnic comparison of adolescent major depression based on the DSM-IV criteria in a US–Japan study’, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 40, pp 1308-15, at p 1308).
12 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 348.
13 Twenge, J.M. (2000) ‘The age of anxiety? Birth cohort change in anxiety and neuroticism, 1952-1993’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 79, no 6, pp 1007-21, at p 1018.
14 ONS (Office for National Statistics (2008) Sustainable development indicators in your pocket 2008: An update of the UK government strategy indicators, London: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, p 130. The equivalent ONS publication of a year earlier had broken down these statistics by social grade AB, C, D and E (p 125), but not by age, the publication of a year later reported the responses to different questions (p 137), and so comparisons over time for children from this source are not yet possible (in the 2008 study children could say it was ‘a bit true’ that they were happy, but that option was removed from the later survey and apparent happiness rose by 10%!). For adults by social grade in England stark differences in well-being were reported in 2007. Only those in the best-paid work, grades AB, reported much net happiness and feeling engaged with what they were doing. Those in the worst-paid work, grade E, most often felt unhappy, not engaged, unsafe, depressed, lonely and that everything was an effort. Most probably because they were and it was.
15 Nancy Shalek (president of Shalek Advertising Agency), as quoted in Kasser, T. (2002) The high price of materialism, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, p 91.
16 McChesney, R.W. and Foster, J.B. (2003) ‘The commercial tidal wave’, Monthly Review, vol 54, no 10.
17 In comments reported in association with the publication of Department for Children, Schools and Families (2007) The Children’s Plan: Building brighter futures, London: The Stationery Office. Ed Balls was the relevant government minister in charge of this department at the time. In subsequent years he did nothing to reduce the exposure of children to advertising.
18 Baggini, J. (2008) Welcome to Everytown: A journey into the English mind (2nd edn), London: Granta, p 224, relying in turn on a National Consumer Council survey of 2005 referenced on p 274. The same report revealed that some 78% of children in Britain say they ‘love shopping’.
19 Rowan Williams was elected Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003. These words are from the press release to a report from the Children’s Society written in his name: Williams, R. (2008) ‘Good childhood inquiry reveals mounting concern over commercialisation of childhood’ (www.childrenssociety.org.uk/whats_happening/ media_office/latest_news/6486_pr.html), referencing in turn: Schor, J. (2004) Born to buy: The commercialized child and the new consumer culture, New York: Scribner; and NCC (National Consumer Council) (2007) Watching, wanting, wellbeing, London: NCC.
20 Or, to quote verbatim, ‘marinated in the most aggressive advertising and marketing environment ever known’, according to Anya Kamenetz, the author of Generation debt, one of many recent popular books about the evil of advertising, quoted in Harris, J. (2007) ‘The anxious affluent: middle class insecurity and social democracy’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, vol 15, no 4, pp 72-9, at p 75.
21 Trotter, C. (2007) No left turn: The distortion of New Zealand’s history by greed, bigotry and right-wing politics, Auckland: Random House, p 124, noting the observation was made first by John Dewey.
22 Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming life, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 46-7; emphasis as in the original.
23 As explained by Sebastian Kraemer, and as clearly evident in the current economic recession/depression. For a summary of the odds of unemployment making you ill, the efficiency of the various alternatives and Kraemer’s explanation, see Dorling, D. (2009) ‘Unemployment and health (editorial)’, British Medical Journal, vol 338, p b829.
24 Navarro, V. (2003) ‘The inhuman state of US health care’, Monthly Review, vol 55, no 4.
25 Research reported in Edwards, M. (2008) Just another emperor? The myths and realities of philanthrocapitalism, London: Demos and The Young Foundation, p 51.
26 The dissection of meaning of the private hospital receipt is one of the most striking and memorable of illustrations included in Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning Information (published by the Graphics Press in 1990). It is not hard to understand that a medical system that aims to give the best care at the lowest cost, and one in which profit is not allowed, is both likely to do the least harm, and most likely to treat you quickly and appropriately when you actually most need treatment. There are no private accident and emergency wards in the UK; it is not in the interest of private hospitals to provide such facilities, ones where the need is so clear and the scope for profiteering so low.
27 Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The threat of race: Reflections on racial neoliberalism, Oxford: Blackwell, p 88.
28 DH (Department of Health) (2008) Tackling health inequalities: 2007 status report on the programme for action, London, Health Inequalities Unit, DH, p 46, and with Professor Michael Marmot, chair of the Scientific Reference Group on Health Inequalities, suggesting on p 5 that ‘action on inequalities in health in England conforms rather well to evidence-based policy making’.
29 Kelsey, J. (1997) The New Zealand experiment: A world model for structural adjustment?, Auckland: Auckland University Press, p 359, quoting in turn and in part, from Prue Hyman.
30 Whyte, D. (2007) ‘Gordon Brown’ scharter for corporate criminals’, Criminal Justice Matters, vol 70, pp 31-2. Original source: HM Government (2007) Regulators’ compliance code: Draft code of practice laid before Parliament under section 23(4) of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 for approval by resolution of each House of Parliament, London: Cabinet Office Better Regulation Executive.
31 Robert Townsend Farquhar, in the 19th century, arguing in favour of wages in place of slavery for islanders in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, and quoted in Hudson, M. (2004) ‘Scarcity of what and for whom?’, Monthly Review, vol 56, no 7.
32 Trotter, C. (2007) No left turn: The distortion of New Zealand’s history by greed, bigotry and right-wing politics, Auckland: Random House, p 57, quoting a director of the London docks speaking during the 1889 strike.
33 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 295, where Avner Offer makes all these points in regard to the US but not China, although the connections are clear, and that is without mentioning how frequently the death penalty is applied in both countries, including for executing children.
34 Elliot, L. and Atkinson, D. (2007) Fantasy Island: Waking up to the incredible economic, political and social illusions of the Blair legacy, London: Constable and Robinson, p 229.
35 Franz Münterfering, the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, the Social Democrat Party) chairman, as quoted in Bild and reported in Peston, R. (2008) Who runs Britain? How the super-rich are changing our lives, London: Hodder & Stoughton, p 210.
36 Daniel Loeb, chief executive of the hedge fund ‘Third Point’, as reported in Peston, R. (2008) Who runs Britain? How the super-rich are changing our lives, London: Hodder & Stoughton, p 211.
37 DeVerteuil, G. (2007) ‘Book review: Fragments of inequality: Social, spatial, and evolutionary analyses of income distribution. Sanjoy Chakravorty’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol 97, no 1, pp 219-20, at p 219, according in turn to a recent study by Andrew Beveridge, published in the New York Times and referenced by Roberts, S. (2005) ‘In Manhattan, poor make 2 cents for every dollar of the rich’, the New York Times, 4 September. Note that following the widely reported success of the Namibian basic income project in Otjivero, conditions are becoming slightly less desperate there.
38 Jackson, T. (2001) ‘Website of the week: health inequalities’, British Medical Journal, vol 322, no 7286, p 622.
39 Cole, M. (2007) ‘Learning without limits: a Marxist assessment’, Policy Futures in Education, vol 6, no 4, pp 453-63.
40 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 287.
41 Guy, M. (2007) Public health annual report 2005/06: Focusing on the health of older people, London: Westminster Primary Care Trust, figures given in accompanying press release.
42 Ibid, p 22.
43 The NHS reports for West minster do suggest such a concentration, although for a wider view see: Parr, H. (2008) Mental health and social space: Towards inclusionary geographies?, Oxford: Blackwell, p 9. It is also partly the story of Largactil as told in Section 7.5, pages 302-3, this volume.
44 Connelly, M. (2008) Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p 29; emphasis in original.
45 Ibid, p 32. A photograph of the mutilated children of the Congo, with their severed hands, was one of the first photographs of genocide survivors to be distributed worldwide. That circulation continues today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MutilatedChildrenFromCongo.jpg
46 Hall, E. and Drake, M. (2006) ‘Diarrhoea: the central issue’, in E. Garrett, C. Galley, N. Shelton and R. Woods (eds) Infant mortality: A continuing social problem, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp 149-68, at p 149.
47 Brown, D. (2008) ‘Life expectancy drops for some US women’, Washington Post, 22 April.
48 http://voltagecreative.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/bailout-pie.png. With thanks to ideas merchant Molly Scott Cato for passing on this example.
49 According to The Economist, ‘Sea of troubles’, 1 August 2009, pp 51-2, which predicted that worldwide shipping supply would soon exceed market need by 50% to 70%.
50 Seager, A. (2009) ‘Industry shows unprecedented fall in demand for power, says Drax’, The Guardian, 5 August, p 22.
51 Master’s courses in Business Administration (MBAs) became successful because they nurtured short-term bird-brained arguments. ‘Profit matters more than anything else, especially in the short term’, is one such argument. These were the kinds of arguments that those hiring business graduates wanted to hear and so such arguments had to be generated with the greatest ferocity by business schools trying to place themselves on the very highest perches in the aviary.
52 Staley, O. (2009) ‘Harvard begins case study as tainted MBAs reveal damaged brand’, Bloomberg News, 2 April. This report was in turn quoting the words of Louis Lataif, reported to be a 1964 graduate of Harvard Business School.
53 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 47. On p 53 Avner Offer explains how recently more and more people have come also to behave like those who run corporations: ‘Consumption surveys indicate much higher levels of “hand to mouth” consumption than either exponential or hyperbolic models suggest, but the hyperbolic model comes closer to reality, and reality is much less prudent even than the hyperbolic model’.
54 According to the New York Times of 16 January 1910. See also Hudson, M. (2004) ‘Scarcity of what and for whom?’, Monthly Review, vol 56, no 7. In this article Michael Perelman is quoted with reference to the price of passenger pigeons not rising at all as supply fell.
55 CGD (Commission on Growth and Development) (2008) The growth report: Strategies for sustained growth and inclusive development, Washington DC: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and The World Bank, on behalf of CGD, pp 1, 12. The one concession made to their critics here is the admission that resources are, eventually, finite, although a few still talk of mining the moon!
56 Abnormalities of the prefrontal cortex are usually referred to among other conditions causing some people who do well in business to prosper partly because they behave psychopathically. See Spinney, L. (2004) ‘Snakes in suits’, New Scientist, 21 August. The article also reports the 1977 work of Cathy Spatz Widom which discovered that for psychopaths in everyday life, the kind who can be found in boardrooms, the ‘… main difference she noted between her respondents and convicted criminals who were typically studied at that time was that they were better educated’.
57 Shah, H. and McIvor, M. (2006) A new political economy: Compass Programme for Renewal, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p 143. See also Chapter 6, note 34, page 365, this volume for one suggestion as to why the populations of Europe rose when they did with such global consequences.
58 Gordon, M.J. and Rosenthal, J.S. (2003) ‘Capitalism’s growth imperative’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol 27, pp 25-48, pp 33, 43; they do mention that this was initially Rosa Luxemburg’s suggestion, made long before the events she foretold.
59 Elliot, L. and Atkinson, D. (2007) Fantasy Island: Waking up to the incredible economic, political and social illusions of the Blair legacy, London: Constable and Robinson, p 235.
60 Beck, U. (2000) World risk society (2nd edn), Cambridge: Polity Press, p 6.
61 Rutherford, J. and Shah, H. (2006) The good society: Compass Programme for Renewal, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p 85.
62 Pitts, M., Dorling, D. and Pattie, C. (2007) ‘Oil for food: the global story of edible lipids’, Journal of World-Systems Research, vol 13, no 1, pp 12-32, at p 28.
63 Brunner, E. (2006) ‘Oily fish and omega 3 fat supplements’, British Medical Journal, vol 332, pp 739-40.
64 Diamond, J. (2006) Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive (2nd edn), London: Penguin, p 368.
65 Rose, S., Lewontin, R.C. and Kamin, L.J. (1990) Not in our genes: Biology, ideology and human nature, London: Penguin, p 174.
66 The proprietary form in which Diazepam was first marketed by the (now) pharmaceutical giant, Roche; see James, O. (2007) Affluenza: How to be successful and stay sane, London: Vermilion, p 204.
67 Masters, R.D. (2001) ‘Biology and politics: linking nature and nurture’, Annual Review of Political Science, vol 4, no 1, pp 345-69, at p 346. Often children are prescribed Ritalin because schools will not include them if they are not dosed up.
68 Dumit, J. (2005) ‘The depsychiatrisation of mental illness’, Journal of Public Mental Health, vol 4, no 3, pp 8-13, at p 11.
69 James, O. (2008) The selfish capitalist: Origins of affluenza, London: Vermilion, p 205.
70 DH (Department of Health)(2008) Tackling health inequalities: 2007 status report on the programme for action, London, Health Inequalities Unit, DH, p 80.
71 About the number that the non-psychiatric prison population reached by 2005. For earlier figures see Timmins, N. (2001) The five giants: A biography of the welfare state (new edn), London: HarperCollins, pp 210-11.
72 I am very grateful to my father, who was a GP prescribing in Britain in these years, for parts of this history. He suggests that so many mistakes were made over the use of medication because doctors often assumed that if patients kept asking for a drug it was because it was doing good, rather than because the drug was causing dependence and addiction. The staff in prisons, old people’s homes, hospitals, children’s units and certain schools found it easier to cope with doped-up ‘inmates’. Often in research the wrong questions were asked, or even the wrong people. Relatives and friends were often not asked if the medication had done any good, even the patients themselves were often not asked if they felt that they were back to normal. For other sources of background information see Dorling, D. (2007) ‘Guest editorial: the real mental health bill’, Journal of Public Mental Health, vol 6, no 3, pp 6-13.
73 Dufour, D.-R. (2008) The art of shrinking heads: On the new servitude of the liberated in the age of total capitalism (translation), Cambridge: Polity Press, p 72.
74 Reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: CBC (2008) ‘Use Ritalin only as last resort for kids with ADHD, guidelines say’, 24 September (www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/09/24/adhd-guide.html).
75 NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (2007) NHS quality improvement Scotland: Clinical indicators 2007, Glasgow: NHS Quality Improvement Scotland, pp 6, 10, 12, 24.
76 See note 2, page 372 above.
77 Offer, A. (2006) The challenge of affluence: Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 9.
1 Bauman, Z. (2008) The art of life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 6.
2 In place of that conspiracy of the rich, and for a neat two-page recipe, should you wish to know what’s going on (as defined in Chapter 6, note 65, page 357, this volume) see Wallerstein, I. (2005) ‘The actor and world-systems analysis: comments on Blau and Wieviorka’, Contemporary Sociology, vol 34, no 1, pp 9-10.
3 Stephens, L., Ryan-Collins, J. and Boyle, D. (2008) Co-production: A manifesto for growing the core economy, London: New Economics Foundation, pp 7-8.
4 The insertion of the word ‘apparently’ is all that is needed to begin the process of dismantling the logic of this well-known argument attributed originally to John Rawls. The quotation is taken from Arneson, R.J. (2009) ‘Justice is not equality’, in B. Feltham (ed) Justice, equality and constructivism: Essays on G.A. Cohen’s ‘Rescuing justice and equality’, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp 5-25, at p 25.
5 DCSF (Department for Children, Schools and Families) (2007) The Children’s Plan: Building brighter futures, London: The Stationery Office, pp 73-4 (emphasis added here); hopefully they did not mean opportunities when they wrote outcomes! However, the DCSF are as fallible as the rest of us.
6 Rutherford, J. and Shah, H. (2006) The good society: Compass Programme for Renewal, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p 51, referring in turn to the Welsh government statement.
7 Shuayb, M. and O’Donnell, S. (2008) Aims and values in primary education: England and other countries, Primary Review Research Survey 1/2, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, p 22.
8 Haydon, D. and Scraton, P. (2008) ‘Conflict, regulation and marginalisation in the North of Ireland: the experiences of children and young people’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, vol 20, no 1, pp 59-78, quoted in last sentence of the article.
9 Krugman, P. (2007) The conscience of a liberal, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p 211.
10 Ibid, p 215, on an unnamed Texas legislator (identified on the web as Debbie Riddle); poll figures are given on p 202. On 7 September 2009 Debbie gave instructions to her friends and neighbours on how to avoid their children ever having to hear President Obama speaking (http://debbieriddle.org/2009/09/your-children-do-not-have-to-hear-obamas-speach/).
11 Dufour, D.-R. (2008) The art of shrinking heads: On the new servitude of the liberated in the age of total capitalism (translation), Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 168-9. The quotation continues: ‘Descartes’s capitalist Amsterdam has now conquered the world. It is not just that everyone in this planetary city is now involved in trade; trade is now involved in everyone in the sense that it shapes us all’.
12 Harris, R. (2004) ‘Government and the economy, 1688–1850’, in R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds) The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain: Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 204-37, at p 217.
13 Dixon, T. (2005) The invention of altruism: Making moral meanings in Victorian Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 213, quoting Thomas Paine’s Rights of man, part I, p 94.
14 Du Boff, R.B. (2004) ‘US hegemony: continuing decline, enduring danger’, Monthly Review, vol 55, no 7, www.monthlyreview.org/1203duboff.htm
15 Leonhardt, D. (2009) ‘A bold plan sweeps away Reagan ideas’, New York Times, 27 February. Note that as the year 2009 progressed the plan began to look a little less bold when the President began to associate himself more closely with those associated with bankers and their ideology. In October 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, not for what he had done, but in a move widely reported as being encouragement to be more progressive in future, both at home and abroad.
16 OMB (Office of Management and Budget) (2009) Inheriting a legacy of misplaced priorities, A new era of responsibility: Renewing America’s promise, Washington: The White House (http://budget2010.org/inheriting-a-legacy-of-misplaced-priorities.html), p 9.
17 Thanks to Dave Gordon for passing on a version of this summary; see Figures 9 and 11 at www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/fy2010_new_era/ Inheriting_a_Legacy1.pdf
18 Grimshaw, A.D. (2002) ‘A review essay on “In search of politics”’, Contemporary Sociology, vol 31, no 3, pp 257-61, at p 259. The text missing from the quote is ‘(and here Bauman adopts Jacques Attali’s metaphor)’.
19 The Companies and Remuneration Bill had its third reading in the House of Lords on 13 July 2009 and then went for consideration to the Commons. In the strange world of 2009 politics, many of their Lordships were more opposed to high rates of inequality than were the party who once represented the interests of the poorest of labouring commoners. There was little expectation that the Commons would accept the Bill and make it law, but then these were the strangest of times and that strangeness was changing the nature of the art of the possible. When Britain was last bankrupt, in 1945, the only secure and cheap way to provide security for all, including many of the affluent, and a health service for all, was to introduce a welfare state and National Health Service. Being less rich creates more possibilities.
20 The key person proposing the amendment was Lord Taverne, and the Chancellor who delivered the budget was Alistair Darling. On the amendment see www.equalitytrust.org.uk/node/121 and on the Bill see www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/maguire/2009/04/29/ harriet-harman-s-equality-bill-points-to-the-route-for-a-better-britain-115875-21316506/
21 Irvin, G. (2008) Super rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 209.
22 This list is taken from Steel, M. (2008) What’s going on, London: Simon & Schuster, p 247, and Kelsey, J. (1997) The New Zealand experiment: A world model for structural adjustment?, Auckland: Auckland University Press, pp 370-1.
23 This itself is, of course, just another of those lessons so easily forgotten by humans given that our brains have not evolved to cope with so much to remember. For four versions of the chant being remembered and repeated see Field, P. (1999) ‘The anti-roads movement: the struggle of memory against forgetting’, in T. Jordan and A. Lent (eds) Storming the millennium: The new politics of change, London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp 68-79, at p 74. Patrick Field quotes Milan Kundera, as recorded in turn by Neil Goodwin in Life in the fast lane on the M11 road protests. And see also Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 84, also referring to Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness.
24 When the best-off tenth of skilled manual men earned 2.55 times the amount earned by the worst-off tenth; see Section 4.5, at page 140, for the ratio series. Overall wage inequality rates are, and were, much higher with mostly men in managerial positions at the top and mostly women in care work at the bottom by 1996.
25 Machin, S. (2003) ‘Wage inequality since 1975’, in R. Dickens, P. Gregg and J. Wadsworth (eds) The labour market under New Labour: The state of working Britain 2003, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ch 12, at p 191.
26 The man best known for saying this, Lord Peter Mandelson, enjoyed annoying members of his own political party by making such statements. In 2009 he suggested that ‘anti-elitism of some parts of the left on education policy has often been a dead end’, presumably to cause more annoyance, as almost everyone is anti-elitist today; see BBC (2009) ‘Fee rise “must aid poor students”’, 27 July (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8169838.stm). On the same day a key government adviser, Sir Jonathon Porritt, working on a completely different area of policy, resigned, citing Mandelson as the problem: ‘Lord Mandelson had been particularly hostile to the concept of sustainable development’ (BBC [2009] ‘Porritt parting shot at ministers’, 27 July (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8169627.stm)). One week later it was revealed that Mandelson was trying to find a job for a friend of his (Trevor Phillips) who might otherwise become a Conservative Party adviser given how easy it was to switch sides by 2009 (according to www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1203653/Mandelson-tried-persuade-Trevor-Phillips-quit-promising-Ministerial-post.html). Neither Lord Mandelson, nor Sir Jonathan Porritt, nor Mr Phillips held any elected post, but all were in government in one way or another, and this series of spats typified the dying days of New Labour.
27 See Figure 12, Chapter 5, page 170 for the effects of an economic crash within a period of such inequality reduction. I am grateful to my grandfather, Eric Charlesworth, for telling me these stories in 2009. He was born in 1916.
28 O’Grady, F. (2007) ‘Economic citizenship and the new capitalism’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, vol 15, nos 2/3, pp 58-66, at pp 62-3.
29 Burns, J. (2007) The descent of madness: Evolutionary origins of psychosis and the social brain, Hove: Routledge, p 182.
30 Bauman, Z. (2008) The art of life, Cambridge: Polity Press, p 39; emphasis in original.
31 Baggini, J. (2008) Welcome to Everytown: A journey into the English mind (2nd edn), London: Granta, p 181.
32 Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane, pp 260-1.
33 Marx (1907 [1852]) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr: see Chapter 2, note 27, page 337, this volume.
34 Shah, H. and Goss, S. (2007) Democracy and the public realm: Compass Programme for Renewal, London: Lawrence & Wishart, p 17; Mohandas Gandhi’s words used in the sentence before are quoted on p 11.
35 Connelly, M. (2008) Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p 380.
36 Magnason, A.S. (2008) Dreamland: A self-help manual for a frightened nation, London: Citizen Press Ltd, p 279.
37 Kelsey, J. (1997) The New Zealand experiment: A world model for structural adjustment?, Auckland: Auckland University Press, p 393; and see pp 394-8 for just one set of ideas on the way to do the right thing.
38 Krieger, N. (2000) ‘Passionate epistemology, critical advocacy, and public health: doing our profession proud’, Critical Public Health, vol 10, no 3, pp 287-94, at p 292, who does indeed provide a very good guide to being on the side of the angels.
39 Ritzer, G. (2004) The globalization of nothing, London: Sage Publications, p 216.
1 Stott, R. (2010) ‘Review of “Injustice” and Tony Judt’s “Ill fares the land”: a treatise on our present discontents: How can we rediscover the magic of more equal societies?’, British Medical Journal, 4 August 2010, doi: 10.1136/bmj.c4155.
2 Coyle, D. (2010) Blog comment on Injustice, posted 2 May 2010, http://blog.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/_archives/2010/ 5/2/4519257.html
3 Wright, J. (2010) ‘Book of the month: more equal than others’, Geographical Magazine, July, p 63.
4 Clark, P. (2010) ‘Fiery Dorling preaches to the converted’, Public Health Today, September, p 15.
5 If I get to be much older– it is careless to take longevity for granted and you can take too long carefully working out exactly what you want to say.
6 Clark, P. (2010) ‘Fiery Dorling preaches to the converted’, Public Health Today, September, p 15.
7 Harkins, E. (2010) ‘Review, Injustice – why social inequality persists’, Scotregen, no 50, p 20.
8 Clark, P. (2010) ‘Fiery Dorling preaches to the converted’, Public Health Today, September, p 15.
9 Harkins, E. (2010) ‘Review, Injustice – why social inequality persists’, Scotregen, no 50, p 20.
10 Meyer, G., Blas, J. and Farchy, J. (2011) ‘World moves closer to food price shock’, Financial Times, 12 January.
11 Butterworth, M. (2008) ‘House building slumps to a record low’, The Telegraph, 20 November.
12 www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/ housingstatisticsby/housebuilding/livetables/
13 Biswas, S. (2010) ‘India’s micro-finance suicide epidemic’, BBC correspondent, BBC online, 16 December, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11997571, who reported that: ’India’s micro-finance crisis mirrors the 2008 subprime mortgage meltdown in the US, where finance companies threw cheap and easy loans at homebuyers until prices crashed and borrowers were unable to sell their homes or pay their debts’.
14 Such as that shown in Figure 14, p 191, this volume.
15 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘One of Labour’s great successes’, The Guardian, 28 January, p 10.
16 Browne, J. et al (2010) Securing a sustainable future for higher education: An independent review of higher education funding and student finance, www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/docs/s/10-1208es-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report-summary.pdf (note that the ‘independent review’ is a document held within the government’s business department under the assets/biscore/corporate directories!).
17 Williams, R. (2011) ‘“‘Savage”cuts to youth spending could rob a generation of chances’, The Guardian, 5 January.
18 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘The Browne review moves us further away from a system in which the majority can get the benefits of higher education’, Adults Learning, November, vol 22, no 3, p 25.
19 Dorling, D. (2011) ‘Clearing the poor away’, in N. Yeates, T. Haux, R. Jawad and M. Kilkey (eds) In defence of welfare: The impacts of the Comprehensive Spending Review, London: Social Policy Association, pp 14-16.
20 Orwell, G. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Secker and Warburg.
21 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘Letter: Boris is right to fight housing cuts’, London Evening Standard, 1 November, p 47.
22 ‘A political storm broke today after a government minister claimed that plans to cap welfare benefits would prompt an exodus of Labour voters from London. The unnamed Conservative minister was quoted as describing the policy as “the Highland Clearances” – the eviction of farmers from the Scottish highlands and islands in the 18th and 19th centuries’, as reported by Murphy, J. (2010) ‘Welfare cuts “will be like the Highland Clearances”’, Evening Standard (quoting the Telegraph), 7 October, www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23885725-welfare-cuts-will-be-like-the-highland-clearances.do
23 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘Are students pre-programmed to live with inequality?’, The Guardian (Education), 26 October.
24 Frank Field suggested redefining the child poverty measure rather than reducing child poverty, in the style in which Margaret Thatcher had attempted to redefine away unemployment 30 years earlier.
25 Dorling (2010) ‘Axing the child poverty measure is wrong’, The Guardian (Society), 16 June, p 4. A mention should also be made of Frank Field’s Labour Party (but Coalition commissioned) sidekick, Graham Allen MP, who suggested that city investors could make a profit out of sponsoring schemes to reduce child poverty and so turned the clock back a few more years again towards Victorian values of profit motives and paternalism: Gentleman, A. (2010) ‘Making the case for early intervention’, The Guardian, 19 January.
26 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘Britain must close the great pay divide’, The Observer, 28 November.
27 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘Youth unemployment must be tackled now’, The Guardian (Society), 14 September.
28 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘The super-rich are still soaring away’, New Statesman, 27 April, www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/04/super-rich-rise-inequality
29 Dorling, D. (2011) So you think you know about Britain?, London: Constable and Robinson, ch 7.
30 Pickett, K. and Dorling, D. (2010) ‘Against the organization of misery? The Marmot Review of Health Inequalities’, Social Science and Medicine, vol 71, 1231–3.
31 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘New Labour and inequality: Thatcherism continued?’, Local Economy, vol 25, nos 5–6, August–September, pp 397-413.
32 Stott, R. (2010) ‘Review of “Injustice” and Tony Judt’s “Ill fares the land”: a treatise on our present discontents: How can we rediscover the magic of more equal societies?’, British Medical Journal, 4 August 2010, doi: 10.1136/bmj.c4155.
33 Simpson, L. (2011) ‘Injustice: why social inequality persists’, Environment and Planning A, forthcoming.
34 Burns, J. (2007) The descent of madness: Evolutionary origins of psychosis and the social brain, Hove: Routledge.
35 Dorling, D. (2010) ‘Mean machine: Structural inequality makes social inequality seem natural’, New Internationalist, no 433, 20-21, www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/2010/Dorling_2010_ New_Internationalist_2010.pdf
36 It is worth remembering in conclusion that ‘… with the roughly 300,000 generations that humans spent as hunter-gatherers and the 500 generations they spent as agrarians, the 9 generations passed in the industrial era and the 1 generation so far spent in the emerging post-industrial era … a drop in the bucket of time. As organisms, we cannot possibly have adapted to the environment in which we now find ourselves’ (Massey, D. S. (2002) ‘A brief history of human society: the origin and role of emotion in social life:2001 Presidential Address’, American Sociological Review, vol 67, no 1, p 15). Note that 300,000 is probably an over-estimate, as it gives modern hunter gatherers a six-million-year history. Humans, in our current state as evolved social animals with sophisticated language, have only experienced around 3,000 generations. We really are all still learning and trying to understand exactly where fate has placed us. My parents grew up without computers, my grandparents without television, my great-grandparents without radio, and not all of their parents were able to read. Only very recently have we, the majority of humanity, been given access to enough information to think more for ourselves. No wonder we are confused, do not agree, and often continue to preach the unjust thinking of the tiny minority who used to hold such a monopoly on knowledge.
