One of the Left’s major bugbears is inequality. In Britain, thinktanks like the Fabian Society and newspapers like the Guardian are always banging on about its supposedly pernicious effects. And such organisations no doubt have their counterparts in other Western countries.
Back in 2009, a wildly popular book called The Spirit Level claimed to show that almost all social ills can be traced back to inequality. And I’m not exaggerating when I say “almost all”. Part II of the book, “The Costs of Inequality”, has sections on “community life”, “mental health”, “obesity”, “violence” and “teenage births”—to name just a few.
One problem with the thesis that inequality is terrible for society is that it’s not obvious why this should be the case. Suppose Bill Gates moves to Britain. Because he has a huge amount of money, this makes Britain more unequal. But it’s hard to see how ordinary people are worse off. Would they be better off if every billionaire picked up and left? Surely not.
The mechanism proposed by the authors of The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, is that inequality makes life more stressful for the have-nots by magnifying social status differences. Humans evolved in relatively egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers, the authors note, so they aren’t adapted to societies with vast differences in material resources.
This is not an unreasonable argument—though it should be noted that humans have continued to evolve since the dawn of agriculture when complex social hierarchies first emerged.
However, the argument makes a crucial assumption—that people can correctly perceive the level of inequality. If they can’t, then higher levels of inequality aren’t necessarily bad.
When social scientists have looked into this, they’ve found that people have only a vague idea about the level of inequality in their country. In a 2018 paper, Vladimir Gimpelson and Daniel Treisman reported small-to-moderate correlations between measures of perceived inequality and measures of income inequality, as well as negative correlations between measures of perceived inequality and measures of wealth inequality. A more recent paper tracked the relationship over time in a sample of countries and found that it was small and non-significant.
Interestingly, both papers found that support for redistribution was strongly related to perceived inequality but not to actual inequality. So people want the government to reduce income differences when they perceive those differences to be large—not when those differences actually are large.
What all this means is that Wilkinson and Pickett’s proposed mechanism probably doesn’t work, at least when it comes to differences between nation states. If people have only a vague idea about the level of inequality in their country, it seems unlikely that inequality itself is making their lives more stressful (though their perceptions of inequality might be).
Another reason the Left’s crusade against inequality is misplaced is that the situation in Britain has barely changed for more than three decades and has actually improved slightly since the Financial Crisis. As figures published by the ONS show, the Gini index—a measure of income inequality—is lower now than it was in 2007.
Taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor to pay for public services is entirely appropriate and most governments around the world do it. But fretting endlessly about inequality doesn’t make much sense.
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Like all too many things, perceived by socialists as a zero-sum game. Also a subset of divide and rule. Take away one person’s equality in order to make a second person more equal, thereby making the first person less equal.
Not the way the world works, otherwise robbing the rich to give to the poor would have worked centuries ago and people could have then flourished in medieval squalor for ever more.
What matters is human capital, ingenuity and hard work to make life better. Nothing succeeds like success.
Any assets accrued in the family I know best have been the product of self-reliance, diligent study, hard work and getting the job done – tried and tested attributes passed down by the two preceding generations. No inequalities perceived or dished out.
Quite so.
The natural state of humans is poverty. It’s only that infinite human resource, our capital, ideas, innovation, industry that has made us as a species wealthy.
In a capitalist free market economy (assuming absence of political interference), A can only get wealthier by making others wealthier – even if that is not A’s intent – by producing something others value and want which makes them wealthier.
The reason why people are poor is they don’t produce anything.
As for complaints about inherited wealth: an examination of history indicates that in about 95% of cases, inherited wealth is frittered away within the next one or two generations.
I have endless respect for the families whose members have managed to pass down the generations the many lessons about what wealth truly is and the characteristics of those who accumulate wealth.
For example, Rees-Mogg.
The Millionaire Next Door (Stanley & Danko) should be read by all.
Are fans who are far less wealthy than their rock star idols distressed at the disparity? Are football fans distressed at the difference between their incomes and those of the footballers they follow each week?
What the feelings were of nomadic peoples living in the Pleistocene is merely conjectural. Being nomadic would have meant that it was simply impractical to possess too many chattels. Any woman of such a tribe could not have ‘possessed’ more children than could keep up with the family on the march, resulting in uncivilised forms of birth control.
Visit Brighton and as you pass the Quaker Friends meeting house you will notice a poster on their notice board declaring that there is no migration crisis but rather one of inequality. What this poster doesn’t make clear is that there is a vast wealth disparity in Third World countries between the very small strata of the exceptionally rich and most other people who are dirt poor.
Monopoly. As the game progresses wherein everybody starts equal and has equal opportunity, plus an element of chance, wealth accrues to the smallest number and ultimately just one player.
No matter how many times the game might be restarted with wealth equally redistributed, one player will end up with it all. No matter how many times the game is played by the same players, one (not necessarily the same one) will end up with it all.
Quakers: there is a prevailing view in many quarters that “wealth” exists in nature and is finite: and that there is a vast wealth heap or wealth pie which can be sliced up and greedy people take the biggest slice.
Wealth is created. If immigrants can create wealth, they can do so at home and don’t need to come to the UK.
What we fo have is the welfare state which using taxation takes from those who create wealth to give to those who don’t.
The net result will be equality… everyone in poverty as wealth creators lose the incentive to create, and wealth consumers have a disincentive to create when they get it without needing to produce anything.
The cost to date of this is £2.6 trillion since 1945 – that’s the accrued national debt needed to service the shortfall between the wealth generated by those who create it, and the hand outs to those who create nothing. That is the true tax on everyone in the population, and future generations.
Wealth is indeed created, mainly through work with some luck and inventiveness thrown in – but work is always required, even if you are lucky and clever. People do indeed think it’s a zero-sum game, or that money is the same as wealth. I think they also believe in Magic Dirt Theory. I guess the Dirt might have been Magic a few hundred thousand years ago, when evolutionary pressure was at work in different parts of the world (if you believe in that stuff) – but the evidence for Dirt not being Magic over short timescales (thousands of years) is overwhelming.
Excellent. Perhaps that’s why our creator made us competitive. Or if you prefer a more Darwinian approach why there is in fact a difference between people.
Equalty is a luxury which is distributed by unsuccessful people. The exception of course is when philanthropists distribute their wealth to the poor but not to the rich.
Anyone who moans about inequality is always looking up and never down.
People in Britain are better off than most people in the world. But that never counts. They’ll insist that what counts is what happens in their own country Not because there is any logic to it, but because that serves their argument.
“Inequality” is the wool pulled over the eyes of gullible people to accept all manner of tyranny and totalitarian control. Sadly the author can be included in that group (“Taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor to pay for public services is entirely appropriate “). Really?
The easiest people to convince that the pursuit of equality is insane are children with a simple example.
How would they feel if after doing their exams, they took some marks of the top achievers and gave them to lowest achievers – you know, to get rid of the inequality. I mean, it’s not the fault of the lower achievers that they’re not as bright, is it? And the higher achievers have been blessed with higher intelligence and ability, right? So it’s only “fair” that exam grades should be spread out to make things more “equal”.
Obviously that is ridiculous and a child immediately understands it. Sadly, grown ups, through constant and persistent brainwashing, believe that kind of engineered rebalancing, in a slightly different context, makes all the sense in the world.
The pursuit of equality is the pursuit of tyranny and totalitarianism.
Here’s someone who must spend a lot of time looking up and never down, all things being equal and that..Must’ve got his uniform bespoke;
https://x.com/TheNorfolkLion/status/1905418895629918600
Nice analogy with the exams.
If you earn £27,000, then you are in the top 1% globally. If you earn this or more, do you feel wealthy..? Are you wealthy.?
That’s not the point. The point is that if the people in the bottom 50% had the same concept of “equality” as most people in western countries, they would want to confiscate money from the person who earned 27,000 and redistribute it to “reduce inequality”
“Taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor to pay for public services is entirely appropriate and most governments around the world do it.”
Not sure about “entirely appropriate”. I think it rather depends on how much higher the rate is, what you define as “rich”, and what “public services” are being paid for. Taxation is a form of theft because you are relieved of your money by force and the amount of control over how that money is used is somewhat vague, even in a highly functioning democracy which ours isn’t.
“Most governments around the world do it”. As Sir Desmond Swayne might have put it, could this be “Herd Stupidity”?
The public services used to be provided by the private sector – both for-profit and not-for-profit – but these were over time nationalised and socialised to give Governments control.
For example: by the end of the 19th Century 75% of the British population had private health insurance, and many included unemployment and sickness insurance in the package.
These weren’t the wealthy, but coal miners, factory workers, railway workers, etc.
Those without insurance were covered by private charities, parish poor laws and philanthropists. The current Royal Free Hospital in London was established in the 1860s as the Free Hospital by a surgeon and charitable subscribers to provide free care for uninsured.
This private sector insurance was swept away by the 1911 National Insurance Act which the population didn’t want, for purely political motives forcing workers to contribute to the State scheme which meant they could no longer pay into their private scheme – usually local and under their scrutiny – and getting no more benefit. Nor did the Act provide cover for the 25% who had no cover.
Then in 1948 the Government nationalised healthcare and we have the monument to Socialist sclerosis, the NHS.
Take away Government control, return services to the private sector, no need to tax = no need for Government in its current shape and size.
The horror!
Indeed. I would have thought we could do without most of what government does, probably not all of it. Defence, a justice system, law and order, infrastructure planning. So some tax needed, but not much.
Controlling our borders properly instead of pretending to.
And we had a previous Labour government under the ‘bigot’ Brown with his mate Fat Balls who destroyed our excellent company pension provision by taxing dividend income to hit their growth. These two retards showed complete economic stupidity – remind you of anyone we know called Rachel – in thinking that the funds would always be doing well such that companies could take a funding holiday and nobody would notice their theft. Sadly there are also downturns and companies need to put more funds in. You might have thought a Conservative government would have removed the dividend tax but then when did we last have one of those.
With the wealthier 1% providing something like 20% of all tax revenue some might not consider that ‘fair’ especially when government at most levels is financially incontinent and pisses money away on things any normal person would consider moronic.
“But fretting endlessly about inequality doesn’t make much sense.”
Something of an understatement. It makes no sense to fret for one nanosecond about it. “Inequality” is baked into existence and shall be forever. It is stark raving bonkers to spend any time considering it. You will drive yourself nuts and/or end up trying to tell other people how to live their lives, stealing their money, or worse (and end up with a much worse “society” than you started with).
Ture equality is impossible, even in a communist state. There are always some people more equal than others.
Are North Koreans as equal as Kim Jong Un? Or his family?
Where Albanians as equal as Enver Hoxha?
What really bothers people is extreme inequality, when those extremely wealthy individuals publicly flaunt their wealth.
I guess it bothers some people. It doesn’t bother me. Life seems complicated enough as it is without spending a lot of time worrying about how other people are living their lives and how those lives are turning out. I need all my energy just to sort myself out.
People who talk about inequality (or equality) just haven’t thought too deeply about it. And the standard NPC response to people can’t be equal, is no, no, no, I don’t mean equality of outcome, I’m talking about equality of opportunity. As if that changes everything and makes it all very reasonable.
There is no such thing as equality or equality of opportunity. There never will be. it just takes small amount of thought to realise it can only end up in one place – totalitarian tyranny. To a bigger or smaller scale, depending on how much “equality” you push for.
The impulse to strive for equality comes from one of two places. Either guilt – if you are in favour of being discriminated against and being stolen from to make things more “equal” for others or envy if you are in favour of discriminating and stealing to make things more “equal” for yourself.
Anyone who is comfortable with a collective push for equality of any kind – as opposed to everyone taking responsibility and striving for themselves – should realise they are basically comfortable in an abusive relationship.
Indeed. I think people confuse the urge they have to “help others less fortunate than themselves” with this being mandated – enforced charitable giving. The idea that it’s right for the state to help people and we should all contribute to that whether we like it or not is well entrenched, and indeed advocated by a few posters here. I suppose you could argue that a society in which some people are “helped” is a more pleasant society to live in, for various reasons, and we all get the benefit of that so we should all pay. But that looks to me very much like a road to hell paved with good intentions.
And to me
I think some inequality is worthy of worry, e.g sentencing guidelines. It bears repeating that 8 out of 14 members of the Sentencing Council are white men but these new rules coming into effect on Tuesday have white men at a total disadvantage in the eyes of the law. So who’s doing the discriminating here? The white male judges who still make up the majority?
”White men are going to be treated a lot tougher by judges from Tuesday, compared to other groups’
Keir Starmer told GB News ‘all options are on the table’ after the Sentencing Council refused to scrap rules criticised over concern they will create differential treatment,”
https://x.com/GBNEWS/status/1905594292619407599
White male middle class men. I wonder if there’s a tendency among this group to have something against white male working class men.
Not if they’re paedophiles, evidently, as we know that all the white men who are caught with masses of images of child sex abuse walk free, every single time. And unlike Tommy Robinson, possessing such filth is not a ‘victimless crime’, but they avoid jail regardless. Soft spot for paedos, the ( mostly male ) judges. Go figure..
Example: All 4 paedophiles got suspended sentences, all on the same day, all courtesy of male judges. I did a check on that last point. I’d say there’s an over-representation of paedo-sympathisers in the judiciary. They obviously, due to their gender, have a lack of regard for safety, or something…
”The UK Online Safety Act came into force this week – sold as vital to “protect children.” Critics say it risks shutting down free speech. Meanwhile, 4 men caught with a total 25,820 indecent images of children walked free on the same day. One was a reoffender.
What protection?”
https://x.com/Wommando/status/1905174891206259019
The least “inequality” is impoverished societies where everyone is equally poor.
Inequality indicates an expanding economy and increasing prosperity within it, but not at an equal rate because it depends mostly on human agency. Some are more industrious, more ambitious, more innately gifted.
“One of the Left’s major bugbears is inequality.”
Until they have to pay for “solving” it, that is.
In the synopsis; “Taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor to pay for public services is entirely appropriate and most governments around the world do it.”
Depends on how the tax is spent, I suppose… And just because the various mafia around the world do it, does not make it appropriate, of course.
Should we be worried that the eagle kills the pigeon? Does that mean that the pigeon is suffering from inequality? No, it’s nature.
Such statements like “make poverty history” would mean that we must therefore also “make wealth history”.
Ergo, absurd.
“Humans evolved in relatively egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers, the authors note”
Did they really? How do the authors know that?
Because everybody knows, tof.
Everybody knows we all come from the same place in Africa.
Everybody knows it was a pandemic.
True or not, it makes the point that poverty is the natural state of Mankind.
There is a famous cartoon of three characters watching a baseball game, but not all of them can see over the fence. However with reorganising of the boxes they are standing on, they manage to find a situation where they can all watch the game. What most people don’t pick up is that they are outside the fence and none of them paid anything towards the spectacle and entertainment. They are thieves…
When did good sense come into it?
Sir Michael Marmot has shown that there are socio-economic gradients in health. Those at the bottom have increased risk of almost all diseases and die at a younger age. A good example is obesity. It is associated with increased risk of ischaemic heart disease, hypertension, depression, cancer and neurodegeneration. Obesity is not the cause of these conditions but is itself a product of multiple changes in the body which cause obesity and its associated diseases.
But obesity is a consequence of affluence. Throughout history the poor, living in impoversihed societies have been thin. It is only affluent societies that can produce enough food to cause obesity. In the Uk, however, there is a paradox – the affluence paradox. It is the least affluent in society who suffer most from obesity. The explanation is that those at the bottom of the socio-economic pile have the problems of affluence together with many other problems which interact to cause those changes in the body which produce obesity and other diseases.
A common factor in all the conditions is inflammation. Affluence leads to inflammation because our diet is sterile (a product of hygiene) and we lack the bacteria in our food which maintains the microbiome. Pathogens then enter the tissues and cause inflammation which contributes to most disease. The answer is to fortify our diet with milk and yoghurt which provides the lactose fermenters to maintain the microbiome.
Boris Johnson wanted to level up. Well that is almost impossib;le in terms of economics, but it is possible in health. If farmers produced more milk, and we dran,k more milk and ate more yoghurt, then the entire population would be healthier. There would be fewer on benefits and the pressures on the health service would be less. A reduction in inflammation would improve mood and increase the production of oxytocin (the molecule of love). We do not need to be at the top of society to be happy. In fact the life of a working person with a decent job and a decent wage who is in good health is probably as good as it gets.
There are a few conditions that are more common in those at the upper end of the socio-econmic scale. But this usually occurs when society is moving from overall poverty to increased affluence. Then it is those at the top who experience affluence first and suffer the downside. Thus epidemics of poliomyelitis first appeared in middle class in the USA and UK. Also conditions such as anorexia nervosa and eczema first appeared in the better off, but gradually spread through societiy and now are increasingly more marked at the lower end of the scale.
Thus in general inequality is associated with disease, but the answer is not to try to engineer economic equality but to tackle the basic problem of inflammation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379311083_The_Microbiome_and_the_Entropy_Paradox_An_Evolutionary_Perspective_Food_Nutrition_Journal
Second law of thermodynamics => efficiency is proportional to temperature difference.
Ceteris paribus, the more inequality, the greater the efficiency.
When there is no inequality, no useful work can be done.
Simple thermodynamics may not apply to economics but perhaps there are similar underlying “laws” which show that inequality can not only be good but is essential for an economy to operate.
Interesting question is what the “right” level of inequality might be.
I’m concerned with the people who have fine singing voices. And those who can memorise loads of stuff. And the drop-dead good looking. Boohoo. It’s all so unfair.