One book that I didn’t read in 2011

It received a lot of publicity when published, generating comment and debate about equality and income distribution.  It became a bit of a political handbag to bash the political classes and the bankers  with.  I heard that Ed Milliband gave it to all the shadow cabinet for homework reading over the summer holidays last year.  The discussion that it has generated has led to the establishment of the Equality Trust – a national organization  with local branches around the country campaigning to reduce income inequality.
 

If you haven’t guessed by now, the book is ‘The Spirit Level: why Equality is Better for Everyone’ by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson.  I was pleased to be lent a copy by a good friend  but I have to confess that I returned the book unread. I ‘m not sure what I was expecting but when I opened the book I glazed over in the face of the wealth of detailed evidence supported by charts and graphs covering a range of social indicators.  It didn’t seem like rocket science to me that living in an unequal society was bad for everyone’s health. 

Then last November I went to an Equality Trust Workshop - ‘A Balancing Act’ which had been jointly organized by the Workers Educational Association and the Cooperative Movement.  Bill Kerry, the Secretary of the Trust, talked us through a powerpoint presentation that laid out the basics of the case made in the ‘Spirit Level.’  The workshop introduced me to the arguments and the evidence that I had missed by not persevering with the book:

•          We live in a society where inequality has been rising – our economic model has resulted in more wealth at the top and failed to deliver any trickle down to the rest.

•         This inequality has become stuck, entrenched.  It is now a part of the landscape, not a passing trend or blip.

• ·         Politics hasn’t challenged inequality – it has accommodated it. 

• ·         It is not a question of increasing average incomes by chasing economic growth but concentrating on tackling income inequality.  Not more money, but reorganising the distribution of what we already have.

• ·         There are 2 possible ways of doing this (and maybe others?): 1) use taxation to re-distribute income (Scandinavian model) 2) narrow the spread of income before tax (Japanese model).  Which route should we follow?

• ·         The debate on inequality has been diverted into talk about equality of opportunity over equality of outcome, the vain hope that social mobility will kick in while such inequalities persist, and a focus on the poorest in society and what’s to be done about them.

• ·         Unequal societies foster insecurity, division and scapegoating.  The ‘squeezed middle’ kick down instead of punching up.

• ·         Inequality is not just about poverty.  The value of having hard evidence such as the Spirit Level is that it shows that inequality is harmful for almost everyone in society.  This provides a wider base for arguments around social justice.

• ·         We can make a start as individuals by auditing our spending (and that of our organizations) in favour of cooperative, employee owned and mutual suppliers which tend to have lower pay differentials

We discussed:

• ·         How to spread these ideas in order to reach out to a wider audience in neighbourhoods and including black and minority ethnic groups.

• - ·     - Popular and community education can be used to make the case for economic democracy more accessible.

• ·        -  Our current party political system is not equipped or prepared to grasp the issues.  The Occupy movement and others are making a strong case and raising awareness of the urgent need to transform the nature of our economic system.

• ·         We mustn’t forget the wider context of global inequality where the developed world (the North) has had more than its fair share of wealth and resources at the expense of the developing world (the South).

Exploring the case for equality leads us on to the next layer of the onion.  For those of us living in rich developed societies  the time has come to acknowledge that we do not need more growth. In fact we already have more prosperity than we need, it’s just that it’s not shared out fairly.  So our challenge is to envision an economy that is sustainable  - prosperous without growth - and to achieve a widespread buy in as part of that process – a constructive unraveling of this society which has become based on our identities as individual consumers while still addressing the inequalities that it fosters.  What does a post-growth society look like?  How do we build it and how do we live in it?  How do we achieve a fairer balance between our wants and our needs?  How do we achieve fair distribution? If we are not individual consumers then what is the basis of our identity and security?  How do we rebuild our trust in ourselves as beings with basic social and communal instincts?

Reading for 2012 so far includes:

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class.  Owen Jones. Verso 2011
Prosperity Without Growth: economics for a finite planet.  Tim Jackson.  Earthscan

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global revolution.  Paul Mason. Verso
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism. Ha-Joon Chang