Colin James devoted a recent column to The Spirit Level and how inequality was one of the core concerns at our party conference weekend before last. He wonders if the book, covered here in earlier posts, might become “a sort of guidebook for the next Labour ministry”.
Authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have…mined a vast amount of data, much of it relatively recently available, to show that in rich countries health and social problems are greater in more unequal than in less unequal societies.
This is not just among the poor. “The vast majority of the population is harmed by greater inequality,” Wilkinson and Pickett say.
“Across whole populations rates of mental illness are five times higher in the most unequal compared with the least unequal societies, people are five times as likely to be imprisoned, six times as likely to be clinically obese and murder rates may be many times higher.” More equal societies have more trust and higher self-esteem and less anxiety and social insecurity.
Recognise the picture?
Bill English could, for example, spend less precious taxpayers’ money building and running prisons — not to mention less money trying, mostly futilely, to fix up prisoners’ mental, addiction and other crime-inducing disabilities — if he reduced inequality.
James writes the challenge for those of us who want to put inequality back on the agenda is to ” convince voters reducing inequality is good for them — and to do that they will need to go where Wilkinson and Pickett go only very lightly and argue that it will also be good for the economy, that is, voters’ material welfare.”
I agree with him. It has to be pitched as an idea that is good for all of society, not just those at the bottom of the economic heap. It is about investing in the untapped and neglected talents of our under-educated young. Unleashing the human and economic potential of the bottom 40%. Because that will make New Zealand as a whole move ahead. We will all benefit. And given the depressing array of social ills linked with income inequality (as set out convincingly in The Spirit Level) reducing that inequality will make this country a much better place to live.
What do you think?
There are many ways of thinking about the proposition. I personally like that Rawlsian idea of the type of society people would want if they were ignorant of the position they might hold in that society. From behind this veil, it’s likely people would opt for fairness and justice than inequality and injustice. But as you and James contend, there’s actually a robust economic/investment argument to be had too.
You could call this new policy strategy ‘Closing the Gaps’.
That made me smile, Danyl.
That made me smile, Danyl.
It’s nice that there is now a single book that brings together vast amounts of study – empirical, analytical, theoretical – into a form that is (presumably) quite easy to read and understand (I have yet to read it but my area of area of research and study involves many of the same things).
This new direction pleases me greatly in terms of a departure from the more strictly neoliberal workfare policies of the Fifth Labour Government who did not adjust benefit levels despite the overwhelming evidence to suggest the negative societal impacts are just simply astronomical.
It’s been something of a frustration for me that Labour have previously not gone to the same lengths to spell out the connection between a fair and equitable society and a functional one that perhaps the National party have previously to demonise social spending.
Now if only there was a way to package it up into a nice little slogan… the right tend to be very good at that sort of marketing.
“Public opinion will support the necessary political changes only if something like the perspective we outline in this book permeates the public mind”
And so it was in the great European corporatist accords. Positive and negative forces ‘permeated’ attitudes across class divides, producing a lasting commitment (well, since the 1930s)to agreed political change and subsequent stability. Also, each case was substantially different – Sweden form Denmark, Finland from Sweden,Sweden from, say, Austria post 1945 and so on. This was the model developed in crisis in the Ireland in the 1980s, the longevity of which will be tested by the current crisis. These were subdtantially more than the accommodation struck in NZ after 1945 (if, indeed, there was an accommodation, as opposed to a modus operandi without established agreemenst and rules).
There is much to ponder in this model, as we watch the last three governments’ model of modern social democracy subside into a contingent hal-way house between what was and what looks like a neo-liberal resurgence in a putative second term.