Equality When?

Social barriers to sustainability

2010-01-16T03:29:00.000-08:00

The social barriers to sustainability.

To avert climate change, we must outlaw inequality and open the borders.

(A shorter article based on this appeared in New Internationalist, June 2010)

by Bob Hughes

The modern global economy doesn’t just run on fossil fuels; above all, it runs on inequality: the principle that some people are worth more than others, while yet others are worthless. And an ever-growing mountain of evidence indicts inequality as the real driving force behind all the harms, and more, that have finally led to climate change. A world without inequality is not just desirable, it is necessary, and urgently. And it can be achieved. Outlaw inequality, and the emissions will fall away, as the pressure of the market’s hidden foot begins to ease off the accelerator.

Inequality has recently ceased to be “just” a moral issue: hard data are appearing, in ever-greater abundance and coherence, on its material effects. The best-known of these, so far, are its health-effects within more-developed countries (not between countries – but we will come to that). Life in an unequal country, or region, is shorter and nastier than life in a more-equal one. In the USA (the world’s most unequal rich country), being among the least-wealthy 20% takes 14 years off your life and diminishes its quality in ways that go too deep and wide to quantify. In Britain the penalty for being in that lower fifth is 7.5 years. In Oxford the penalty is 5.5 years. And it affects everyone: even the rich die slightly younger, and lead slightly worse lives, in highly-unequal USA and UK than in more-equal Sweden or Japan. Knowing this means that anyone who tolerates inequality must now accept full responsibility for other people’s misery, illness and early death.[1]

What is less widely discussed, so far, is the environmental cost of all this inequality. Here are some indicative findings:

• Inequalities are far more costly, in environmental terms, than income-differences alone might predict. For example an Oxford University study in 2006 found that 61 per cent of all travel emissions came from individuals in the top 20 per cent (those earning £40,000 a year or more), while only 1 per cent of emissions came from those in the bottom 20 per cent (with incomes up to £10,000)[2]. Sheffield University’s Danny Dorling reckons that:

it is almost certainly an underestimate to claim that the richest tenth of the world's population have a greater negative environmental impact than all the rest put together. [...] And, of the richest 10th of the world's population, the richest 10th consume more, even than the other half a billion or so affluent.[3]

This extraordinarily disproportionate impact is explained not by their wealth per se, but their wealth relative to the rest of the population. The whole idea of “wealth” becomes disastrously skewed in an unequal society, as we will see below.

• Rich countries generally have far greater ecological impacts than do poorer ones – but a country’s impact may not relate so much to its wealth, as to its wealth-inequality. The WWF’s 2008 Living Planet Report showed that the two countries with the greatest per-capita ecological impact were the United Arab Emirates and the USA, with ecological footprints, respectively, of 9.5 and 9.4 global hectares (Gha) per citizen in 2005, compared to a sustainable footprint of just 2.1 GHa. If wealth is defined in terms of human wellbeing and development, then this need not carry any ecological price at all, as shown by highly egalitarian Cuba, which had a footprint of just 1.8 Gha, and is even regenerating forests that were destroyed in the earliest days of imperialism. In 2006, Cuba was the only country to achieve both sustainability, and good-quality lives for its people (as measured by the UN’s Human Development Index – HDI – included in the WWF’s 2006 report). Some countries that are almost as wealthy in crude terms as the UAE and USA, but which are more equal, have nowhere near the ecological impact. Rich nations are deceptive units of comparison because they do less and less productive work, especially the dirty work, within their own borders. But even so, a striking relationship is observable – see Appendix 1.

• In the USA, a strong relationship has been established between inequality and environmental degradation. A 1999 study by James K. Boyce at the University of Massachusetts found that more-unequal states (like Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi) had several times more, and worse, pollution, and weaker environmental laws, than more-equal states (like Minnesota, Maine and Wisconsin)[4]. These are also the states where other ill-effects of inequality are most prevalent: from exposure to crime, to infant mortality, to suicide, to the chances of being incarcerated, to the chances of being washed out of your home by a passing hurricane.

• Human impact grows when inequality grows, globally and within nations[5]. IPCC figures show that atmospheric CO² equivalents increased more than twice as fast during 1995-2004 (the first ten years of the World Trade Organisation’s existence, when the brakes really came off neoliberal growth and world-wide inequality soared) as during 1970-1994.

• The same pattern even appears in the archaeological and historical record. The first evidence of environmental degradation due to human activity is associated not with agriculture as such (as was widely assumed) but with the emergence some thousands of years later of intensely unequal, aristocratic societies in the Eastern Mediterranean around 5,000 years ago. The same sites also yield evidence of the human health problems associated with inequality: “the ordinary people have five times more dental lesions than their ruler and are up to 4 percent shorter. An average Bronze Age male farmer from the eastern Mediterranean would stand 167cm (five feet six inches); 6 cm shorter than his ruler and 10cm shorter than his hunting ancestors”.[6] This pattern of inequality, depletion of natural resources and human immiseration is the leitmotif of early-modern European history, reflecting the course of feudalism, helping explain the rise of capitalism itself in Northern Italy and the Low Countries, and culminating in the spectacular exodus of the European poor to the Americas and Australasia in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries[7]. By 1914, the average British conscript was 5 inches (12.7 cm) shorter than his officer[8]. Europeans have only regained their hunter-gatherer stature in the last two or three generations – but only thanks to cheap fossil fuels and intensified exploitation of the rest of the world.

This knowledge is new, and political dynamite for anyone with the courage to use it. The epidemiological studies (by the likes of Michael Marmot and Richard Wilkinson) only began in earnest in the 1970s; the archaeological evidence only began to emerge in the 1980s, so it is little wonder if the penny has taken a little while to drop among the broader community – especially when one reflects on how deeply and forcefully we have all been acculturated, over scores of generations, to accept inequality (with even militant trades unions setting their sights no higher than retention of relatively low-paid, unpleasant jobs, instead of demanding control of the work by workers themselves, and a fair share of the vast wealth produced).

How does this damage happen?

Inequality does its work in two ways – first, by the “emulative consumption” described more than a hundred years ago by Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899 – not to mention by Adam Smith himself in 1759, in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments). In a unequal world, says Veblen, life becomes above all a battle for respect and to avoid “invidious comparisons”; “everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of the ability to pay”. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett chart in detail its effects on health and to some extent on the environment in their recent book The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better (2009). Le Monde’s environmental editor, Hervé Kempf, delivers a blistering account of it in How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (2008), and draws links between rising inequality and state violence and erosion of democratic rights. The rich not only spur each other on in their extraordinary feats of overconsumption, but also transform consumption all the way down the social pecking-order, turning whole societies into high-performance planet-trashing machines, as everyone is drawn into an intensifying struggle for ever-more fragile respect (and self-respect): from the billionaire who needs apartments in London, Paris and New York and a yacht with a helipad just to keep face with his peers; to the working-class familes that must spend more than they can afford on a car that makes them look wealthier than they are, lest they be seen as “losers”; to their children, terrified of the scorn awaiting them should they turn up to school in the wrong trainers.

Positional consumption: private goods become public bads. the link between global and local inequality.

Whereas emulative consumption is driven by frail human psychology, “positional consumption” is 100% material: forced on us by factors that physically shape our lives. It was first described by British economist Fred Hirsch in Social Limits to Growth (1977). “Positional goods” are ones whose value is reduced, or which cease to be luxuries and become necessities, if others have them too. Hirsch’s analogy is standing at a football match to get a better view; if everybody does it, nobody is any better off. Country cottages and “unspoiled Greek islands” are classic positional goods, whose pursuit blights entire countries with terrifying speed. With private cars, positionality has become a central fact of life: once enough people are using them, they become obligatory; and anyone who wants to continue leading a “normal life” must find the money to play a game whose ante is continuously being raised. Likewise private schools and private healthcare: the more others use them, the more (and the more urgent) reason there is for you to use them too, or be left behind. Which is very good for GNP (the whole neoliberal project can be seen as one of turning as many goods as possible into positional goods) but of diminishing benefit to anyone or anything else. As Sheffield University’s Danny Dorling has observed, the English city of Bristol spends vastly more money on secondary education than does similar-sized Sheffield, because it has an extraordinary number of private secondary schools. Sheffield has hardly any. Yet both cities send almost identical numbers of children to university.

Actually, to call these things “private” is misleading: they have massive public impacts. A “private estate” dominates and diminishes the lives of everyone it excludes, or who even tries to conduct their life in its vicinity. Private helicopters intrude on the lives of millions (and especially in hotspots of inequality like Sao Paulo, which has more private helicopters than Manhattan). These things are unlike genuinely private goods (such as a meal, decent clothing, or a good night’s sleep, whose enjoyment affects only the person enjoying them).

Hirsch observes that even good A-levels are “positional goods” when the supply of nice jobs (doctor, lawyer etc.) is restricted: having straight As becomes no longer adequate; A-stars are needed, plus interesting extra-curricular accomplishments. And the education that provides these good things becomes positional, especially when is dominated by an elite, private sector. Hence the Bristol taxi-driver who works double shifts from the time his daughter is two years old, to get her into and through one of that city’s five elite, private-sector all-girls schools – adding 2 extra tonnes of CO² to the atmosphere every year[9], and wearing himself out. He is not necessarily driven by crude ambition, but by fear for his daughter if she has to go the disparaged, local, state secondary school.

But being a doctor should not be a prize for which people fight each other: the more good doctors, the better, surely, and this is the approach taken in Cuba. There, doctors come to you rather than you to them. Their carbon footprints are about the same size as everyone else’s. They are not a species of aristocracy, as elsewhere, yet the profession still has no difficulty attracting recruits – and Cuba achieves almost the same health outcomes as the USA, for one twentieth of the expenditure. (Which while bad for GNP is good for the planet).

Housing is possibly the most ridiculous positional “good” of all. As Danny Dorling puts it: “In a more unequal society, everyone is less free to choose where they live”[10]. His 2007 Joseph Rowntree Foundation study Poverty, Wealth and Place in Britain, 1968 to 2005 showed how hard the “exclusive rich” must now compete for diminishing numbers of desirable locations and to avoid undesirable ones, at huge and ramified energy cost throughout society: extra hours must be worked to secure the same amount of housing (two salaries instead of one); extra journeys must be made as “islands” of respectability and safety become smaller and more isolated. As the despised interstices of respectable society atrophy and become unproductive, more and more resources are sucked in from beyond the national borders. Hence foreign wars, intensified exploitation and corruption of resource-blighted countries, and ever stiffer, more militarised national borders. Parallels can be drawn between NATO’s beleaguered garrisons in Afghanistan, and Britain’s wealthiest 1%: both groups need increasingly to travel by helicopter. (And in Sao Paulo, the risk of kidnap makes the helicopter almost compulsory).

Yet it is easy to see how housing becomes a public good if no house is allowed to be built that does not enrich its surroundings. This is how houses were once built (and the rich have snaffled most of the surviving specimens as charming rural hideaways). Such houses could be built again, starting tomorrow. But not by any market, only by people.

Instead, in the unequal countries (and even more so, on this increasingly unequal planet), work of all kinds has been relocated, increasingly, to suit the rich.

Within the national borders, this means more time must be spent in cars, a need for more reliable and safer cars, leading for example to a 20% increase in the size of automobiles in the USA since 1985[11]; plus a vast increase in their numbers and a tripling of commuting time between 1983 and 2003. For an illustration of how this happens in the UK, see Appendix 2.

Globally it means more migration: people must live, and to help them do that the bravest and ablest embark on trials and journeys that out-Odyssey Odysseus a million times over, every single day, wherever there are borders between rich and poor. Internationally there are thought to be about 300 million of them (and this does not include the hundreds of millions of ‘internal’ migrants, especially within China). They are the “dark matter” of the neoliberal universe, without which no budget would ever balance; its “ragged-trousered philanthropists”, working almost for nothing (and often actually for nothing), doing the work the rich countries’ own paupers have been priced out of by the crippling costs of living. There are three-quarters of a million illegalised migrants in Britain alone, trapped here to a greater or lesser extent by the draconian anti-immigrant laws that made them illegal, and which have led to a lucrative revival throughout the UK of slavery, debt-bondage and death through overwork[12] – not to mention the increasingly acceptable racism that keeps the whole system going.

An answer: prioritize public goods; redefine “private wealth”; outlaw inequality; and scrap immigration controls.

In Hirsch’s analysis, positionality supercedes older and more limited notions of private and public wealth, and embraces Ruskin’s useful but hitherto ignored idea of “illth”[13]. The opposite of a positional good might be either a public good, which enriches everyone’s life, whoever it belongs to, or a private good, whose consumption is an entirely private matter, affecting nobody else. Warm clothes, decent food, leisure, creative activities and personal relationships come into that category, but most of what we currently call “private wealth” certainly does not (see above). The industrial “private sector” generally is anything but. And as for the private press and privately-owned media, these are nothing less than assaults on the public realm by private interests intent on controlling it.

Clean water, a beautiful garden, a good sense of humour, or any skill you like to name, are or could be public goods. Public transport, housing, libraries, theatres, cafés, parks and schools of all kinds are clearly public goods – and the planet and its people need more of them. But there has never been an economic policy informed by this concept of maximising public good while eliminating the positional, and we need one now.

Above all we need to reduce inequality because this, ipso facto, means less competitive and less positional consumption – and less of almost any type of morbidity you care to name, from homicide to obesity. We can do this rapidly when we want to: the UK government did it during World War II with great popular support: consumption fell to a fraction of its peacetime level - yet public health made its greatest advance of any period in British history[14]. Central to this project is the removal of all borders that, instead of properly defining zones of responsibility, have come instead to separate an “us” from a “them”. The obscenity of EU and US border fortifications against the world’s poor, and the cancerous network of agencies and commercial interests serving them, is a terminal symptom of the divisive malaise the societies they pretend to protect have harboured for far too long: the divisions of class.

Exposing the link between inequality and climate change could mobilise people who at present are not engaged:

• It links personal reality to global reality.

• It speaks to the sense of social justice which we all share, and shows that it is relevant. It appeals to our desire for solidarity and hatred of injustice; not just personal guilt.

• It opens up and informs a wealth of opportunities for action and engagement – wherever the poor are abused by the rich.

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Appendix 1: Examining the 2006 WWF figures, Danny Dorling found that although some of the more-equal countries do not on the face of it look particularly virtuous, when one corrects for these countries’ biocapacities (the amount or real, usable land they have within their own borders) their eco-footprints begin to fall into rank, with ecological impact and inequality closely matched. I have added Gini coefficients (where I could find them) to a selection of countries. (The Gini figure rises with inequality.):

Table 1:

	National eco-debt	Gini
United Kingdom	-237.7	36.0
Germany	-216.5	28.3
Italy	-163.7	36.0
France	-142.7	32.7
Spain	-132.2	34.7
Netherlands	-59.4	30.9
Belgium	-41.3	33.0
Greece	-35.1	34.3
Portugal	-25.5	38.5
Switzerland	-21.9	33.7
Denmark	-10.2	24.7
Austria	-9.2	29.1
Malta	-1.3	26.0
Luxembourg	-1.1	26.0
Ireland	1.6	34.3
Norway	4.9	25.8
Iceland	24.1	25.0
Finland	28.2	26.9
Sweden	38.0	25.0

Sources: Eco-debt figures from personal email from DD, 2007, using WWF 2006 data; Gini figures from UN website.

Appendix 2: Positional automobilisation in Swindon, UK.

Some of the most powerful mechanisms driving positional consumption seem to happen just outside peripheral vision. For example, in Britain, many banks and building societies (mutual financial organisations) moved their headquarters out of drab town centres to new, “prestigious” out-of-town settings during the 1980s and 1990s (the word “prestigious” became a stock-epithet in UK advertising copy during that period, reflecting the growing importance of status). This was partly straightforward Veblen-consumption (corporate status became more important as competition intensified as regulations were relaxed) and partly to accommodate the needs of an enlarged, motorised sales-force (in turn, the consequence of turning pensions into positional goods, as marketised private pensions were promoted in opposition to state and job-based pensions).

In one case, which I witnessed in the early 1990s, the Nationwide Building Society moved its headquarters out of its old premises in the centre of the lacklustre West of England town of Swindon into a new, steel-and-glass atrium-style building, amid landscaped carparks, close by the motorway. This meant that several hundred low-paid and mainly female clerical, catering and ancillary staff could no longer travel to work easily by bus, or do family shopping in their lunch-hours. So, between 1994 and 1997 (when I worked there) Nationwide’s car parks gradually became fuller and fuller – mainly with fairly old cars. Executives complained that they were being filled up with “bangers”. Tennis courts and flower-beds were paved over to make way for them. Even so it became necessary to arrive at work earlier and earlier to be sure of getting a place. Low-paid staff had been coerced into the automobile economy, to play their part in the monstrous ramping-up of carbon emissions that marked that decade, with impacts that left no corner of the planet untouched.

This local saga seems to have been part of a general trend: Oxford University’s Amanda Root has found that in the UK there was a 90% increase in women with driving licences during the 1980s and 1990s; for the first time there were as many female drivers as men (there had been only half as many in 1975-6); but the women only drove one fifth as many miles as the men[15] – reflecting a type of car usage, and the low status that went with it, that I witnessed in Swindon.

Bob Hughes © 12/01/2010; Contact: bob@dustormagic.net; +00 44 1865 726804

[1] See Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson “The Spirit Level: why more-equal societies almost always do better” Penguin 2009; Richard Wilkinson “The Impact of Inequality” (Routledge, 2005); Inequalities Are Unhealthy; Vicente Navarro; Monthly Review Volume 56, Number 2; http://www.monthlyreview.org/0604navarro.htm; Oxford data from NHS Health Profile for Oxford, 2006

[2] Travelling in the right direction: lessening our impact on the environment; Brand, Preston and Boardman (2006) Final Research Report to the ESRC:
http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/PO/releases/2007/february/travel.aspx?ts=3

[3] Danny Dorling, personal communication 28/9/2007, citing Worldmapper.org and WWF Living Planet Report data. See also Dorling; “Injustice: why social inequality persists”, Policy Press, April 2010 (in press).

[4] James K. Boyce: “Is inequality bad for the environment and bad for your health?”; DifferenTakes 8, Spring 2001; Population and Development Program at Hampshire College, Amherst.

[5] “The rate of growth of CO 2-eq emissions was much higher during the recent 10-year period of 1995-2004 (0.92 GtCO 2-eq per year) than during the previous period of 1970-1994 (0.43 GtCO 2-eq per year); (Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, IPCC)

[6] Martin Jones; “Feast: why humans share food”, p. 248

[7] The phenomenon of land-exhaustion in Europe since the tenth century is described and analysed by (e.g.) Fernand Braudel “Civilization and Capitalism 15^th – 18^th Century” (1981); Immanuel Wallerstein “The modern world system”(1974); Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, “Poverty and capitalism in pre-industrial Europe” (1979). Bob Sutcliffe has estimated that: "from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, more than 60 million Europeans migrated to America and Australasia, of shom 5.7 million went to Argentina, 5.6 million to Brazil, 6.6 million to Canada, and 36 million to the United States." (quoted by Teresa Hayter in “Open Borders: the case against immigration controls”, Pluto 2001)

[8] Andrew Marr, “A History of Modern Britain”, Macmillan 2009.

[9] Calculation based on a taxi driver using 10 litres of diesel/shift, producing 7.15 kg of Carbon. If he does this 5 days/week for 10 years (260 days/year = 2,600 days) he produces 2600*7.15 = 18,590 kg of carbon (18.59 tonnes) into the atmosphere. Carbon figures from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmenvfru/929/3091706.htm

[10] Danny Dorling, “The trouble with moving upmarket”; Guardian 18^th July 2007.

[11] “Falling Behind: how rising inequality harms the middle class”, Richard Frank, University of California Press 2007. The weight of a Honda Accord (an average car) increased from 2500 pounds in 1985 to 3200 pounds in 2007.

[12] For example as described by Hsiao-Hung Pai in “Chinese Whispers: the true story behind Britain’s hidden army of labour”, Penguin 2008. See also Rahila Gupta: “Enslaved: the new British slavery”, Portobello 2007; and Dan McDougall: "When I hear of girls working in London who swallow acid, I know it could have been me"; Guardian 24/5/2009

[13] Ruskin developed this idea in his influential essay, “Unto this last” (1860)

[14] Development as Freedom; Amartya Sen, OUP, 1999

[15]Transport and Communication; Ch 13 of “Twentieth Century Social Trends”, ed Arthur Halsey and Jo Webb, 2000.

US working hours and climate change

2009-12-19T08:19:00.000-08:00

The small but growing Equality lobby has so far not made any breakthroughs, in publicising the link between inequality and the overconsumption that is causing climate change. Let's hope this changes in 2010. I feel little progress will be made, without the kind of popular, moral pressure an equality-based approach could unleash.

Long working hours are a major feature of unequal societies. This article, from Monthly Review, argues that if the US had adopted EU working hours, it could have reduced its carbon emissions by 2 percent by 2002, from 1990 levels - and given US workers 7 additional weeks of time off per year:

David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot, "Are Shorter Work Hours Good for the Environment? A Comparison of U.S. and European Energy Consumption". They say:

If Americans chose to take advantage of their high level of productivity by shortening the workweek or taking longer vacations rather than producing more, there would follow a number of benefits. Specifically, if the U.S. followed the EU-15 in terms of work hours, then: * Employed workers would find themselves with seven additional weeks of time off. * The United States would consume some 20 percent less energy. * If a 20 percent energy savings had been directly translated into lower carbon emissions, then the U.S. would have emitted 3 percent less carbon dioxide in 2002 than it did in 1990.

Also on this theme, try Hervé Kempf's "How the Rich are Destroying the Earth" (Green Books, 2008). For hard data on the link between inequality and long working hours see Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's "The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better."

With best wishes for Christmas and 2010.

How little is your England?

2008-10-15T03:41:00.000-07:00

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just published a new report on "Young people and territoriality in British cities", by Keith Kintrea, Jon Bannister, Jon Pickering, Maggie Reid and Naofumi Suzuki. It illustrates acutely well the point made by Richard Wilkinson in "The Impact of Inequality" about the intensifying competition for respect under rising inequality.

It also, incidentally but very clearly, shows up the real nature of the alleged overcrowdedness of our 'tiny overcrowded island': poorer people really are being confined - not by 'floods' of immigrants as Sir Andrew Green (of Migration Watch) would have them believe, but by the likes of Sir Andrew Green himself (whose England is a very commodious and extensive affair) and his friend Nicholas Soames (co-founder, with Frank Field, of Migration Watch's new, parliamentary front-organisation, Balanced Migration). Limitations of UK land registry make it difficult to work out just how big Soames's England is but if it's anything like his friend the Duke of Westminster's, it would need a much bigger planet than the one we have, were all true-born English folk to be granted a similar acreage.

Meanwhile, for one young man who contributed to the study, England consists of a bleak area just 200 metres square in Peterborough - as you can read in Rowenna Davis's article about the new report in yesterday's Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/oct/14/children-socialexclusion

The full report is here:

http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=978

It complements last year's report "Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005" by Daniel Dorling, Jan Rigby, Ben Wheeler, Dimitris Ballas, Bethan Thomas, Eldin Fahmy, David Gordon and Ruth Lupton:

http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=905

What I'd really like, would be a set of maps showing the relative sizes of people's Englands, based on income, wealth, age, race, gender and disability, and showing how they have ALL shrunk as inequality has risen. As Danny Dorling said last year (re the above report) "In a more unequal society, everyone is less free to choose where they live".

Invasion of the killer zillionaires (June 2008)

2008-06-05T05:31:00.000-07:00

HARD ON THE HEELS OF THE SEIZURE last year of 45% of Cambodia by foreign property speculators (see "Country for sale", Guardian Weekend, 26/4/2008:) comes news that 2/3rds of this island in the British Virgin Islands could be gobbled up by the super-rich, who need somewhere to park their yachts and play golf:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/119884382?z00m=15374441

The on-line petition (above) seeks to halt the development on the limited grounds that it will destroy the habitats of 26 animal species. I think that should be 27. More of the story here.

Meanwhile, our own tiny, overcrowded island is steadily getting even tinier and overcrowdeder, as floods of these same billionaires buy up and fence off rural acreages and gate their communities in their insatiable quest for privacy (e.g. see Ian Jack's article on Britain's sudden rise in land prices, in the Guardian in February).

QUESTION: how tiny would this tiny island of ours be, if the part of it occupied by the richest 1% were removed? The Isle of Dogs perhaps? (It is hard to work this out because over half of Britain isn't registered - and at least some of this has been owned by the same "happy few" since approx 1066).

FOR PERSPECTIVE:

American writer P J O'Rourke, points out that if the whole of the worlds' population moved to one place it would cover former Yugoslavia at the same density as Manhattan and he says "Manhattan is a pretty good place to live."

- from Educational charity WORLDwrite's Ceri Dingle, describing the new, pro-immigration film "The More the Merrier".

Now, positional consumption tears China apart

2008-05-08T03:56:00.000-07:00

Positional goods are ones whose advantages are affected by social factors (notably, whether other people also have them, or not: country cottages, private educations, iPods, cars). They are a major feature of unequal societies. The "positional economy" was first described by Fred Hirsch in "Social Limits to Growth" (Routledge, 1977) and the concept was used more recently by Robert Frank in "Falling Behind: how rising inequality harms the middle class" (2007).

This piece in the New York Times of 24th April (also included in The Observer's NYT supplement, 4th May 2008) gives a very vivid illustration of their impact in China:

By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: April 24, 2008
With First Car, a New Life in China

Bradsher explains that family cars have become essential for improving your sons' marriage chances (and thence the possibility of having grandchildren). But "When [the father of the family he talked to] courted his wife in the early 1980s, he needed only a bicycle."

Bradsher's article ends with the tragic news that:

In two weeks, he will go to a leading hospital in Shanghai for more surgery, a five-hour drive to the north, followed by two more rounds of chemotherapy. But he will not be going in the family car: he sold it for nearly $8,000 last year to help cover his medical expenses.

It is a common occurrence in this country, nominally communist, but with little or no safety net. While many families are scrambling into the middle class and buying cars, others are falling out of the middle class because of business reversals, medical bills or other problems, and are unable to buy replacements for their first car.

Extreme inequality, and the riots in Tibet

2008-03-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

This article, by Heiko Khoo, gives a very convincing explanation for the explosion of unrest in Tibet: extreme inequality that is even more acute than the already-insane inequality prevailing in China generally, which is itself driven by China's descent into the free market.
http://www.marxist.com/the-riots-in-tibet.htm
Both the Chinese and western governments seem to be making the Dalai Lama the central issue, thereby avoiding the main problem, which neither wishes to face.
Here's a snippet from the article (I believe Heiko Khoo is a researcher for Amnesty):

The ‘average wage' in China's cities as a whole is 14,000 Yuan a year, (US$1800) but wages in Tibet are nearly double the average, higher than in Shanghai and second only to Beijing. State sector employment accounts for nearly 94 percent of employment in Tibet as opposed to 66 percent in China's cities on average.

The problem is that such relatively well-paid state employment is disproportionately allocated to people of ethnic Chinese backgrounds. Higher wages are justified on the basis that living in Tibet takes you far from family and friends and often causes serious health problems due to the effects of high altitude. Tibetans, whose skills are generally lower than the ethnic Chinese migrants, look on them as a deliberately privileged layer.

Alongside the influx of state employees, engaged in administration and infrastructure projects, has come an influx of ethnic Chinese traders and to a lesser extent Hui Muslims, whose businesses thrive on the high spending power of state employees and tourists. Their nationwide networks mean Tibetans can't compete with them. The boom in Tibet has encouraged all manner of migrant entrepreneurs to open shop, including beggars' rackets and sex workers. Tibetans often think they too are subsidized by Beijing. Thus it is easy to see wherein the roots of ethnic discontent lie.

All over China the wage levels of workers have not risen in line with the economic boom. Under pressure from the army of migrant workers and the rapaciousness of private sector employers, wages for many have been frozen. According to the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) 26% of China's workers have not received a pay rise for five years despite the economy growing at an average of 10.6%. Profits have been boosted not only by new machinery and work methods but also by holding down wages. The ratio of overall labour costs to GDP has fallen from 53.4 percent in 1990 to only 41.4 percent in 2005.

Given that so much of what constitutes the western lifestyle is now manufactured in China (i.e. made possible by China's inequality) it seems inadequate to focus on western inequality alone.

Inequality and the neo-Malthusians

2008-03-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday's Nightwaves (BBC Radio 3) there was a fascinating discussion about Malthus and current anxieties of various kinds about "today's crowded world" and the possibility that "the population of poor countries alone will rise by almost three billion in the next 30 years" (and what should "we" do about this?)

Some very refreshing contributions came from Matthew Connelly, a historian from Columbia University - for example:

If the world's food resources were distributed fairly there would be about 4 pounds of food per person, "including 1 lb of meat and dairy products, which would make most of us fat".

... and:

"If the problem is consumption, then of course it's the *wealthiest* people we need fewer of."

Connelly has a new book out:

Fatal Misconception: the struggle to control world population;
Matthew Connelly; Harvard University Press 2008

For a free sample chapter, see:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CONFAT.html

Here's a snippet from the programme that I liked so much, I laboriously transcribed it via the Listen Again facility:

"Too often, alas, population projections are *psychological* projections ... not that there are too many people but that there certain *kinds* of people, with whom we feel uncomfortable, who there are too many of. So when people say the US or the UK for that matter is overpopulated I want to ask them which people in particular they have in mind, who are in and of themselves a problem?

"If the problem is consumption, then of course it's the *wealthiest* people we need fewer of. I mean, Britain would do much better if it had 100 million subsistence farmers, say, than 50 million people who are doctors and lawyers and bankers and so on. It could have much less of a carbon footprint if it imported subsistence farmers from the Sahel, and exported bankers and lawyers to Africa. But nobody is proposing that."

You can hear whole program on line till next Wednesday, here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/nightwaves/pip/0vffr/

Evolutionary roots of egalitarianism

2008-02-22T02:21:00.000-08:00

This was in response to a discussion of the "are we innately predisposed to be nasty, hierarchical animals, or nice egalitarian ones?" question; in particular, the work of Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto on Social Dominance Theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Dominance_Theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dominance_orientation

According to Christopher Boehm, in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behaviour. (Harvard 1999) the answer to this question is "Yes". Humans are neither nice egalitarians nor nasty Hobbesian despots, but both - and that is the secret of our success, as what we might call a "militantly egalitarian" species.

Humans have a *capacity* for forming dominance hierarchies, as other primates do, but have evolved very good counter-dominance strategies for cutting upstarts down to size - which accounts for the overwhelmingly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer and most tribal societies. i.e., human egalitarianism is a highly dynamic affair, in which a very high value is placed on individual autonomy. People who might become upstarts are cut down to size by a whole range of techniques ranging from pleasant mockery to ostracism to (as a very last resort) homicide. People of exceptional ability or strength, who have the potential to become upstarts, are at pains (unless they are psychopaths) to pre-empt criticism by practising self-deprecating humour and modesty (lest they be thought boastful, etc).

Boehm reckons that (apart from the last couple of thousand years) humans have been so effective at maintaining equality that natural selection may even have had time to make this predisposition part of our genetic makeup. But whether it is genetic or not, egalitarianism is something humans do very well - until they fall under the control of invincible despots from whom they cannot escape. At which point Paul Gilbert's work on depression (The Evolution of Powerlessness) becomes very relevant, I think. Gilbert and Wilkinson ought to get together to discuss this - both have offices at Nottingham University after all.

I recommend Boehm's book very strongly indeed. Also (but from a quite different angle) Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Co-operation (Basic Books, 1984).

After reading Boehm, I suddenly saw my late father in a new light. He went through WWII without rising above the rank of temporary lance-corporal despite being a very capable, intelligent man with a good university degree. He declined promotion partly because he hated the officers, but also because he felt the other men would resent his elevation, and make his life a misery. This, I think, was an example of a human society functioning well, despite the unpromising circumstances (and maybe it was what got them through).

But do read Boehm. Worth it.

PS - On the environmental impacts of inequality: In his book Feast: why humans share food (OUP 2007) Martin Jones says that the onset of hierarchical societies in the Bronze Age coincides with first signs of environmental degradation due to human activities. This was also the period when humans became shorter and unhealthier: "An average bronze age male farmer from the eastern mediterranean would stand 167cm (5'6"): 6cm shorter than his ruler, and 10cm shorter than his hunting ancestors." (p248)

Equality when? A discussion paper.

2007-10-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

The damage done to the health of individuals and societies by simple inequalities of wealth is becoming clearer and clearer, thanks to a growing body of research that began as recently as the 1970s. Whether one compares nations, regions, cities, districts or even workplaces, one finds that the members of less-equal groups have shorter, unhappier and unhealthier lives than the members of more-equal ones.

Inequality is no longer "just" a philosophical, or a moral issue: it is now a medical, actuarial and (soon perhaps) a legal issue. If we tolerate huge gaps in wealth, we condemn some members of our society to entirely predictable forms of suffering and early death. In the USA as a whole death comes 16 years earlier for the poorest than it does for the richest. In Oxford the difference is 6 years. In the UK civil service, the death-rate is 3 times greater for the lowest grades than it is for the highest.

The impact of inequality is felt by everyone: the rich as well as the poor (although the poor overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the damage) which is why apparently-poor but more-equal societies and groups often outperform the richest (but less-equal) societies on health.

The effects of inequality not only drown out those of other, well-known factors such as diet, drug and alcohol abuse, and smoking - those factors (and many others) turn out themselves to be consequences of inequality. Other consequences include repression of women and minorities, violence and self-harm, and even environmental degradation (caused by the excess consumption that goes with inequality).

Inequality is moving to centre-stage, as the most important and immediate threat to well being that we face. But unlike other threats, such as aids, terrorism or global warming, it is one that we can do something about, even on a local scale and in a fairly short time-frame: any diminution in inequality is beneficial, and we have a host of metrics with which to monitor the effects.

Equality when? We need a timetable.

I believe it is time for Trade Unions to move beyond pay-disputes, and demand absolute equality. There is no reason to demand anything less. Of course, any reduction in inequality is beneficial - so if the thought of immediately giving everyone the same pay is too frightening, then we can take a gentler approach, introducing a maximum wage as well as a minimum one, adjusting these over time so that they converge in a certain number of years, and meanwhile devoting as much energy as possible to reducing and repairing the kinds of suffering that are caused by inequality.

The important thing is to recognise that inequality and its consequences are now a choice that we make - and we cannot escape responsibility for that choice any more. Any group or organisation that continues to tolerate (or actively encourage) big differences in wealth is damaging the health of its employees and their familes and communities, in predictable and very unpleasant ways, and may eventually have to pay for that damage - just like companies that have poisoned their workers and neighbourhoods with toxic materials.

Even holding a public debate about this has some effect, because it puts the creators of inequality on notice that their behaviour is under a serious new challenge.

The goal, however, has to be equality. All "civilised societies" pay lip service to it, and all societies that have ever practised it have been significantly happier, healthier and better for the planet than the ones that don't.

Bob Hughes, Oxford Brookes University, 26/1/2007

bob at dustormagic dot net

Some references:

Much of the evidence is presented with great clarity in Richard Wilkinson's "The Impact of Inequality" (Routledge 2005).

An early landmark was Amartya Sen's 1981 study of gains in life-expectancy in poor countries, based on World Bank statistics: "Public action and the quality of life in developing countries" Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statisics 43:287-319

Michael Marmot's 2 "Whitehall studies" - of life-expectancy in the UK Civil Service demonstrated conclusively the importance of status for health: Marmot M. Status Syndrome - how your social standing directly affects your health and life expectancy. London: Bloomsbury & Henry Holt New York, 2004.

See also Professor Danny Dorling's numerous publications: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/staff/dorling_danny/