Ill Fares the Land Read Free Page B

Expectancy.
    (From Wilkinson & Pickett, The Spirit Level , Figure 6.2, p. 80)
    Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. The impact of material differences takes a while to show up: but in due course competition for status and goods increases; people feel a growing sense of superiority (or inferiority) based on their possessions; prejudice towards those on the lower ranks of the social ladder hardens; crime spikes and the pathologies of social disadvantage become ever more marked. The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed. 1

CORRUPTED SENTIMENTS
    “There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.”
     
—LEV TOLSTOY, ANNA KARENINA
     
     
     
     
    D uring the long decades of ‘equalization’, the idea that such improvements could be sustained became commonplace. Reductions in inequality are self-confirming: the more equal we get, the more equal we believe it is possible to be. Conversely, thirty years of growing inequality have convinced the English and Americans in particular that this is a natural condition of life about which we can do little.
    To the extent that we do speak of alleviating social ills, we suppose economic ‘growth’ to be sufficient: the diffusion of prosperity and privilege will flow naturally from an increase in the cake. Sadly, all the evidence suggests the contrary. Whereas in hard times we are more likely to accept redistribution as both necessary and possible, in an age of affluence economic growth typically privileges the few while accentuating the relative disadvantage of the many.
    We are often blind to this: an overall increase in aggregate wealth camouflages distributive disparities. This problem is familiar from the development of backward societies—economic growth benefits everyone but disproportionately serves a tiny minority positioned to exploit it. Contemporary China or India illustrate the point. But that the United States, a fully developed economy, should have a ‘Gini coefficient’ (the conventional measure of the gap separating rich and poor) almost identical to that of China is remarkable.
    It is one thing to dwell amongst inequality and its pathologies; it is quite another to revel in them. There is everywhere a striking propensity to admire great wealth and accord it celebrity status (‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’). We have been here before: back in the 18th century, Adam Smith—the founding father of classical economics—observed the same disposition among his contemporaries: “The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.” 2
    For Smith, this uncritical adulation of wealth for its own sake was not merely unattractive. It was also a potentially destructive feature of a modern commercial economy, one that might in the course of time undermine the very qualities which capitalism, in his eyes, needed to sustain and nourish: “The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition . . . [is] . . . the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” 3
    Our moral sentiments have indeed been corrupted. We have become insensible to the human costs of apparently rational social policies, especially when we are advised that they will contribute to overall prosperity and thus—implicitly—to our separate interests. Consider the 1996 “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” (a revealingly Orwellian label), the Clinton-era legislation that sought to gut welfare provision here in the US. The stated purpose of this Act was to shrink the nation’s welfare rolls. This was to be achieved by withholding welfare from anyone who had failed to seek (and, if successful, accept) paid