From the UK, a New Reminder Why Inequality Must Go

Remember the fabled midnight ride of Paul Revere? Remember the storybook warning Revere shouted out that evening in 1775 to his fellow patriots just outside Boston?

“The British are coming!” Revere declaimed as he rode. “The British are coming!”

Well, one thing then led to another, and some fifteen months later a Virginia slaveowner named Thomas Jefferson was declaring the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal.”

The new nation that Revere and Jefferson helped create would go on to have a really hard time translating that noble sentiment into any serious sort of egalitarian reality. But then, in the middle of the 20th century, Americans began making real progress on the equality front. By the 1970s, our nation’s distribution of income and wealth had become substantially more equal.

But that progress would soon stall — and shift into reverse. By the late 20th century, the United States had gained global notoriety as the developed world’s most unequal major nation, a shameful distinction the US of A still holds today.

The good news amid all this? The British are once again coming, with a dire warning that all of America desperately needs to hear and heed.

Tackling inequality head-on, the UK’s highly regarded Equality Trust makes clear in a powerful new report, has become “both a moral and economic necessity.”

This new Equality Trust report comes fifteen years after the publication of this century’s most pivotal book on economic inequality’s direct impact upon our lives. In their 2009 classic, The Spirit Level, the British epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson detailed how maldistributions of income and wealth foster everything from lower levels of personal health to higher levels of societal violence.

In the Equality Trust’s just-published new analysis, The Spirit Level at 15, Wilkinson and Pickett have joined Aini Gauhar and Priya Sahni-Nicholas to update their original effort. They’ve uncovered a contemporary reality that Wilkinson and Pickett did not expect to encounter.

“What we weren’t prepared for when we first wrote the book,” the two acknowledged last week, “was how much worse things could get.”

Research since The Spirit Level first appeared, Wilkinson and Pickett point out, “has added gambling, domestic violence, and the mistreatment of children to the list of problems all correlated to higher levels of inequality.”

“Correlated,” the two add, amounts to too tame an appraisal. Their work makes a compelling case that inequality “actually causes poorer outcomes.”

Inequality, note Wilkinson and Pickett, heightens hierarchy and reinforces the notion that some people — rich people — have more intrinsic value than people of more modest means. Within this unequal social reality, “people worry more about how they’re seen and judged.” Status rules supreme, leaving some among us “overcome with a sense of inadequacy and depression” while a fortunate few view life through an exceptionally narcissistic lens.

This “hubris of the ultra-wealthy,” The Spirit Level at 15 observes, “is destroying our world.”

We can put some chilling numbers on that destruction: Our richest 1 percent worldwide, the new Equality Trust report points out, are now emitting “as much greenhouse gas emissions” as our world’s poorest 66 percent combined.

Shrinking that “massive environmental footprint” of the world’s richest, the Equality Trust analysis stresses, “must be recognized as indispensable to controlling the climate crisis.” And high levels of inequality, the analysis adds, also intensify “status competition and class insecurity,” two key social dynamics that lead inexorably “to overconsumption and a throwaway culture.”

The Spirit Level at 15 abounds in other insights on the high price we pay, individually and socially, for tolerating ever-wider economic gaps between our richest and everyone else. But given the political power of those rich, could we actually start narrowing these gaps? We simply must, The Spirit Level at 15 stresses, and the report devotes considerable attention to the wide variety of steps we could be taking to shrinking the size and power of our world’s greatest fortunes.

Those steps include enacting serious taxes on grand concentrations of private wealth. Such taxes, The Spirit Level at 15 relates, could “play a strong role in raising the tax base to fund the cost of public services, redistribute wealth, and stabilize economies through reducing inequality.”

But taxes on grand fortunes — and incomes — only take us so far. We also, posits The Spirit Level at 15, need to rethink our society’s basic business models and do much more to nurture alternatives ranging from co-operatives to employee-owned enterprises. Developing government procurement policies that prioritize contracting relationships with these co-ops and employee-owned businesses could speed this transition mightily along.

The world’s most celebrated network of co-op enterprises, Spain’s Mondragon Group, currently limits top executive pay to just nine times the pay of its enterprises’ lowest-paid workers. In the United States last year, ten corporate CEOs pocketed over 1,000 times the pay of their most typical workers. Governments worldwide, the Equality Trust believes, ought to be capping corporate executive pay at a reasonable multiple of median worker compensation.

The UK’s Equality Trust has plenty of other ideas for fostering a more equal and environmentally secure world. And building that world has become more fundamentally essential today than ever before.

“In an era of unprecedented wealth,” as the British authors of The Spirit Level at 15remind us, “we are witnessing soaring numbers of people suffering from emotional distress, exhaustion, and isolation.”

We can change that.

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