To begin with equality itself and the basic question of whether inequality matters? It may be that to many people the question itself will appear unnecessary, so obvious is the answer to it. It is because of the take for granted quality of that shared thinking that I wanted to begin with a reminder of what lies behind that answer may be not at all widely shared outside our own circles.
For those on the radical right inequality also matters. It is the precondition for the sort of good society which the neo cons, as we have come to call them, envisage. For the true believers of the Thatcherite premiership and the Bush White House, inequalities mattered and matters a great deal. It is not a to be regretted or unavoidable by product of market mechanisms it is the spur which drives the lively and creative to succeed and which ensures that the undeserving obtain their just deserts. Without inequality, the dead hand of social engineering intervenes to hold back those who create the wealth on which the rest of us depend while, utterly uncooperatively, the state rewards and fosters the very behaviours which any civilized society would most wish to eliminate.
Thus it rewards those who fail to work with unemployment benefits, encourages the production of children outside wedlock by increasing state support as each new infant is created and excuses crime, and the violation of property in particular, by those whose way of life has placed them apart from the decent main-stream. The ‘idle, thieving bastards’ school of social analysis, as identified by Bagguley and Mann (1994), is alive and well, the best part of two decades after Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street.
Let us not forget, either, that those who support these views have answers to the problems as they describe them. Lean and very mean social support, provided as much as possible by family and charity, more orphanages for children whose parents (invariably mothers and, in the USA, almost as invariably black) cannot support them and, in the one service which the radical right guru von Hayek was keen to see the state provide, larger prisons and plenty more police officers.
There is, of course, a variation on this position, in a sort of Labour middle way.
Here inequality remains an unavoidable and inevitable by product of modern globalised, marketised economies. The good news, however, is that everyone is getting better off, and as Mr Brown has said, so long as that is true, the fact that some are getting better off faster than others is nothing too much to get worried about. The worst effects of inequality are to be mitigated, but the direction of travel, with its ever growing gap between the best and the worst off in society, is once and for all set. In contrast with the first position, poverty is an enemy which governments must attack, but the achievement of a more equal society is one which is impossible and unnecessary.
Finally there is the position adopted, I would guess, by most people reading this that inequality does matter, and that the classless ambition remains one to be pursued, even in difficult times.
The case for working, deliberately, to create more equal outcomes, processes, autonomy rather than simply more equal opportunities to become ever more unequal, has two necessary rationales the practical and the moral.
The practical case for more equal societies includes the contention that such societies are more successful economically drawing on the talents of all the citizens at a society’s disposal, rather just a section of them and socially.
More equal societies have less crime, less fear of crime and, crucially as far as concerned, enjoy better health as study by Richard Wilkinson and Michael Marmot.
Morally, the case for fairness draws on all these practical benefits but does not depend on them.
To quote the classic text of R.H. Tawney, it relies on the concept of ‘equal worth’.
Equality in this sense is absolutely not, as its critics suggest, about a dull uniformity. It is entirely consistent and supportive of diversity, but a diversity in which there is similarity of esteem including a far greater similarity of economic rewards between the duke and the dustman, the brain surgeon and the bus driver and so on. This belief in the unique worth of each human being, of course, is a fundamental building block in any worthwhile society.
- What do you think?
- Does it matter?
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