In many cities, those living in the poorest neighbourhoods will live up to ten, and sometimes 20 years less than those thriving in the richest. This is not a fact dug up from the other side of the equator, reported decades ago. This is modern-day Britain, and the United States. This is London, Glasgow and Sheffield; it's Chicago, New York and Detroit.
The only way to turn this around, to dig our way out of a trend that has been worsening for decades, is to create a politically active society that demands more of its leaders. “There is a shortage of political will,” Richard Wilkinson, honorary visiting professor at University of York, tells WIRED. “There isn’t a shortage of technical ways of doing it - there is a need for the mass movement.”
The Equality Trust member has penned an editorial in the British Medical Journal with Kate Pickett, professor of epidemiology, highlighting the damning “immorality of inaction on inequality”. At the World Economic Forum this year, rising income and wealth disparity was cited as the trend that would impact global development most in the next ten years. And there is no shortage of evidence to backup claims of inaction over this issue.
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Inequality is everywhere and the disparity is most apparent in the wealthiest countries in the world, across Europe and in the US. It is clearly visible in the health of their citizens, in spiking drug use and obesity levels. It infiltrates a child’s wellbeing, say Wilkinson and Pickett, reduces their chances of attaining a good education, and thus their social mobility. As the rich countries get richer, social groups within them are frozen in their silos - and it is becoming increasingly harder to break free. “Among developed countries, mental illness and infant mortality rates are two or three times as high in more unequal countries; teenage birth rates and homicide rates can be 10 times higher,” the coauthors write in the BMJ.
Political will, of sorts, has already been expressed against inequality in many areas of the US and UK. These kinds of crushing inequalities, for instance, are rife in many of the communities that voted for president Donald Trump. “In the US among poor white people, some of the people supporting Trump, death rates have been rising and they've been rising in suicide, drugs and alcohol - all signs of people feeling pretty desperate," Wilkinson tells WIRED. "There are beginning to be similar signs [in the UK], though it looks as if it has more to do with the effects of austerity on people aged 85 and over. In both cases, it’s a matter of what societies spend money on - whether that’s the super rich or whether it’s distributed, or whether we have adequate services.”
Wilkinson, who is coauthoring a book with Pickett on how inequality affects mental health, suggests we are at the peak of an enormous u-turn in attitudes that has taken us well away from the relatively egalitarian outlook popular in the 1970s. Income differences were high in the 20s, then dropped dramatically postwar until the 70s, after which came “the modern rise in inequality” based on neoliberal ideology brought in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
“Another pattern we’ve seen is that people who traditionally supported Democrats in the States or Labour here have in many cases moved to the right, I think because they gave up on those parties that allowed themselves to become part of the establishment. When Blair talked about New Labour and said he didn't really mind about inequality - it’s those kinds of policies that have done the damage and people are moving right.
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“Support for both Trump and Sanders was a response to the same thing - the failure of established parties to deal with inequality. That broad pattern has been repeated in lots of countries. Far left parties in some countries and far right in others, but always the movement away from established political parties. If there hadn't been this growth of inequality, this wouldn't have happened.”
Despite this, as Wilkinson points out, the governments that have been brought in as a response to the accelerating inequality trend look unlikely to do anything other than make that disparity greater.
“I’m quite sure in the States, a government of the super rich and an administration of the super rich that government has appointed is not going to do much for their less well-off supporters.”
The failure of recently slated progressive governments to be just that, progressive, pushed voters this way. Wilkinson here references Tony Blair “sidling up to the rich”. But also points to prime minister Theresa May, pre-election, claiming she wanted employee representatives on company boards - something that typically leads to more democratic companies with smaller pay differences. This suggestion ultimately vanished, post-election. “It’s clear she was nobbled by some of the rich business interests close to the Conservative party and because there isn't a strong mass movement saying you can’t do this, the easiest thing is to give way to the super rich.
“Of course it’s damaging to democracy - the influence of money and politics is appalling, particularly in the US.”
But Wilkinson argues that, once the political will is there, there are many avenues for remedying the dire inequality of western societies.
When Theresa May backed down on mandatory employee representatives on company boards, something she campaigned on in the run-up to the General Election, she pointed out we would not have “German-style binary boards”. Speaking at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Annual Conference in November 2016, she said: “I can categorically tell you that this is not about mandating works councils, or the direct appointment of workers or trade union representatives on boards. This is not about creating German-style binary boards which separate the running of the company from the inputs of shareholders, employees, customers or suppliers.”
That German system, which she promised the UK would avoid, has been one of the most progressive and successful efforts at balancing social needs. Companies with 2,000 employees or more in Germany must have a board half made up of employee representatives, and BMW has tied executive salaries to those earned on the assembly line floor. “In some FTSE 100 companies, the difference is 400 times the lowest wage.”
Pay ratios are already on the agenda for investors, according to Legal & General Investment Management’s 2016 corporate governance report. Those investors are increasingly demanding more transparency from companies. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has also made it mandatory for public companies to disclose the pay ratio between average wage and CEO’s wage.
“This is becoming a political and social issue and will creep into the governance world,” Sacha Sadan, LGIM’s director of corporate governance, said at the time. “Frankly we don’t know what the ratio should be, but I think it is going to be an emerging issue and more transparency will occur in this area.”
Change should come at the point of earning, within companies, but also via more progressive taxes argues Wilkinson. ”The rich do not pay a higher proportion than the poor. We must spend more on public services.”
Again, emphasises Wilkinson, none of this will be possible without a grassroots political movement. It’s what president Trump time and again claimed was behind his candidacy, and ultimately his success. And on the one hand, he was right. The disenfranchised he directed his speeches at; those tired of the political elite and corporate influence in government (Hillary Clinton was typified by Trump as the embodiment of that influence, by means of her association with her husband's legacy), wanted change. But they got Donald Trump, an elite of the highest financial echelons whose corporate conflicts of interest are too many to name and are set to overshadow his presidency in many ways.
He has replaced the political elite, with the corporate elite, surrounding himself with powerhouses of the oil and banking industries, billionaires at the furthest end of the inequality scale. Incredibly, at a rally shortly after his election win, he admitted he thought his infamous "drain the swamp" phrase - directed at political opponent Hillary Clinton - was "hokey" and he only started "saying it like I meant it" after seeing the crowd's reaction.
But we might have a lot to thank Trump for.
His presidency has already inspired millions to become politically active, to protest the wrongs they see and challenge the institutions implementing them. We saw it at the women's marches that took place across the globe on Trump's inauguration day; marches specifically campaigning against inequality. And citizens, companies, politicians and lawmakers alike have all staunchly rejected, campaigned against or outright fought the rhetoric, premise and legal substance of Trump's executive order to ban nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. Kindling to the fire burning under these kinds of movements is universal access to better information on wealth disparity – from the US Securities and Exchange Commission's demand that pay ratios be made public, to Oxfam’s annual report showing this year that just eight men own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world.
Wilkinson is confident the culmination of all these things will necessitate a move closer towards the kind of grassroots movement needed to drive real change.
“Many European countries’ austerity policies are going to produce more protests, but also in the US there is going to be a growing movement protesting about most of the things Trump wants to do. There is very wide growth of the left, and there are indications that it has been happening in the States already with the support for Bernie Sanders, a man calling himself a socialist.
“In Britain we have seen huge growth in the Labour party membership and support for [Jeremy] Corbyn - clearly there are problems in the Labour party; but their growth in membership and the sign of a growing group who want a Labour party, a left party that in a way hasn’t sold out to inequality and forgotten about the people, it will help.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
