Growing inequality has become another cause of the left, but being more equal doesn’t necessarily make anything better.
Theodore Dalrymple illustrates this in a column on Britain’s National Health System:
. . . equality in health is not necessarily desirable in itself. Suppose that the infant-mortality rate in the highest social class is three per 1,000 live births, while that in the lowest is six per 1,000 (approximately the case in Britain today). Then suppose that we could reduce the rate by one death per 1,000 births in each social class, yielding two per 1,000 in the highest class and five per 1,000 in the lowest. A cause for rejoicing, certainly—but not from the point of view of equality, for the ratio of deaths in the lowest class to deaths in the highest class would widen from 6:3 to 5:2—that is, from 2.0 to 2.5. Surely, however, only a latter-day Lenin would reject such an improvement because it increased inequality. Similarly, an increase in the infant-mortality rate of the highest social class, to six per 1,000, would represent an advance to complete equality; but again, no one but a Lenin would wish it. . . .
The easiest way to improve inequality is to drag the top down but that would make things worse for those people without doing anything at all to improve matters for those at the bottom.
A wide gap between rich and poor might increase envy from those at the bottom but the real problem isn’t how much those at the top have. It’s that those at the bottom don’t have enough, although how much is enough is open to debate.
Helping those in greatest need get enough ought to be the goal even though that might not close the gap between them and those who are better off.
Most people with an interest in inequality like to point to our “egalitarian” past.. sometime between 1900-50.
But if we examine the period we find say, in 1936 the rural population was about 500,000 and the urban about 1 million. By 1996 the rural population was still 500,000 and the urban 3 million, ie from 2:1 to 5:1.
A good part of that period saw what demographers call the fastest (unforced) diaspora of a people anywhere in the world as Maori shifted from the marae to the cities to get work.. suddenly a big chunk of our hidden inequality was exposed and conquered in the brilliant economy through to about the late 60s. But its that same group of people and their descendents that lost work (and their language and culture) from that period on.
So a large part of our equality of the period resulted from most of us living “off the sheep’s” back with a lot of hidden inequality on the marae and on the farms.
That strong interdependence between town and country on farming also imposed its own rough equality on the nation.. taxes, subsidies, regulations and financial controls were used to keep the farm based economy ticking over and create an impression of egalitarianism in the place.. but of course it all went West when Britain joined the Common Market and agriculture slumped.
Our so called inequality is really a reflection of our recent history and we simply haven’t had the time, the money and the industrial development to do much about it.. indeed I think inequality may be an essential feature of a modern progressive economy, eg, an innovator puts out a new product, his personal wealth soars and his workers are well paid, but the market competitors catch up, the product gets cheaper and the innovator moves on with his wealth and wages slump. Technically inequality has increased till those workers retrain and go with the next innovator.. and so it goes..
JC