Just Finished Reading: Inequality and The 1% by Danny Dorling (FP: 2014)

Capitalism certainly didn’t create fiscal inequality but it most certainly exacerbated it – a lot! According to several figures I’ve seen, something like the 5 richest people have more wealth than the bottom billion. That’s wealth inequality on a truly awesome global scale. In this rather polemical review of this ever growing disparity the author says that this phenomena is one of, if not the, most important issues in the world today. Although the facts are indeed shocking I’m personally not convinced.

One other interesting piece of financial information I came across recently is that people on the ‘poverty line’ in most Western countries are still in the top 25% in terms of wealth globally. Essentially the poor here would be comparatively rich anywhere else. Of course most of the 99% barely interact with the 1%. We often live in very different worlds. But is this a problem? Sure, the wealthy are like Black Holes pulling more and more of the money supply to themselves but still we are, comparatively speaking, still generally better off than most of the world throughout most of human history. Damage is being done – but I don’t think it’s in the way the author thinks it is. I think that the most damaging aspects of extreme wealth are cultural rather than crudely financial. The ‘gravity’ of wealth generates its own particular ‘pull’. Wealth (and the greater the better) is seen – in movies, books and much else - as a prime good: something that should be strived for to the exclusion of almost everything else. But, ironically, the very act of striving for great wealth is also all too often portrayed as destructive to those who obsessively seek it – like poorly equipped moths attracted to a too hot flame. Wealth, our culture seems to tell us (that is the 99%), is something both to be striven for and essentially beyond our reach. It is an activity almost designed to both elevate the status of the already rich whilst, at the same time, prove that most (99% maybe?) are unworthy of attaining that status. In other words we are being stimulated by an unobtainable dream to work ourselves to death to achieve an unreachable goal – it is the brilliance of the Capitalistic system that has worked very well indeed.

To me at least the fact of wealth – even extreme wealth – is not the crux of the great economic problem. As I see it the problem is hinted at, indicated by, the great fiscal disparity between rich and poor. It is not that there are so few of the super-rich but that there are so many of the super-poor across the world. To twist an old saying: The Rich have ALWAYS been with us and, to be honest, they probably always will be. The challenge of the 21st Century and beyond is what we do about the *Poor* and most especially those living a hand-to-mouth life on the edge of existence itself. Naturally the Rich themselves can help in that regard – both through a reasonable level of taxation – that isn’t so easily avoided or evaded – and through being encouraged to invest in programmes designed to permanently reduce the absolute number of the poor and through public recognition of the exercise of the philanthropic impulse.

The author argues that countries with ever increasing fiscal inequalities are both unhappier in general (at both ends of the spectrum and not just at the shallow end) and more politically unstable. This may in fact be true. It is definitely in the best interests of the Rich not to leave the other 99% with nothing left to lose. Such societies tend not to last very long and when they inevitably fail that ending tends to be bloody. Although the author does make some valid points I think he fails in his larger argument that we cannot and should not learn to live with the 1%. It is entirely possible that such an argument does in fact exist but this book is not the place to find it. Overall rather disappointing.