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Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
© Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett 2008
There is a long history of theories of the sources of class distinctions.
But imagine a society without categorical class distinctions – perhaps
some future version of our own society – in which all personal income,
apart from social security benefits and pensions, is earned income, and everyone
in the economically active age-range is an employee. Imagine also that none
of the productive system is owned by private individuals and all capital is
institutional capital belonging to banks, pension funds, corporations etc.
Hence there is no unearned private income from capital, from ownership or
rent. Imagine also that this society is just as market orientated as our own:
capital is still moved around to maximise profit, and firms can only survive
by selling the goods and services they produce. Lastly, imagine that the differences
in income and power among the employed population are the same as they are
now. Top managers and directors are just as rich although they receive only
salaries and no profits, and throughout the job hierarchy many people from
the most senior managers down to the organiser of the cleaners, have –
as now – the power to hire and fire those below them. In this society
everyone lives by selling his or her labour.
What would this society be like? We believe it would feel much like our own
and that problems of hierarchy, of inequalities in status and power would
feel very familiar. We would still suffer the same invidious ranking, with
all the same connotations of success and failure, ability and inadequacy.
There would still be a deep divergence of interests between rich and poor,
and the ideology and institutional power of richer, better educated and more
privileged people would still have a predominant influence on government policy
and the management of the economy. People from minorities and the poor would
still be stigmatised and suffer discrimination, while children from more privileged
backgrounds would continue to enjoy easier access to better education, jobs
and higher incomes. Health inequalities and differences in living and working
conditions would look much as they do now.
The society in this thought experiment is designed to rule out the possibility
of different classes distinguished by categorically different relations
to the productive system – according to whether they are owners or workers,
living on earnings or profits. Gone are the categorically opposed classes
– freeman and slave, lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat –
‘oppressor and oppressed’. And instead of ‘two great hostile
camps’ (within which you’d expect a good deal of class solidarity),
there is now just inequality.
Either we have to believe what seems intuitively implausible, that
such a society would feel quite different, or we have to accept that the social
injustices of modern societies result from material inequality rather than
from some set of class relations. That such a society would seem likely to
suffer from most of the social injustices current in our own society means
that our attention should be turned towards the nature and effects of social
inequality itself.
As well as understanding the way economic life changes the nature of the conflicts
produced by social stratification systems, we also need to understand the
underlying driving forces present within any stratification system. A few
generations ago this often seemed too obvious to be worth discussing. With
large proportions of the population living at subsistence levels, material
want was assumed to be the primary driver. Nevertheless, both Adam Smith and
Marx recognised the shame of relative poverty.
Now however, if you look at the 13 per cent of Americans who live below the
Federal poverty line, you find 80 per cent have air conditioning, over a third
have a dishwasher, three-quarters own at least one car or truck. While some
go short of necessities, this is usually a reflection of the power of social
pressures on their spending priorities.
It is half a century since most of what had been called the diseases of affluence
became the diseases of the poor in affluent societies. No longer are the poor
thin and the rich fat. Among the richest 20 or 30 countries there is no suggestion
of a relation between Gross National Income per head and average life expectancy.
However, within each of those countries health is finely graded by income
right across society. This means that what matters in the developed world
is no longer absolute material standards, but the differences between us.
For the vast majority, relative income is important for reasons to do with
status and respect. Consumption is of the essence because ranking systems
– in humans and animals alike – have always been about power to
gain access to resources and recognition of that power. The endless variety
of modern consumer goods has made consumption an ever more exquisite and exacting
marker of status.
But we are not stuck with intense status competition. Rising inequality intensifies
status competition and the pressure to consume; greater equality reduces them.
The data show that with greater inequality people work longer hours, savings
seem to go down and debt and bankruptcy increase. We intuitively know that
inequality is socially corrosive. The surprise is how clearly this shows up
in the figures. Most of the problems associated with low social status become
more prevalent in more unequal societies.
We have looked at rates of physical and mental illness, violence, trust, social
cohesion, teenage births, drug abuse, obesity, rates of imprisonment and educational
failure. They are all much worse in more unequal societies. (We test for statistically
significant relationships in two independent test beds: internationally among
the richest countries, and among the 50 states of the USA. Some of this evidence
will shortly be available at: www.equalitytrust.org.uk).
These problems are not caused directly by poor material circumstances or by
bad housing: how rich a rich country is compared to another makes almost no
difference. They are effects of inequality and status differentiation. What
matters is no longer economic growth but income distribution. In some developed
societies the richest 20 per cent of the population are only three or four
times as rich as the poorest 20 per cent; in others they are eight or nine
times as rich.
Perhaps the most useful way of thinking about material inequality is that
it provides the skeleton which becomes fleshed out with all the cultural markers
of status, creating social distances, feelings of superiority and inferiority
and the various forms of downward prejudice and discrimination.
Greater inequality does not make all these problems just a little bit worse:
health and social problems may be anything from twice to eight times as common
in more unequal compared to less unequal societies. The differences are large
because greater equality does not just help the poor. Although it makes most
difference to them, it improves outcomes among almost the whole population.
The good news is that status competition and the problems which flow from
it – and from the invidiousness of low social status – are highly
responsive to the scale of inequality in a society. Reduce inequality, and
all these problems – including consumerism – recede. Not only
does status matter less where income differences are smaller, but it looks
as if greater equality can increase the real quality of life for all of us.
A full statement of the evidence and its implications will be available in:
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Inequality (Penguin, January
2009).
Richard Wilkinson is Professor of Social Epidemiology in the Division
of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Nottingham, and Kate
Pickett is Senior Lecturer in Social Epidemiology in the Department
of Health Sciences at the University of York.
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