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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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