Inequality: good or bad?

 Inequality: good or bad?

        I was a bit disappointed by the talk Paul Johnson** gave at Clare College, Cambridge, on Thursday 2nd May 2024, titled "Inequalities: what they are, why they matter, and how to address them". He presented many inequalities and many correlations between them: inequalities of income, wealth, education, health, inheritance, ethnicity, gender, geography.  But he seemed less interested than I had hoped in pursuing the mechanisms that could explain the correlations. Maybe he assumed a mechanism, pursuing a 'woke' agenda; poor people are badly educated, are sick, die young and live in the north. It is the sort of story that we hear a lot. And he scarcely touched on remedies.

It is not self-evident to me that inequality itself is a 'bad thing'. Some inequality could be called variety. Some people are tall, some short, some fast, others slow, some numerate others literate.  

Inequality is inevitable. Nevertheless, it can often seem 'unfair' and its unfairness can be painful to contemplate. We are not all born equal.  Our idealism feels let down. Inequality can be mitigated, but not abolished. 

However, some inequality may be by choice? Some people may choose to live on a croft, on Raasay, keep a cow and fish for lobsters. Some may choose to remain in the north east of England without a job, preferring that life to any alternative that they can imagine. After all, I do not want to make money on the Stock Market, nor by flying planes, nor by cutting people open. We should beware of making choices for other people. 

What, then, is bad about inequality, and how far should we go to lessen it? Does the existence of inequality indicate that there is something wrong, or is inequality itself the 'something' that is wrong? 

Two features that I regard as bad for our society are the presence of very rich people, and the existence of very poor people. But they seem to me bad in quite different ways; the very rich distort society when they exercise too much power; and the existence of the very poor dehumanises us. Their poverty hurts us, unless we look away. (To one who is susceptible to envy, 

witnessing great wealth can also hurt. )

Money can be equated with power in many ways. There is the possibility of great hurt if a single individual has more resource than the average state, because such an individual is very difficult to control. In particular, excessive wealth provides excessive means of making more wealth; the situation is unstable – explosive. 

Much of the thinking behind the science of economics supposes that the units (the individual people) behave identically. Most people will use most of their resource most of the time. A billionaire will not; his wealth does not trickle down, significantly, to his hairdresser, or butler, but is salted away for his heirs. 

Perhaps we should look for action points. Should we aim, for example, to improve education in areas remote from London? Likewise, transport infrastructure? Perhaps we should look for a metric that would indicate where state interference with the free market could beneficially be applied; for example monitor the increase in GCSE grades per GB£ spent, on the grounds that a pound spent in Ashington, Northumberland, would yield more marginal benefit than a pound spent in Haslemere, Surrey. 

I was hoping Paul Johnson** would have thought himself, and us his audience, into such territory. Perhaps he will now do so.

Sincerely, Ian West

** Paul Johnson, director of  the Institute for Fiscal Studies