Horner's Corner » equality

What Nick Clegg doesn’t know about equality

Chris — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 19:48:00 +0000

Clegg (Getty Images)

The most equal countries also have the highest social mobility

Once more following in David Cameron’s footsteps, Nick Clegg is delivering tonight’s Hugo Young memorial lecture. A preview of his speech appears in today’s Guardian, in which the Lib Dem leader suggests that increasing social mobility, not achieving income equality, should be the ultimate goal of progressives.

He writes:

Social mobility is what characterises a fair society, rather than a particular level of income equality. Inequalities become injustices when they are fixed; passed on, generation to generation. That’s when societies become closed, stratified and divided.

The problem with Clegg’s argument is that the countries with the highest levels of social mobility are those with the lowest levels of inequality. As the graph below (from the excellent book The Spirit Level) shows, countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Canada, where income inequality is low, have far higher levels of social mobility than the United States and the UK, where income inequality is high. This is hardly surprising: greater inequalities of outcome make it easier for rich parents to pass on their advantages to their children. Clegg’s suggestion that progressives must prioritise either social mobility or income inequality is empirically unsound.

Social mobility

The data on equality and social mobility also undermines his argument against the 50p tax rate. He attempts to characterise Ed Miliband as an “old progressive” due to his support for a permanent 50p rate. But it is no coincidence that the most equal countries in the world are also those with the highest rates of income tax. Japan, the most equal country in the world, has had a top rate of 50 per cent for many years, Sweden, the second most equal country in the world, has a top rate of 56.6 per cent. The correlation continues: Denmark has a top rate of 55.4 per cent, Norway a top rate of 47.8 per cent and Finland a top rate of 49.6 per cent.

Clegg’s refusal to acknowledge all of the above reveals either his ignorance or his disingenuity. Until he accepts that the most socially mobile societies are also the most equal, no one should take his “progressive” claims seriously.

Posted by George Eaton

See also my Injustices of Merit -Chris Horner

via New Statesman – What Nick Clegg doesn’t know about equality.

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May scraps inequality duty for councils

Chris — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 18:19:39 +0000

Inequality in Europe: The higher the column, the more unequal the country.

The coalition Government is scrapping the public sector duty intended to close the gap between rich and poor that was contained in Labour’s Equality Act.

The socio-economic duty would have forced councils and other public bodies to consider the action they could take to cut inequalities between rich and poor in their area. It was due to be implemented in April 2011, a few months after most of the provisions contained in the Equality Act are expected to come into force.

According to an example outlined in the act, the duty might have meant that an NHS trust would target resources at deprived areas with poor health outcomes, rather than on more affluent areas with lower levels of health inequality.

Regeneration & Renewal reported in July that ministers were reviewing the socio-economic duty before deciding whether to implement it.

In a speech today at London-based development trust Coin Street Community Builders, home secretary Theresa May announced that it would be scrapped.

May said: “Equality is not just important to us as individuals. It is also essential to our wellbeing as a society. But even as we increase equality of opportunity, some people will always do better than others. That is why no government should try to ensure equal outcomes for everyone.

“Just look at the socio-economic duty. It was meant to force public authorities to take into account inequality of outcome when making decisions about their policies.

“In reality, it would have been just another bureaucratic box to be ticked. It would have meant more time filling in forms and less time focusing on policies that will make a real difference to people’s life chances.

“At its worst, it could have meant public spending permanently skewed towards certain parts of the country. Valued public services meant to benefit everyone in the community closed down in some areas and reopened in others.

“You can’t solve a problem as complex as inequality in one legal clause. You can’t make people’s lives better by simply passing a law saying that they should be made better. That was as ridiculous as it was simplistic and that is why I am announcing today that we are scrapping the socio-economic duty for good.

May added: “I want to turn around the equalities agenda and I want to change people’s perception of what the Government is trying to achieve on equality.”

A spokesman from the Home Office said that the Government has just finished a consultation on a new public sector duty to require public bodies to publish details of the gender and race of their staff, as well as the number of staff with disabilities.

A strategy document setting out the coalition’s full approach to equalities will be published in several weeks’ time, he said.

Peter Lewis, chief executive of London Voluntary Service Council, which represents council-funded voluntary bodies in London, said: “It is regrettable that the Government has decided to drop the socio-economic duty on public authorities when evidence shows how unequal London is. We are asking government at all levels to ensure London is a more equal place in five years time.”

http://www.regen.net/bulletins/Regen-Daily-Bulletin/News/1041618/May-scraps-inequality-duty-councils/?DCMP=EMC-Regen%20Daily%20Bulletin

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Talk of fairness is hollow without material equality

Chris — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:30:23 +0000

The rather charming video summary of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s triennial report, “How Fair is Britain?”, tells us that “fairness is as British as fish and chips”. Judging by the preponderance of talk of fairness from all sides at the recent party conferences, one may well think that the EHRC are right. Fairness seems to be not only as British as fish and chips, but just as popular.

But we shouldn’t get too carried away by our apparent national predilection for a fair society. As the EHRC report vividly demonstrates, Britain is a country of deep social divisions. Inequality is literally killing the poor: members of the most privileged socioeconomic groups typically live a full seven years longer than their poorest compatriots. It tells its own story that poor Glaswegians have the lowest life expectancy in Britain, while residents of Kensington and Chelsea have the highest.

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The Spirit Level

Chris — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:39:55 +0000

Fast Tube by Casper">The Spirit Level is a very powerful document. NB there is a link to the Equality Trust on this blog (on the right, in the list)

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=jsEZr3s1aBA]

The Spirit Level

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republican virtue and equality

Chris — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 19:33:10 +0000

The view of equality that was reflected in the first phase of Cold War liberalism could be summed up in a sort of koan: equality is one of the necessary goals towards which any good society strives. At the same time, the failure to attain equality is a necessary structuring principle that makes the good society possible.

Among the canons of Cold War Liberalism, no text was clearer about this double bind than Rawls’ Theory of Justice. In no other area of political philosophy was the difference between Cold War liberalism and its classical predecessors so significant. The experience of the devastating wars of the twentieth century, and the Great Depression, had destroyed the old gentleman’s liberalism for which Hayek pined. In its place was a liberalism that ceded, and promoted, an interventionist state. But, in continuity with the old anti-egalitarian thematic, the CW Liberals saw the danger of perfect equality from two perspectives. From the economic perspective, while conceding the performance of the mixed economies of the developed world, that performance would be endangered if positional incentives were wholly removed from the picture. Thus, the people on the bottom would be peculiarly hurt by a totally equal society, for those were the people who benefited most from the technological innovations of the private sphere. The second danger was political. To maintain equality required some body, some institution, some party. But the enforcers of equality would not only destroy liberty, but would themselves simply recreate inequality in terms of other goods. The administrator whose pay, in a capitalist society, put him well above the wealth of a worker on the assembly line, was matched by the party administrator whose perks and power, in a communist society, permitted him access to a lifestyle far above that of the workers for whom he supposedly spoke.

More via news from the zona: republican virtue and equality.

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What Matters

Chris — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:30:20 +0000

What Matters

Walter Benn Michaels Reviewing Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson

In the US, there is (or was) an organisation called Love Makes a Family. It was founded in 1999 to support the right of gay couples to adopt children and it played a central role in supporting civil unions. A few months ago, its director, Ann Stanback, announced that, having ‘achieved its goals’, Love Makes a Family would be ceasing operations at the end of this year, and that she would be stepping down to spend more time with her wife, Charlotte. Our ‘core purpose’, she said, has been ‘accomplished’.

It’s possible of course that this declaration of mission accomplished will prove to be as ill-advised as some others have been in the last decade. Gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, where Love Makes a Family is based, but it’s certainly not legal everywhere in the US. No one, however, would deny that the fight for gay rights has made extraordinary strides in the 40 years since Stonewall. And progress in combating homophobia has been accompanied by comparable progress in combating racism and sexism. Although the occasional claim that the election of President Obama has ushered us into a post-racial society is obviously wrong, it’s fairly clear that the country that’s just elected a black president (and that produced so many votes for the presidential candidacy of a woman) is a lot less racist and sexist than it used to be.

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing.

More: via LRB · Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters.

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