Inequality

The postman at the door is stooped by his burden like an allegorical statue of Labour Oppressed by Capital. His wearisome, low-waged task is to deliver a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century — or perhaps multiple copies all round the town, since this breezeblock of a thesis on the iniquities of accumulated wealth stands second in this week’s bestseller lists, pipped only by the life story of someone called Guy Martin. His core argument — the celebrity French economist Piketty, that is, not Martin, who turns out to be a celebrity motorbike racer and lorry mechanic — is that the return on unfettered capital will always

The following blog from a Catholic commentator about the Pope’s controversial tweet suggesting that “inequality is the root of social evil” puts the row about it on Twitter into context. But the real question is the language in which Pope Francis first tweeted: Spanish or Latin? In Latin, as the author of this blog observes, the critical noun is “iniquitas”, which you might as well call “sin”; come to that “malus” doesn’t mean social evil so much as any sort of evil. And to say that sin is the root of evil is sort of tautologous, at least for Catholics. But if the pope’s thought was first expressed in Spanish,

At the end of Coming Apart Charles Murray mentions, rather enigmatically, that our assumptions about society will soon be blown out of the water by new discoveries about human nature. I imagine he’s talking about genetic discoveries, in particular about the human brain. One of our current assumptions is meritocracy, and the idea that we can produce a fair society in which the most talented and energetic rise to the top. This is sometimes what people mean when they talk of the ‘American Dream’, a term that seems to be used more now that social mobility in that great country is fading and inequality rising. That is why The Son

Scarcely a day passes, it seems, without another book landing with a thud on my desk that bemoans the rise of inequality. On this side of the Atlantic we have The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Injustice by Daniel Dorling, while in America we have Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality. I’m coming round to the view that these intellectual heavyweights have got it back to front and the really significant social trend of our era is the triumph of equality. So it was refreshing to dip into A Classless Society, the third volume of Alwyn Turner’s history of Britain since

  Stockholm  ‘All of them should have been very happy,’ Robert A. Heinlein begins his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon. The material problem has been solved on this future earth, poverty and disease have been eradicated, work is optional. And yet parts of the citizenry are not enthusiastic. Some are bored, others are preparing a revolt. Why should that be, in such a utopian world? A similar puzzlement has been the dominant reaction from commentators after riots broke out and cars and buildings were burned in heavily immigrant-populated suburbs of Stockholm in late May. Sweden? Since the standard interpretation is that violence is the only weapon the marginalised have against

The power of ideas is vastly underrated in British politics. It has become fashionable to dismiss them as “ideology” and declare oneself in favour of “what works”.  But the idea of what works is, of course, driven by concepts. As Keynes put it: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.”   I write this because ConHome has just run a piece by Max Wind-Cowie saying, “Equality should not be a dirty word for the Conservatives”. I do admire the way Demos, seeing Labour on the way out, is trying to inject as much of its agenda

The level of educational inequality in this country is appalling. I have heard the numbers that Michael Gove listed off in his speech several times before but they never fail to shock. One wonders what future there can be for the half of the children who left comprehensives last year without five good GCSEs. The worst schools in the country are in the poorest areas. The Tory plan, to put parents in charge of the £5,000 per year that the state spends on a child’s education, with pupils from deprived backgrounds receiving additional funding, would end the monopoly on state education provision that has failed the poorest. In its place