The Spirit Level

The Spirit Level - or Why Equality is Better for Everyone.
By Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Penguin


After writing about Affluenza, I was very kindly given this book as a present during a recent stay in the UK.It is interesting to see now so many critiques of what Oliver James called 'selfish caplitalism' in the 80's.

Could it be that more and more people - in Europe, elsewhere, are getting fed-up of the dog-eat-dog world of the post-Thatcher and Reagan era? Just getting the sense that surely Things Could be Better?

This book is a very brave attempt to Statistically Prove what maybe many people have always suspected all along intuitively that Inequality not only Sucks, but has a truly iniquitous effect on most societies?

Live in the inner city? Scared to go ut at night? - well, the shame and humiliation of being unable to get a good job can create violence among Young People. And more crime. (The writers tend to take a realistic view of the limitations of 'human nature' with its need for the trappings of a certain amount of status, but then the sociologists who look atthe effects of relative poverty on the tender psyches of therelatively deprived, already knew that.

Is everyone you know either stressed, an alcoholic, or depressed? Well, guess what. Inequality tends engender more mental illness.

Tired of being squeezed out of your seat at rush hour by obese people? - well, as the book explains, once a certain amount of affluence has been reached and, unlike in developing countries, nobody need starve, then interestingly, it is the poor, not the rich, who seem statistically to end up becoming obese in the most unequal parts of the developed world. Beyond a certain point, affluence neither brings happiness nor health to a nation.

Too many teenage pregnancies? - As EastEnders has always been at pains to reveal in its wonderful storylines, this is one way a young woman without much in the way of education can achieve 'adult' status.

No community? Don't trust your neighbours? Well, here again, inequality tends to create a more dog-eat-dog world.

It has to be stressed that the writers of this book are not routing Revolution from Without, but rather transformation from within.And suggests hopefully sustainable ways in which this might happen - in fact, is happening. And all without the dreaded spectres of the Reds emerging from under the beds too.

One could be for the employees of a given company to buy it themselves, which coincidentally means that the means of production lie in their hands, making it, as the writers wryly suggest, less easy to keep saying when turning a blind eye to any nefarious practices that 'they were only following orders.' It addresses what originally Marx defined as the problem of alienation from a totally new angle - suggesting that businesses become employee-owned, and if that happens on a grass-roots level, then there may be more equality, less alienation and therefore less of the amoral dog-eat-dog reality of corporate life in general. Because we saw the corruption of allowing most utilities and providers where they were State-owned, no other possibilities were ever adequately explored.

Examples looked at include instances in the US where this has happened with electric utility providers, and in the UK with several employee-run co-operatives including the John Lewis partnership. In parts of Northern Ialy where many such co-operatives exists, the local communities around them are alegedly 'healthier' than those where things are run on more traditional grounds.

It could be that employee-run organsiations are certainly not immune to corruption from within, but the authors are sanguine on their hope that initiatives such as these could still create a more long-term type of accountability than an average feedback form might provide.


In case this blog does not appear to begin to do justice to the ideas examined here, here is a link to The Equality Trust:



http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/

On Affluenza and Other Things

Here is a hard-hitting critique of what is behind a great deal of social malaise - where it is all work, work, work.

In some respects, Oliver James, to use an old-fashioned Brit derogatory term, can and does come off as something of a prat (and he willingly acknowledges this): he writes as he talks - of his swanning off around the world to chat to millionaires and billionaires, whilst throwing out off-the-cuff psycho-analyses of their mental and physical states. The little woman, of course, holding the baby and everything else together in the home, meantime.

He has a beef, against the System. But not against capitalism per se, but what he calls selfish capitalism, of the kind first made popular' by Thatcher, then by Blair, at least in the UK, though he makes it clear that this is a global issue: where, as Thatcher famously, or rather, infamously declared: 'There is no such thing as community.' No subsidised education, nor childcare, nor welfare dependency - just the freedom to keep in earning for bigger and shinier goods. Or, in overusing credit cards in order to get these. All in compensation forthe fact that the working hours are more and more insanely long.

This can only be something that can be powered through enough emotional deprivation to make Wanting Things seem even more attractive - this is where James gets psychoanalytical again, with his diagnosis lent to the title cover 'Affluenza.'

Money, points out James, however, cannot in any case buy you love, not everyone can manage to get to be a millionaire, and can we really afford an unbridled dystopia of neurotic over-achievers and over-spenders forever?

James's solution is elegant: the cure for Affluenza is Back to Basics. As in provison of childcare that is less likely to result in the kind of avarice and workaholism borne of severe emotional deprivation in the first place, and he points to the Danish way of doing things, which whilst maybe flawed in other ways, maybe serves as a possible paradigm (though he was unable to resist a more 50's-style critique on relatively-Utopian solutions of the reds-under-the-bed kind 'You will also be bland emotionally and creatively, but you will be so happpyyyy!'

It is a pity he did not also examine other Scandinavian systems of childcare, which also look at the impact of compulsory childcare for small children: it may somewhat stolid citizens make, but also has been cited as a way of avoiding certain kinds of social inequality......

Over all, a most interestingly and timely book.....