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What inequality does to people

The evidence is incontrovertible: inequality damages human health. The poor suffer more from illness and disease; their height is reduced; and they die earlier. The traumas they suffer are even passed on to future generations. The time may come when policies promoting inequality, as under austerity, are prosecutable as crimes.

Societies have always tended to regard the poverty around and within them as if it were an unsightly growth that it ought to be possible to remove somehow, leaving the rest of society pristine and unaltered. But it now seems that the real specter at the feast is not poverty per se, but the inequality of the society as a whole.

Inequality is injurious in itself. It impedes and distorts technological progress. It also impairs people, makes them ill, causes them to die sooner – in very specific and increasingly predictable ways. The new evidence on this derives from breakthroughs in computing and statistical science that were achieved in the Second World War and its egalitarian aftermath. Computers made it possible to analyze health data for whole populations, and to discern patterns that had lain invisible before. In this way, the computer, and the skills that grew up with it, have served a similar revolutionary function to that of the microscope a hundred years earlier.

In the mid-1970s Richard Wilkinson, then a postgraduate researcher in community health, applied the new statistical and computer techniques to Britain’s public health data and found that, while health overall had improved, unexpected, large, and growing differences in illnesses and life expectancy had appeared between the wealthiest and poorest fifths of the British population. The gap was two or three times as large in the 1970s as it had been in the 1930s.

When all other factors, such as local and cultural variations in diet and climate, had been eliminated, inequality stood out as the sole, constant predictor of increased child mortality, cardiovascular disease, stroke, various cancers… a list that would subsequently grow to include diabetes, obesity, mental illness, and a constellation of societal disorders, including youth suicide, alcoholism, drug use and violent crime. It wasn’t just that illness was retreating more slowly among the poorest; new major illnesses, like diabetes, were emerging and claiming lives across the board, but especially among the poorest.

In December 1976, Wilkinson summarized his findings in an open letter to the British Labour government’s health minister published in the magazine New Society. The health minister promptly commissioned a fuller study by an expert panel headed by the government’s chief scientist, Douglas Black. Three years later, the Black Committee’s report confirmed the trends Wilkinson had identified, and concluded that they were not just related to inequality – they were caused by inequality. The implications of this finding triggered other studies, and initiated a ferment of research and further revelations.

This turn of events might easily not have happened. The Black Committee delivered its report just weeks after Britain had elected one of the most aggressively anti-egalitarian governments ever chosen by a democracy – that of Margaret Thatcher – which tried to bury the report, failed, but turned Britain anyway into a nation-sized inequality lab.

Wilkinson retained his focus on the original anomaly: the failure of increased wealth to produce commensurate health benefits. His own work has continued to concentrate on rich countries.¹ By the 1990s, he was able to show that the trends he’d identified in the 1970s held true not only within other countries but also between them, and moreover that the trends waxed and waned in step with changes in economic policies – with a clear correlation between global pandemics, for example of depression and obesity, and the growth of economic inequality.

The findings imply that the health impacts of inequality can no longer be dismissed as just misfortunes. They arise not by accident but because of specific decisions and actions taken by specific individuals, who cannot escape responsibility for what happens.

INEQUALITY REDUCES LIFE EXPECTANCY

People of all social classes in highly unequal societies do not live as long as people in more egalitarian ones. In Britain (one of the world’s most unequal rich countries), in the years immediately before the latest global economic crisis, being among the poorest 20 per cent shortened women’s lives by 7 years and men’s lives by 7.3 years.² In the world’s most unequal large economy, the US, the penalty for being in that lower fifth was about 14 years.³

The financial crash wiped trillions off the world’s economy, but it was those who were already suffering most who bore the brunt. Income and wealth inequality continued their upward trends and so did the death toll. By 2015 the British press was reporting official figures showing that ‘People born in parts of the UK have lower life expectancy than those in war-torn Lebanon’.⁴ Not only were people in the poorer areas dying younger; a much bigger chunk of those shortened lives was taken over by illness and disability. Also in 2015, researchers from the King’s Fund reported a 17-year difference in ‘healthy life expectancy’ between the poorest and wealthiest health-service districts and ‘if you happen to be female and live within the borders of NHS Guildford and Waverley in Surrey you will – on average – have 20 more years of healthy life than if you happen to be male and live within the borders of NHS Bradford’.⁵

Other harms that go with inequality – including depression, suicide and substance abuse – all follow the same pattern. So do the factors that might drive someone into despair: incidents of inter-personal violence, such as rape, are more common; so is vandalism. You are more likely to be imprisoned in a less equal society than in a more equal one: rates of incarceration reflect a society’s position in the ‘inequality league table’. Thus, the US prison population quadrupled between 1978 and 2005 – the main period during which inequality soared. At approximately the same time, Britain’s prison population doubled, whereas it rose only modestly if at all elsewhere – and actually fell in Finland during the 1990s. Wherever the increases occurred, it was overwhelmingly the poorest and blackest who were imprisoned, which fits with another finding: that racist attacks are more common in more unequal societies.⁶

Those who defend inequality sometimes say it’s needed because it rewards ambition; social mobility and equality of opportunity are what matter most, they say. Yet social mobility is lower in more unequal societies than in less unequal ones. Even the politically conservative journal The Economist has repeatedly focused on this phenomenon over the years⁷ – and it is especially true in the ‘land of opportunity’ itself, the US.

Extending back in time, the statistics reveal that the trend toward greater inequality, and the harms that flow from it, began in earnest in the 1970s – in other words, Wilkinson ‘hadn’t seen nothing yet’ when he wrote his article, and nor had Douglas Black’s committee. This reversed a trend towards greater equality that had started just after the Great Depression (which started in the US in 1929, with the Wall Street crash, but slightly earlier in the UK, with reversion to the gold standard). In Britain, inequality had fallen most rapidly during the Second World War – and public health improved faster than at any other time in the country’s history.⁸ The gains were generally attributed to egalitarian measures, such as rationing, which ensured that many people had enough to eat for the first time, and everybody had a reasonably balanced diet, even if it was an extremely meager one by today’s standards. There was a general turn away from ostentation. Large cars were taxed more heavily than small ones. The sense of solidarity that made those gains possible made an indelible impression on those who experienced it, with people of all classes recalling how ‘we all pulled together during the War’ – and it paved the way for the introduction of Britain’s welfare state, the National Health Service, and the nationalization of major industries and utilities.

Wilkinson has collated figures that show similar phenomena in the countries of the pre-1990 communist bloc. Health in the Soviet Union improved steadily until the late 1960s, when reforms introduced greater pay differentials.⁹ Growing inequality was mirrored by a deterioration in public health, and evidence of social breakdown and concerns from the older generation about growing selfishness, long before the Soviet system collapsed. Inequality then took off in earnest in the period known in the West as perestroika (restructuring) but in Russia as katastroika, when male life expectancy in particular collapsed – a period that, it was said, cost more Russian lives than the Second World War.¹⁰ The one eastern European country where life expectancy continued to increase during the 1970s and 1980s was Albania – which was following its own independent Maoist line.

EQUALITY AND THE SOVIET UNION

Does this imply that, despite the general discrediting of the communist period and the unquestionable tyranny of Stalin’s regime, the Soviet Union did at least tackle inequality? Egalitarianism was a huge social force in Russia before, during and after the Revolution, but Soviet leaders rarely gave it a high priority. Real equality was thought to be possible in an ideal communist world of the future, but not feasible in the here and now, and possibly a dangerous distraction that needed to be curbed, violently if necessary.

Writers such as Petr Kropotkin (the Russian aristocrat who became a founder of anarchist thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries),¹¹ and more recently the US historian Richard Stites,¹² have documented the very strong, versatile and egalitarian mutual support systems that flourished among ordinary Russians – the ‘artels’ that people would form to pool wages, food, equipment, living space, in just about every situation imaginable; and the ‘Mir’ or obshchina system of collective land management in the countryside. Stites has described some of the innumerable egalitarian projects that flourished in the years immediately after the 1917 revolution.

The Bolshevik leadership generally thought those traditions backward. Many of them were avid disciples of the ‘scientific management’ approach developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, and applied with such impressive results in Henry Ford’s factories. They believed in strong managerial control, top-down discipline and incentive systems. Under Stalin, egalitarianism became a dangerous deviance, to be stamped out – a major goal of the purges.

Incentives and ‘perks’ were always present, used at first mainly to keep politically unsympathetic but valuable experts on board. These could arouse forthright popular outrage, but distinctions became steadily entrenched during Stalin’s rise to power in 1928. He launched the Great Terror of 1934-39 with a chilling speech, in which he ridiculed and denounced the ‘levelling’ tendency as ‘leftist chatter’. Stites has described Stalin’s impact:

His hostility – voiced in sarcastic and dismissive terms – was so deep and so clearly enunciated that it rapidly became state policy and social doctrine. He believed in productive results, not through spontaneity or persuasion, but through force, hierarchy, reward, punishment, and above all differential wages. He applied this view to the whole of society. Stalin’s anti-egalitarianism was not born of the five-year plan era. He was offended by the very notion and used contemptuous terms such as ‘fashionable leftists’, ‘blockheads’, ‘petty bourgeois nonsense’, and ‘silly chatter’, thus reducing the discussion to a sweeping dismissal of childish, unrealistic and unserious promoters of equality. The toughness of the delivery evoked laughter of approval from his audiences.¹³

The tough, scornful, ‘realistic’ tone of Stalin’s speeches is not without its echoes in the capitalist world, where the same conviction prevails that ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs’.¹⁴

The ‘apparatchik’ culture was felt right through Soviet society, and was resented. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has described how, during some of the most desperate fighting in the Second World War, new insignia of rank and even Tsarist-style ‘shoulder-boards’ reappeared in the army, and The Internationale (‘rise up, you wretched of the earth!’) was replaced as the Soviet anthem by the dirge-like ode to the ‘homeland of Lenin’, which became familiar at post-War Olympics. The ‘party maximum wage’ was formally abolished in 1932 and by the late 1930s members of the ruling elite were being paid 10 to 30 times what a worker could earn, plus enjoying free furniture and other perks.¹⁵ In the 1970s the dissident physicist, Yuri Orlov, calculated that party heads were paid about 25 times the salary of an ordinary worker.¹⁶ This was only slightly less than the pay gap in the US between chief executives and workers at that time (a 30-fold difference), but much less than it became in 2005 (110 times).¹⁷

Despite this onslaught, egalitarianism remained the bedrock of Soviet society, and it produced the sorts of outcomes we would expect: it outspent the UK fourfold on education per person in 1959.¹⁸ The number of pupils in the top four grades of high school rose from 1.8 million in 1950/1 to 12.7 million in 1965/6.¹⁹ The population recovered with astonishing rapidity from its multiple extreme traumas (the First World War, the Civil War and Wars of Intervention, collectivization, the purges, and then the Second World War).²⁰

After Stalin’s death Nikita Khrushchev tried to restore more egalitarian pay policies and even initiated one in which managers and foremen were paid less than ordinary workers.²¹ This coincided with the upswing in public health mentioned above, which ran out of steam in the late 1960s, after Khrushchev was ousted.

The Soviet Union’s greater equality comes down to two things. First, the whole edifice rested on a persistent and deep culture of solidarity and egalitarianism described by historians like Stites, and by veterans of the Soviet period. Second, the inequalities mentioned above were all ones of income, not wealth. Individuals could not accumulate the kinds of private fortunes enjoyed by elites elsewhere. Almost all of the country’s assets were state property, so there was no legal way for individuals to exploit ownership and acquire rental income which, as Thomas Piketty has shown, is the main driver of extreme inequality, especially when allied to the possibility of inherited wealth.²²

The impossibility of inheriting significant wealth in the Soviet Union meant that this was one of the few places on earth where, in a strictly economic sense at least, ‘the living were worth more than the dead’, to use Piketty’s phrase.²³ This has hardly ever been the case in Western countries, apart from the 30-year post-War period known in France as ‘Les Trente Glorieuses’, during which ‘for the first time in history… wealth accumulated in the lifetime of the living constituted the majority of all wealth: nearly 60 per cent.’²⁴

In the Soviet Union, with rent and inheritance removed from the equation, people could put effort into welfare initiatives in a fairly direct way, bureaucracy permitting. Technology and science could sometimes explore important paths that were barred to Western firms by the logic of profit. In the West, for example, antibiotics became the standard treatment for bacterial infections (generating the profits necessary to the pharmaceutical companies that produced them, and which inevitably used their financial power to shape the course of research in directions that would ensure further profit). Soviet research flowed instead into the use of ‘phage viruses’ (viruses that invade and destroy bacteria). Phage viruses are not a consistent product that can be mass manufactured, stored and sold in bulk, or even patented – they are mainly found in soils, and need to be searched for and cultivated continuously to counter constant mutations in the target bacteria – so they are not attractive candidates for development within capitalist firms.²⁵

Immediately private ownership of major assets became possible, in 1990, the hierarchies were there, ready to take advantage of the situation, unleashing the chaos that took conventional economists by surprise. Till the last, the Soviet Union had survived on the hope that egalitarianism would in the end prevail. The final crushing of that hope undoubtedly helps explain the scale of damage that followed katastroika.

A similar story unfolded, but a little differently, in China. In the 1970s (the period just after the Cultural Revolution and before Deng Xiaoping’s marketizing reforms) wage differentials between party officials of different grades were already well above those in the Soviet Union. However, overall inequality was relatively modest (about the same as in Britain at the time, and enormously less than it had been before the Revolution), and China was deemed a ‘high achiever’ in terms of public health. Birth-rates, for example, were well on the way to stabilization before the brutal one-child policy was introduced in 1979.

After 1980, with the state-managed transition to a market economy (but retaining state ownership of land), inequality soared and health gains stagnated – despite a 12-fold increase in GDP. Health indicators are still rising for most people, but much more slowly than in the past, and rural, female and older populations have suffered particularly wretched reverses.²⁶

AUTONOMY AND SOLIDARITY: THE ESSENTIAL NUTRIENTS

Before Richard Wilkinson’s and then Douglas Black’s reports in the 1970s, nobody had imagined there could be serious differences in health in populations, like those of the US and western Europe, where almost everyone enjoys what look like excellent standards of living in comparison to those of a century or even 50 years ago. How can this happen?

Much of the new health inequality turns out to derive from psycho-social factors, which are now known to be far more powerful than anyone had previously suspected.

Two famous studies (known as the Whitehall Studies) carried out over a number of years by epidemiologist Michael Marmot and his colleagues found that civil servants’ job status was an extremely accurate predictor of their age at death. Those in lower grades did not live as long after retirement as their superiors did. In particular, subordinates had up to four times the death rates from coronary heart disease that their bosses did. This was found to be linked to higher levels of the blood protein fibrinogen, which is associated with the ‘flight or fight’ response in vertebrates: it helps blood-clotting and is released in situations where the animal feels threatened (and might suffer a wound leading to blood loss). Evolution did not anticipate the kinds of ‘pecking orders’ that are found in offices; as far as the body is concerned, a threat is a threat, and fibrinogen is released, even if the source of threat is a summons from a superior, or the thought of one.²⁷

Whatever the cause of death or illness, the most significant factor was found to be lack of autonomy. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson say: ‘of all the factors that the Whitehall researchers have studied over the years, job stress and people’s sense of control over their work seem to make the most difference’.²⁸

Low status can be mitigated by group solidarity. In his 2005 book The Impact of Inequality, Richard Wilkinson tells the story of a village of poor, southern Italian immigrants who settled in the town of Roseto, near the US city of Philadelphia.²⁹ They remained far healthier than equally poor Americans who lived nearby, despite very poor diet and very high cigarette consumption, because they insulated themselves within their language and culture, maintaining their old sociability and egalitarianism, which included general disapproval of competitive displays of status (which they called ‘putting on the dog’). But when a new generation grew up, speaking English, seeing themselves as Americans and comparing their own lives to the ones shown on TV, their health collapsed; they became normal poor Americans.

The downside of this protective, ‘huddling’ strategy is that an unequal society develops a class structure or caste system. People from lower-status groups become stigmatized. They are no longer seen as individuals but as examples of a disparaged sector of society. Members of higher-status groups become capable of almost any degree of cruelty towards them, while remaining in other respects decent, caring folk. This is the ‘group inequality’ phenomenon described by Heidi Ravven (Chapter 1), and which two other researchers, Mark Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, placed at the heart of the problems of unequal societies. Their book Social Dominance concludes that the multifarious forms of structural and physical violence that come with inequality are driven by:

a single, simple heuristic: group inequality. Like a fractal pattern observable from micro- to macro-levels of organization, group inequality is seen in psychological biases, in the effects of social contexts, in the biases of institutional discrimination, and, ultimately, in general social structure.³⁰ [emphasis in the original]

All oppressive societies, they argued, are built ultimately upon ‘gender and age sets’: in plain terms, the first groups to be denied full human status when inequality appears are women and children.³¹

INEQUALITY MAKES PEOPLE SHORTER

The effects of inequality on human beings are impressive, even to the naked eye. For one thing, the poor are always, on average, smaller than the rich. But culture is extraordinarily good at hiding the evidence in plain sight. The idea that the poor are tougher than the rich is so powerful that it can completely obliterate what stares you in the face: that most of them are in much worse shape physically.

Sir William Hayter, who became Britain’s ambassador to Moscow in the 1950s, has described the occasion in the early 1930s when the scales fell from his own eyes. He was no sportsman, hated athletics, and his university friends were of the same persuasion. Nonetheless, the father of one of them, Sir Robert Witt, arranged for them to take part in a tug-of-war against the locals one public holiday.

We were all of us more or less unathletic, and the opposing teams, mainly young men from Brighton, had been practising all day. We expected to be ignominiously defeated. On the contrary, hardly had we touched the rope than our opponents practically fell into our arms. Sir Robert reduced our team, enlarged theirs, but nothing we could do enabled us to lose plausibly. Eventually we shambled back into the Old Clergy House, feeling that Sir Robert’s well-meant attempt to create good will hadn’t really worked out quite right.³²

The physical differences between rich and poor are normally so well wrapped-up in cultural baggage that they can be ignored for millennia, and have been. Just occasionally we find flashes of recognition like the one above, or Captain John Smith’s famous comment (from the early 1600s, on encountering a society that did not have rich or poor) that ‘the Indians seemed like Giants to the English’.³³

It is only since archeologists have started systematically measuring skeletons that the scale and nature of the discrepancy have become apparent.

The archeologist Martin Jones locates the divergence between rich and poor at around 5,000 years ago, in the early aristocratic societies of the eastern Mediterranean:

the ordinary people have five times more dental lesions than their ruler and are up to four per cent shorter. An average Bronze Age male farmer from the eastern Mediterranean would stand 167 cm (five feet six inches); 6 cm shorter than his ruler and 10cm shorter than his hunting ancestors.³⁴

The relatively new science of ‘anthropometry’, which uses skeletal data, military, hospital and workhouse records and the records of slave owners, among other sources, is making the story clearer. The onset of the really intense, European inequality described in Chapter 2 correlates with the anthropometric data.

Richard Steckel has found that, until around the 10th century, north Europeans were about as tall as they are today, but ‘northern European men had lost an average 2.5 inches of height by the 1700s, a loss that was not fully recovered until the first half of the 20th century’.³⁵ Some of the fall in stature might have had something to do with medieval climate change, he says, but most of it is down to inequality: the changes in stature occur in places that did not experience climate change as well as in ones that did. Stature seems to be exquisitely sensitive to inequality – as illustrated by another study he mentions, showing that the children of modern British unemployed working-class men are shorter than those whose fathers have jobs.

Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter and Annabel Gregory have examined British health and stature in the 18th century (the period of Britain’s rise to global power). They studied the records for Royal Marine recruits of Nelson’s navy, who were usually supplied by a pauper charity, the Marine Society. They write that:

The boys of the Marine Society were extraordinarily short, particularly in the 18th century. Thirteen-year-olds born in 1753-80 average 51.4 in (130.6cm), a full 10 inches (25.4cm) less than the children of London measured by Tanner and others in the 1960s. The full contrast, in both the 18th and the early 19th centuries, is brought out vividly by [plotting] two birth cohorts against the modern British standard growth chart; if a Marine Society boy of 1787 were miraculously transported into a doctor’s surgery in 1987, his next step would be into hospital as a sufferer from undernutrition or child abuse.³⁶

They also describe the ‘the dip [in stature] for those recruited during the “Great Immiseration” of the turn of the 19th century, the rise after the Treaty of Vienna, and the dip for those recruited after the mid-1840s’ – giving the lie to the traditional idea that the transition to industrialism was a wonderful thing for Britain’s poor. It is hard to argue with skeletons.

From the mid-19th century onwards we find increasing rumblings of concern about the physiques of recruits in armed forces in Europe, and alarm in Britain in the 1890s at the state of the young but toothless British recruits who were expected to fight well-built Boer farmers in South Africa. A recent history of Britain says that, by 1914, the average British soldier was five inches (12.7 cm) shorter than his officer.³⁷

Only in the last generation or two have typical Europeans regained some of their earlier stature and health, but very patchily. Danny Dorling and his colleagues found differences in stature and dental health almost identical to the Bronze Age ones given above, in Sheffield in 2009 – between the poorer district of Brightside, and the neighboring, wealthier one of Hallam (and this is in one of Britain’s less unequal cities).³⁸

European Americans regained their lost stature in the 18th century, thanks to the treasure trove of high-yielding food plants developed over centuries by the American peoples – squashes, potatoes and especially maize³⁹ – but in Europe itself the recovery had to wait for the arrival of the technology that made the great wars of the 20th century possible: the Haber process for fixing nitrates (first as fertilizers, then as explosives). Larry Lohman and Nicholas Hildyard have written that ‘the coal-intensive Bosch-Haber fertilizer-manufacturing process that tripled crop yields during the 20th century now accounts for half the nitrogen in every human body’.⁴⁰

It is as if, having run through the possibilities of exploiting other lands, science and technology have given the world’s powerful, unequal societies the keys to the planetary past as well, so that it too can be plundered via the exploitation of fossil fuels, whereby 400 years’ worth of accumulated, ancient plant growth can be burned every year.⁴¹

TODAY’S INEQUALITY WILL DAMAGE FUTURE GENERATIONS

We are now learning that inequality doesn’t only affect the generation that experiences it; it also affects their children and grandchildren, even after life has improved.

The first glimmerings of this sobering fact came in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, when the geneticist Raissa Berg and her colleagues carried out a statistical analysis of birth defects over previous decades. The more data they accumulated, from hospitals, from mortuary records and collective-farm ledgers, the clearer was the evidence that the Soviet people had suffered two terrible shocks during the 20th century, resulting in two ‘spikes’ in the numbers of birth defects.

The first of these spikes covered the late 1930s and early 1940s. Berg realized that the mothers of these children had all been born during the last, harsh year of the First World War and the famines that accompanied the revolution, counter-revolution and Wars of Intervention, and in the same areas of the Soviet Union that had suffered most. The second spike had occurred in the late 1950s: too early to be explained by the suffering in the Second World War (which did not hit the USSR till 1941) and rooted instead in 1936-38, the years of Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’.

The mothers of both generations of damaged children had developed in their own mothers’ wombs under fearful conditions, sharing the terror and privation as they developed and their own ovaries formed, complete with the egg-cells from which their own damaged babies would grow. The two ‘spikes’ of birth defects pointed straight at these huge events, the second of which had otherwise been erased from history.

Similar stories are now emerging in the capitalist countries. The suffering inflicted on the people of northern Britain during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s was assumed to be over and done with, and eliminated completely by the welfare state. Wilkinson’s work and the Black Report began to shake that assumption. By the early 2000s – despite vast improvements since the 1940s in healthcare, nutrition, education, working and living conditions – mortality rates and levels of heart disease and diabetes in the north of England and in Scotland were still well above those of the south. David Barker and his colleagues at the University of Southampton have discovered that the anomalies result from genetic damage suffered by those who survived the Depression in the places where it was most severe.⁴²

Other studies, done in the Netherlands (which suffered an intense famine in 1944-5 under Nazi blockade), in Scandinavia (parts of which suffered alternating famine years at the turn of the 20th century) and in China (among survivors of the famines that accompanied Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’) have revealed that the damage is carried down the generations by men, as well as by women.

Kent Thornburg has studied the effects in the southern US, where black and poor white populations still bear the genetic damage caused by the famines and violence that followed the Civil War of 1861-5 – damage reinforced by a further wave of hunger and societal collapse in the 1930s. Thornburg says that heart disease, stroke and diabetes are ‘still rampant’ in the Old South. ‘Their malnutrition goes back to the Civil War and it has never gotten back on track.’⁴³ For the black population, it goes back even further; those waves of damage came on the back of the greatest trauma of them all, enslavement.

Inequality is a kind of violence – and in no way a metaphorical one. It carries the same level of human cost as any other kind of injury; it also has specific, human causes – actual individuals have argued, worked for, condoned and gone along with the policies that caused the injuries, and bear responsibility as with any other harmful act or failure to act. Ignorance of the facts could soon be no more a defence for politicians and civil servants, than ignorance of the fire regulations is for a factory boss. The debate is no longer ‘just’ about rights, but about negligence and abuse of power.

Could tolerating inequality become as unfashionable as smoking? Could it some day be viewed with the same automatic revulsion as tolerating wife beating, food adulteration or toxic pollution – all of which are in fact more common in more unequal societies than in more equal ones?⁴⁴ In the past, politicians knew none of this, but today’s politicians can’t plead ignorance. How long before ‘austerity’ enthusiasts feel a social chill around them, or even face class actions in court?

1 See Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, Penguin, 2009; Richard Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality, Routledge, 2005.

2 C White et al,. Trends in life expectancy by social class 1972-2005. Health Statistics Quarterly, 36, 2007. Available at: nin.tl/lifeexpecttrends

3 Vicente Navarro, ‘Inequalities Are Unhealthy’; Monthly Review, vol 56, no 2, monthlyreview.org/0604navarro.htm

4 Andrew Gregory, ‘People born in parts of UK have lower life-expectancy than those in war-torn Lebanon’, Daily Mirror, 4 Nov 2015.

5 David Buck & David Maguire, Inequalities in life expectancy, King’s Fund, August 2015.

6 Wilkinson and Pickett, op cit, 2009.

7 ‘Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend’, The Economist, 29 Dec 2004; ‘Nomenocracy’, The Economist, 9 Feb 2013.

8 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Knopf, 1999.

9 Wilkinson 2005, op cit, pp 114-116.

10 This seems to be an overstatement, but only a fractional one. Nicholas Eberstadt calculates that around 23.8 million lives were lost in the Russian Republic in the 16 years that followed the breakup of the USSR: 13.7 million fewer births, and 10.1 million more deaths than in the preceding 16-year period. Nicholas Eberstadt, ‘Drunken Nation – Russia’s Depopulation Bomb’, World Affairs, 138, no 4, 2009, p 51. RW Davies has calculated that 38 to 39 million lives were lost during the Second World War: Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p 2.

11 Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902.

12 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, Oxford University Press, 1989.

13 Ibid, p 232.

14 The Romanian communist and writer Panaït Istrati was told this when he visited Petrograd in 1917, and was arrested after he replied: ‘OK. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s the omelet?’ Cited in Sébastien Lapaque, ‘Panaït Istrati, roi des vagabonds’, Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2015.

15 Stites, op cit, p 233.

16 Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats, Doubleday Canada, 2013, p 90.

17 Ibid, p 135

18 Stafford Beer, Decision and Control, Wiley, 1966, p 478, citing UK government report ‘The long term demand for scientific manpower’, 1961.