In the smoking rubble of market fundamentalism, we are all being forced to rethink the principles that order our societies - and one small, shining idea is rising from the wreckage. It is the idea of human equality.
The need for us to return to this, our best and most basic instinct, is spelled out in a new book by Professor Richard Wilkinson and Dr. Kate Pickett called 'The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.' It is the culmination of twenty-five years of scientific research. The truths it contains provide us with a compass to rebuild our societies - and a reason to be profoundly optimistic. There is a way we can make our societies dramatically better - and the impulse to do it is hard-wired into each of our brains.
It starts with a stark realization. For millennia, there was one obvious and necessary way to improve human life: raise material living standards. If you are hungry, you will be made a lot happier by food. If you are thirsty, you will be made a lot happier by water. The human impulse for self-improvement was simple: give us more, and give it to us now. But we now know from reams of studies that once your basic needs are met - once you pass the magic number of $25,000 a year - something changes.
We carry on accumulating and accumulating, because it's what we've grown to think will give us happiness, but it works less and less. And after a while, this unhindered chasing of More More More by the very richest begins to make us miserable - and corrodes some of the other basics we need as humans.
One of our most basic psychological needs is for status - to feel that we are a valued member of our tribe. We evolved in small, very egalitarian tribes of hunter-gatherers, and have only lived outside them for a few minutes in evolutionary terms. So when we feel our status is threatened - or there is no way of becoming respected by the rest of the tribe - we begin to malfunction in all sorts of ways.
Indeed, other than being chased by a wild animal or worrying that our supplies of food, water and shelter will be cut off, nothing makes humans more anxious than panic about our status. Endless clinical trials show what happens to our bodies when we feel we are going to lose our status and could end up being looked on as inferior. Our bodies lock into a "fight-or flight" response, where our heart and lungs work harder, our blood vessels constrict, and we burn up our energy stores fast. Our systems flood with a hormone called cortisol.
If this lasts only a short period, it can be good for us: it helps us escape that growling lion, or pull ourselves out of the wreckage of a crashed car. But if it goes on for weeks or months, we begin to suffer all sorts of dysfunction - as we'll see in a moment.
Yet we have built our societies on exaggerating this status panic - and we have been ratcheting it up over the past thirty years. The more unequal a society is, the more intense it becomes. Even if you slip to the bottom in Sweden, it's not so very different from the top. But when there is a long social ladder and the bottom rung means humiliation and poverty, everyone at every rung feels a sweatier need to cling to their place - and the society starts to go wrong. This isn't left-wing speculation: it is an empirical fact.
Japan and Sweden are very different societies, but they are consistently at the top of the charts for every indicator of social success. They have low violence, low mental illness, low teenage pregnancy, low drug addiction, low obesity, low prison populations, high life expectancy, and high levels of friendship and trust. They are economically highly equal societies. The US and Portugal are also very different societies, but they are consistently at the bottom of the charts. They are highly unequal societies. If you plot countries on a graph, you see the causal relationships with striking clarity. Increase inequality, and every one of these dysfunctions shoots up with it.
How can this be? When we are locked in stress, we get sicker. High cortisol levels corrode our insides and massively increase the risk of heart-attack. We eat more - and our bodies store fat differently. It hugs them to our middles, rather than storing them lower down, in our hips and thighs. We are far more likely to break down into depression or mental illness, or to snap and attack somebody. James Gilligan - the psychiatrist running the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School - explains that acts of violence are "attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation - a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable or overwhelming." He adds that he has "yet to see a serious act of violence that did not represent an attempt to undo this 'loss of face.'"
And when we are locked in stress, we become more suspicious of the people around us. In highly equal Sweden, 66 percent of people feel they can trust their fellow citizens - and as a result have the highest levels of friendship in the developed world. In highly unequal Portugal, only 10 percent of the population trust the rest: see the bars on the windows.
It can be easier to see how this model of stress and humiliation affects us by looking at our evolutionary cousins. In a recent study, scientists at the University of North Carolina took twenty macaque monkeys, divided them into groups of four, and put them in separate enclosures. In each little group, they formed hierarchies, with some at the top, and some at the bottom. They then made it possible for the monkeys to give themselves a dose of cocaine by pulling a lever. The dominant monkeys took very little cocaine - while the subordinate, humiliated monkeys took huge amounts. They were, in effect, compensating themselves for being at the bottom of the pile with no way out. Now think about the rates of drug addiction in Detroit, or South Central Los Angeles, or the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
Our elites have adopted an ideology - the extreme inequality of market fundamentalism - that simply doesn't suit our species. It makes us sick and aggressive and anxious. This doesn't just affect the poor: the studies show the disastrous effects of inequality run right up the ladder.
It doesn't have to be this way. By democratically taxing the rich and using the money to lift up the poor, we can make life better for all of us. Of course there must be some income differentials - but nothing like our own grotesque rates. Plato suggested the richest person should be allowed to earn fives times the wage of the poorest person, which seems fair to me. The evidence is in, and it is plain: a more equal society is a happier, safer, and healthier one. (The obvious exception to this rule is Communist societies. They were incredibly miserable: if equality is imposed by crazed tyrants, at the expense of freedom, then it has none of these positive effects.)
Wilkinson and Pickett explain how the US would change over time if we taxed and invested our way to the same levels of economic equality as social democratic Sweden: "The proportion of the population feeling they could trust others might rise by 75 percent - presumably with matching improvements in the quality of community life; rates of mental illness and obesity might similarly be cut by about two-thirds, teenage birth rates could be more than halved, prison populations might be reduced by 75 percent, and people could live longer while working the equivalent of two months less a year."
It's a shining vision - and not utopian. It exists now in a free, democratic country. Most Americans intuitively want it: over 80 percent say the income gap is too high. It is only the undemocratic, concentrated power of the wealthy that holds us up.
And there is another, even more sombre reason why we need to democratically equalize our societies. We are now highly likely to face a series of destabilizing and dangerous climate shocks. In his book 'Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Survive', looks at the societies throughout history that have faced similar shocks. The difference between the ones that died out and the ones that survived was relative equality. If the elite stands far above the population and can insulate itself from the effects of the shock - for a while, at least - then the society doesn't make it through. We need to reorganize ourselves now, while we can.
At the end of the failed age of market fundamentalism, the long-suppressed democratic cry for equality is emerging once again. Its glow should be at the core of how we move beyond this cold, cold depression.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here or here.
Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101
Michael Kaiser: Why the Arts Don't Pay for Themselves
When people say the arts are irrelevant, I have to disagree; the arts are simply too expensive.
The words you are looking for is Empathy and Fairness as laid out by George Lakoff in his discussion of "Strict Father" vs "Nurturant Parent" metaphors that lie at the heart of our political thinking.
Using "Equality" and talking more equal outcome alone implies to the empathy deficient that equality is achieved without equality of effort, and therefore deeply wrong by their thinking.
However with the Empathy to each persons difficulties, and to recognize that by enhancing their opportunities, you enhance their productivity and life, not just for themselves but for the benefit of everyone.
With Fairness you recognize that very little can be accomplished except by groups of people working together, and that while one job in that group is to assign tasks and benefits, basic fairness demands that such person not take all the benefits for themselves and push all the costs on to others, and that therefore there must be a means of accountability to assure that outcome.
In our universe the highest means of accountability is the Government with the Government also accountable to the Law and the people by means of elections. Some hold a theological authority higher, but that is not much good on those who only pretend to believe, or just don't.
So Its Empathy, with Fairness and Accountability as subtexts, that will actually accomplish the Equality you are looking for.
There are neither perfect systems, nor perfect countries. But life in any country may be improved through a lot of possible changes, at many different levels. The research work referred to in these books allows a big turnaround in philosophy (it's what philosophy is about: a good life).
Plato says it's five times the income of the poor.
I don't know if the 'elite' and 'wannabe elite' would settle for this paltry difference in status.
I mean we're talking the dollar here and the dollar to a lot of people on the planet , is god.
How to get so many people to think of money as king instead of god, is quite the challenge.
Religions whose doctrines eschew materialism are some of the richest institutions on the planet.
It's very sticky, this attachment we have to money.
However when the ability to grab the goodies granted by power and money, is matched by a tax on excess grabbing, many good things result.
The first and most amazing is that looting assets becomes counter productive as it is better to have a smaller income over a long time than to grab the whole pile at once. Under that situation investment secures a steady income for everyone, and businesses actually grow rather than be destroyed as they have been recently. It is also better to have a superior (better paid) workforce as if you are there for the long haul it has a better result.
Under the greatest growth America has ever seen the highest income tax was 93% and the average multiple in a business was nearly the Platonic 5 times (actually 7x) between top and bottom. Only later when such taxes were gone was there a rush to make each CEO the highest paid, as proof of quality even when it showed no such thing.
I so appreciate your smarts and your succinct breakdown of what is indeed an area full of mirrors and smoke.
Hats off to you. And of course to Plato.
But these social and political equality movements started at the grassroots. Politicians and judges didn't just wake up one day and say, "Hey! Let's have a revolution!"
I think we can reach economic equality only when a critical mass of people finally realizes that accumulating stuff is not the path to true happiness. When they quit being hypnotized by Madison Avenue to follow every trend slavishly. In other words, if you buy Hari's argument, when people show that they're more than their evolutionary hardwiring and actually have sentience and self-awareness.
You can't legislate self-awareness. It has to come from the bottom up, an organic awakening of consciousness, much like the Civil Rights movement did. It can be done. Otherwise we wouldn't have the millions of nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers, community organizers, animal rescuers, first responders, librarians, farmers, dentists, scientists, anthropologists, historians, and so on that we already do.
"We cannot base a decent, functional nation on slimy, toxic, unworkable, DANGEROUS conservative ideas."
Hari's article illuminates a simple truth: that right-wing conservatism is not something to be debated, but rather something to be diagnosed: a pathological mental disease caused by cortisol poisioning that leads to hate speech, right-wing political advocacy, and other actions that create an intolerable obstacle to progress.
As with other psychological pathologies such as pedophilia, society has a moral right and duty to protect itself from the consequences of right-wing conservatism. An excellent start would be for America to adopt Canada's practice of having a Human Rights Commission that establishes the acceptable opinions on major public issues. In Canada, anyone having an improper opinion can be charged with a hate crime. The goal of this practice is not to fill prisons with offenders, but to cause people to restrain their pathological impulses. In Canada, there is no equivalent to Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly because they would be charged with hate crimes.
To avoid constitutional objections, the Supreme Court should reinterpret the right of "free speech" to mean "speech that makes us more free," meaning free from racism, social injustice, and right-wing tyranny. Only speech that promotes these goals should be constitutionally protected. Hopefully, Obama's forthcoming appointments to the Supreme Court will move us toward this goal and allow us to begin aggresively cleansing our nation of hate criminals and the social pathology known as conservatism.
Truly twisted.
Sweden seems to be both highly individualistic and happy, according to this article. So, it is possible to be just a bit more collectivist and still retain American individualism.
This is not scientific information, it's just a hunch I have. What do other readers think?
This country for better or worse was founded by the most individualistic people in Europe at the time, and I would guess we're attracting the most individualistic people from various parts of the world to this day.
This individualism is in our DNA, and it's led to a country with 5 % of the world's population producing 25 % of the world's GDP. There are of course exceptions, Sweden probably among them, but in large scale collectivism seems to lead to less affluence overall, and sometimes collectivism has led to extreme economic calamity. We should beware its siren song.
"you want even the poorest people in the population to enjoy a high quality life irrespective of how poor they are compared to the rich."
If a society truly dedicated itself to this goal of equality, I have always wondered how the society would deal with the Pareto principle: that 80% of the work in any organization is done by 20% of the people.
From the beginning of human history, the primary reason people got up and went to work was to provide themselves and their family food, clothing, shelter, and whatever else they defined as a "high quality life." If I could be guaranteed a "high quality life" regardless of how little or much work I did, I would retire now at the age of 27 to a life of leisure. 80% of the population would probably agree with me, and the other 20% would be left working to support us.
The Pareto principle? Just a made-up propaganda tool to justify the extreme pay of the nastiest few execs who have clawed their way to the top. How would you objectively measure this? You can't. This is just silly.
Oddly, most of the children of the uber rich don't retire at 27..... Just another little problem with your rambling.
This is like saying, if I am having a turkey sandwich for lunch, I am not allowed to talk about hamburgers.
This article didn't really sound like preaching. It sounded more like making an argument and presenting some supporting evidence.
What's your beef? Do you only make $25000 a year, and resent anyone who makes more?
I am intrigued by the idea of a humane market economy that promotes human dignity and the family, and avoids the evils that inevitably arise from the overly-centralized powers of socialist (too powerful big government) and straight capitalist (too powerful big business) systems.
no, pounded-down,
HARD.
If we do not do this, America wil be a living hell, or even fall apart altogether.
Conservatives are as wrong as 2+2=13.
We cannot base a decent, functional nation on slimy, toxic,
unworkable, DANGEROUS conservative ideas.
Conservatism has been an indulgence in this country---Like booze, drugs,
illicit sexual affairs, etc etc
It's time to let the sweet, tempting poison of Conservatism go, forever.
FOREVER.
America's survival depends on it.
And here's the thing, they're not even true Christians at all. Jesus valued love of neighbor and even of the enemy, to love others as one loves oneself, and to do unto others what you want others to do unto you. His own disciples even advocated and practiced communal ownership (everybody shares what they have) with their early followers. Who and what these conservatives are now are not the kind of people Christ envisioned his followers to be. He wanted his followers to love, to understand, to accept, and to help--everyone.
(I know all of this even though I'm not even Christian. I'm just Deist who heavily studied Christian Theology)
Ensuring that all citizens have an equal freedom to pursue happiness is alligned with human dignity. Ensuring that all citizens have a [relatively] equal outcome, in spite of their efforts and abilities, is contrary to human dignity and to human nature. Of course, freedom must be tempered by responsibility, duty, and charity toward your fellow man, but the government should promote charity, not enforce it (i.e., increasing the welfare state or going for straight communism).
Charity just means that rich folks get a thrill from giving money to some poor people when the mood strikes them, then the poor return to a terrifying hand to mouth existence, a heartbeat away from disaster.
As to your second point, everyone, not just the rich, can and should participate in helping their fellow man. Regardless, whether it's what we think of as a traditional charity or just helping a neighbor or government welfare, in most cases, besides the most needy and helpless, our aid to our poor should be more of a safety net to help people bounce back, than a system to support a continued way of life for months or years, as our present system operates. Work is dignifying.
There are many forms of capitalism. What we have right now is bubble capitalism, whereby a new bubble in some non-manmade resource (oiil, land etc.) is used to speculate enourmous sums to a very tiny minority of early investors.
This is also Ponzi Capitalism. Or, perhaps, since banks have become a de facto fourth branch of goverment, Crony Capitalism. Certainly, these forms of capitalism is unsustainable.
Here's an alternative: Geonomic Capitalism.
Tax all the non-manmade resources: oil, land, pollution of air/water/land etc. and untax the fruits of productions (wages, capital like factories, cranes, trucks etc.). This would prevent speculation by taxing away the "fuel" for it, on land, natural resources and distributing that back to the comunity (to whom the resources rightfully belong).
Human production would be encouraged by untaxing the rewards of that, but consumption of scarce resources would be discouraged by taxing the raw materials.