Time to start spreading?

By Sam Pizzigati

Americans and the British, the old quip goes, are two peoples divided by a common language.  But that’s not entirely accurate. On both sides of the Atlantic, some people – rich people, to be specific, and those who genuflect before them – speak exactly the same language.

Listen to P. George Benson, the dean of the University of Georgia business school in the United States, explain why we ought to worry only about the creation of wealth and not its distribution: “Inequality of results is the incentive for creating the wealth that is necessary for a civilized society,” Dean Benson posited early in our new century. “It provides the motivation for all of us to excel at whatever our business is. And in the process of excelling, we cure diseases, build world-renowned educational institutions, invent technologies that improve the quality of our lives, produce enough food to feed the hungry, and create artistic masterpieces that inspire and entertain.”

Now listen to Sir Tom McKillop, the top executive at AstraZeneca, Britain’s second biggest pharmaceuticals company, and Britain’s “best-connected boardroom chief,” according to The Times Power 100: “The distribution of wealth is a political and economic issue,” McKillop noted this past November. “But its creation has got to be a good thing because it’s making the cake bigger, making a more advanced society. It allows cultural evolution, it allows the arts to flourish, it allows all kinds of things to happen.”

Or listen to George W. Bush, on the 2004 campaign trail, arguing that any moves to increase taxes on the rich will always backfire on average people: “You know what happens with this ‘tax the rich’ deal,” Bush noted. “That’s why they’ve got accountants and lawyers, so the rich figure out how not to pay, and you get stuck with the tab.”

Now listen to Tony Blair make the same point, with somewhat sharper syntax. Boosting the top tax rate on those who male over £100,000 a year would be a silly idea, Blair claimed last January, because “every single piece of analysis that has ever been done indicates that large numbers of those taxpayers – probably the wealthiest – would simply hire a whole lot of new accountants to do this and that. And actually your tax take would be a lot less.”

In other words, our modern societies cannot stop the concentration of wealth. Indeed, American and British men of means ask us to wonder, why would we ever want to? Inequality in the distribution of wealth, they believe, does no harm. Inequality doesn’t matter.

This basic assumption is now suffocating political discourse in the U.S. and the U.K. – within both major parties. John Kerry, if elected, would have raised no challenge to Tony Blair’s indifference to concentrated wealth. “I am not a redistributionist Democrat,” as Kerry announced during his campaign.

Even more insurgent-minded leaders within the American Democratic Party share this reluctance to confront great concentrations of income and wealth. “The thing to do is concentrate on the 90 percent of people who don’t have what they need and make sure they have it,” Howard Dean argued during his White House bid, “and not worry about the people who make $500,000 a year. Of course, it’s obscene, but so what?”

The irony in all this indifference to the impact of great wealth concentrations? Today, in these early years of the 21st century, we have more eminently reasonable reasons to fear inequality than ever before.

A hundred years ago, in an earlier era of plutocratic excess in both Britain and the United States, egalitarians spent their time emphasizing that no real democracy could survive whenever great wealth gave society’s most favoured considerably more power than everyone else. That truth still holds. But over the past quarter-century a new generation of researchers – sociologists and psychologists, economists and epidemiologists – have added enormously to our understanding of what happens when societies grow more unequal. 

Increasing inequality, this research has documented, leaves our economies less stable, our behaviour less honest, our communities less compassionate, our individuals less content, and even our lives less long. The societies with the shortest life spans, epidemiologists now tell us, are not the societies with the most poor. The societies with the shortest life spans are those that sport the greatest gaps between those at the top of the economic ladder and those at the bottom. Inequality actually kills.

Little of this research has yet worked its way into the ongoing political dialogue in either Britain or the United States. But that may be changing. Institutions and individuals, in both the U.K. and the U.S., are mounting a direct assault on the ideological superstructure that excuses inequality.

The British Catalyst think tank, for instance, has performed a mighty public service with its new and cogently argued pamphlet, Why inequality matters by Ben Jackson and Paul Segal. In the United States, my new book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality That Limits Our Lives, endeavours to expose just how concentrated wealth is poisoning everything we hold dear, from our health to our happiness, from our arts to our Earth.

Over recent years, I’ve spoken on these themes before groups in the United States that have ranged from trade unions and church congregations to gatherings of small businesspeople. Most moderate-income people, I’ve found, almost instinctively understand that no good of it can come when wealth concentrates in too few pockets.

And recent surveys of the American people seem to find the same unease. Right after November’s Presidential election, one national poll gave a cross-section of voters a list of “moral problems” facing the nation and asked them to identify the one problem they considered the most urgent. The top choice? A third of those surveyed – 33 percent – chose “greed and materialism” as the most urgent problem facing the United States. Another 31 percent chose the closely related “poverty and economic justice.” Just 12 percent rated same-sex marriage as America’s pressing moral problem.

Wealth is like manure, as Sir Francis Bacon noted centuries ago. It only does good when you spread it around. Americans, these days, seem to be ready to talk about spreading.

Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati recently stepped down after 20 years directing the publishing operations of America’s largest trade union, the 2.7 million-member National Education Association. He currently edits Too Much, an online weekly on excessive income and wealth, and serves on the board of directors of United for a Fair Economy, the leading American advocacy group working to raise awareness about the dangers of concentrated wealth and power.

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