Reply to post:

jonathan keith,

You have to argue about relative or absolute poverty, for any of this discussion to be meaningful. The two can mean totally different things.

<blockquote.People may not actually *be* poor, according to some arbitrary chart, but if they see that those at the top of the ladder are vastly wealthier than they are, and that those people are getting more and more of the pie each day, as inequality grows, then those people *feel* poor, and angry to boot.</blockquote>

Actually inequality has gone down in the UK in this recession. Or at least had from the last figures I checked. This is becasue a lot of the rich lost quite a lot and the proportion of taxes being paid by the rich has gone up. Also because of benefits and a minimum wage, the poorest haven't got poorer - a possible exception here possibly being incapacity benefit. The people who've suffered most in this recession are probably the skilled working class / lower middle class types (in as much as those terms still have meaning).

Also if your problem is inequality, it'll never be solved. There's always been inequality in society, and there always will be. So what arbitrary chart are you planning to use to measure this?

I wasn't happy with the analysis from The Spirit Level. I'm not sure it ever sorted out what was correlation, and what was causation. It rather looked like it was cherry-picking it's figures in a lot of cases to make the graphs look better. And it ought to be easier to have lower inequality in small countries with relatively homogenous populations than bigger (more mixed) ones.

Whilst inequality can be truly toxic (see Russia for example) it can also be good. Take Google for example. That's made a small number of people vastly wealthy, because they've created a company that they own a large chunk of that's gone from nothing to global behemoth in just 15 years. Google may have it's problems (privacy, monopolistic behaviour), but it's also generated loads of wealth and helped improve society. Now it might have happened in Scandinavia too, but it didn't. Most of these huge tech companies have come from the less equal USA. But The Spirit Level doesn't seem to discuss that. Like all social questions, it's horribly complicated.