Danny Dorling on Inequality

What do you mean when you talk about inequality? Do you think of it as an economic concept?

The most common way to talk about inequality is in terms of money (either in terms of inequality of income, the amount you get every month, or the other much more important way which is wealth). However, when it comes to human happiness the inequalities which matter most aren’t financial. They are in terms of health or education. When it really comes down to it, what matters most is that are you well, that you are going to live a long life, that your children are going to live a long life, and so on. Personally, I am mostly interested in the way these inequalities show themselves geographically; differences which relate to where people were born. It’s common to look at inequalities in terms of men and women, or different ethnic groups, but there is a gap in the market in terms of looking at inequalities in terms of place. 

You argue that certain popularly held beliefs perpetuate inequality, not the belief in inequality itself. What are these beliefs?

Not many people think that inequality is a good thing in its own right. Even Margaret Thatcher believed that her policies would reduce inequality: she set the target in 1985 that inequality would fall drastically by 2000. However, in countries that become very unequal beliefs form which underpin inequality and justify it, only not directly. These beliefs arise because human beings try to make sense of and validate the world around them. In my book, Why Social Inequality Persists, I argue that there are five main beliefs. The first is a belief in elitism; people now believe, much more than they used to, that it is worth investing a lot of money in the education of a very small number of young people. Another is that prejudice is natural. You often hear people saying that social mobility is unlikely because the middle class produce children who are naturally cleverer. The three other beliefs are that exclusion is necessary, that greed is good that and despair is inevitable. It becomes very hard to argue against inequality when, under the surface, arguments are beginning to be made that suggest that it’s rational to have inequality. 

Tell me about your first book, The Challenge of Affluence.

This is a very complicated book so you have to be prepared for a big read: you can tell that the author, Avner Offer, spent years and years in libraries just piecing together this complex story. It is a sort of social history of the United States and British society, starting in the 1950s. It looks at the question of why there is this ‘addiction’ to material goods – what they make people feel about their social status, and why they make people feel like ‘the big man’. Avner Offer is actually a fellow at All Souls College in Oxford (‘the centre of the establishment’ as John Redwood’s presence there implied) and yet Offer is quietly and subtly arguing that much of the whole system is wrong. 

In the book Offer talks about the relationship between happiness and affluence? What does he say?

People expect their happiness to increase with money. If you hear that your salary is going to increase by 50 per cent, then it’s natural to think that you are going to be happier. But the reality is that you’ll feel happy for a very short amount of time, but then you’ll acclimatise to it. There has been a huge increase in material wealth over the last 150 years and this hasn’t been accompanied by an increase in well-being. If anything, the increase has been in things like anxiety and depression. Self-harming rates among young women, according to admissions into A&E, and similar severe indications, are now one in three. I think what Avner Offer is saying is that if you look at the way we use all this wealth, we could probably be happier on less wealth than we currently have, better shared out.

The author of your next book, Oliver James, is a psychologist who looks at some of the reasons why this might be the case. Tell me about The Selfish Capitalist. 

Well, Oliver James’s most famous book is actually called Affluenza. The book which I have chosen, The Selfish Capitalist, is a compilation of all the academic evidence behind it; Affluenza itself is mostly a series of interviews done with people all around the world. He talks about the incredibly high rates of mental illness which tend to accompany affluence; according to the WHO, one in four Americans is mentally ill; one in ten people in Scotland is taking Prozac or a similar anti-depressant. Oliver James argues that these people are taking drugs and suffering these illnesses for good reasons: society provides them with good reasons for being anxious. 

Is it wealth itself which is the problem?

Not really: it’s the inequality in wealthy societies which is the problem. Oliver James finds that it is the unequal affluent countries in the world that have the highest rates of depression. The most content countries, on the other hand, where people trust each other and crime rates are low and so on, are the more egalitarian countries; Japan, Korea and the Scandinavian countries, for example. One thing that creates unhappiness in unequal societies is that they are highly fragmented. There has been research done in the States scanning the brains of students as they see a homeless person: the evidence suggests that they don’t recognise them as human. It was only when they asked the question ‘Do you think that person is hungry?’ that suddenly all the emotions fire up. It’s a survival mechanism.