Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I’ll begin with what might be accused of being a rhetorical question. Are we living in fair and equal societies in Britain and in the West?
We’re living in unequal societies, but what makes the inequality noxious, and very inflammable socially, is that we’re also living in very unfair societies. That’s to say – and this is true of the less developed as well as the developed world – societies in which it is widely felt that many rewards and fortunes have not been accrued in a proportional relationship to effort, enterprise, hard work and the contribution to the societies of which these men and women are part.
People’s rewards have often come about because they have got lucky, rigged a market or manipulated things, like a mafia gangster or oligarch, sometimes illegitimately, to get themselves into the position in which they are in. It is this interrelationship between inequality and unfairness – which are two discrete analytic categories – that I think is the hallmark of our times. And it raises big questions about the legitimacy of contemporary capitalism.
What precisely is your critique of the capitalism we’re living in now?
The apologists for today’s capitalism have a series of theories which at a high level of abstraction are about markets always working optimally. What sits behind those theories is a belief system that the way markets work, and the way life works, revolves very much around the principles of Darwinian natural selection. That capitalism is about survival of the fittest, and hunter-gatherers pursuing their own interests individualistically.
My critique is that this doesn’t describe the world of hunter-gatherers, doesn’t describe how Darwin conceived of natural selection, and more importantly doesn’t describe how actually a contemporary capitalism works and how it has an ongoing legitimacy. My argument is that capitalism delivers its best when it respects some very deeply held human views about the way reward and punishment should be distributed. It should be proportional, and it should have a profound relationship to effort and contribution – what David Miller, one of the authors of the books I have chosen, calls due desert.
Tell me about his book.
David Miller is a moral philosopher. I read Principles of Social Justice when researching my newest book, Them and Us. It was very influential in helping me to harden views about inequality and fairness that I’ve held for many years. There are traces of this thinking in [my books] The State We’re In and The Writing on the Wall but I hadn’t crystalised it until I read Miller.
Essentially what he argues is that if you are to operationalise social justice – so that people actually put their hands into their pockets, and financially or in another way help their fellow man or woman – then the only way to turn abstract notions into actually making that happen is if the value system that underpins it is felt to correspond to deeply held human instincts. Although Miller is sympathetic to [moral and political philosopher] John Rawls and his theory of justice – that the test of a just society is whether you would be indifferent to which family you are born into, because the opportunity to exploit all your talents would be equal wherever you were – he feels that doesn’t really cut it, because people do feel that there should be a proportional relationship between effort and reward, or due desert.
He also explores the role of luck in society. He acknowledges that some people are prettier, physically stronger or more intellectually adept at some things than others. The skills that one has are just there, and people are then better or worse able to exploit those skills. So there will always be an element of income inequality in any society. The question is whether it is felt to be deserved.
You’ve been looking at this kind of issue yourself in the High Pay Commission, at the behest of the British government.
Yes, I used precisely these ideas in that commission which I was asked to lead by the government. I was asked to investigate the question of high pay in the public sector, think through some principles for addressing it, and see if those principles could be used more broadly in the private sector. I used Miller’s ideas of desert – the Treasury officials I was working with must have thought, what is Will Hutton going on about? – and notions of good and bad luck. People feel strongly about circumstantial luck that you have done nothing to earn. An unearned bonus is felt to be very illegitimate, and equally if you are very ill or hurt yourself badly that’s considered brute bad luck that we should do something about.
So I used these principles of fairness to address high pay. I said there is a strong sense among the British that high pay for some public servants – teachers, headmasters, police chief constables – is fair do’s if they’re doing a great job. Where things go pear-shaped is where the public feel that their tax pounds are being spent by someone who’s gamed the system and is being overpaid for the job that they do.
And how about the private sector? I gather CEOs in the FTSE 100 are paid 81 times the average worker salary.
More than that, actually. It’s over 140 times median pay. Pay in the private sector has just gone sky high.
Will Hutton is an English writer, columnist and former editor-in-chief of The Observer. He is the author of several books, including The State We’re In and most recently Them and Us. In 2010 he was invited by the British government to lead a commission into high pay in the public sector. He is currently Principal of Hertford College, Oxford
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