In an interview 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.

In an interview on Why We Live in a Mad World

The Challenge of Affluence, Avner Offner. 

He provides specific details of Thatcherism and Reaganomics in America smashed the family to pieces. What I was talking about earlier, the disinvestment in the domestic household economy, he provides all the evidence. Insecure working conditions combined with increased levels of education in women makes everybody compete ever harder and creates a much greater conflict for women about whether to stay at work or not. During this period, of course, we all borrowed much more money in order to afford property and then we have to work to afford the mortgage and it became increasingly regarded as essential to put family and children second and put work first especially in the higher classes. And he provides all the evidence for this. 

All this stuff about how society is making us ill and we’re all mentally ill because we’re richer sounds very nostalgic for a simpler past of warm beer and cricket. But as a woman surely things are better because we don’t die in childbirth or, ideally, get abused by our husbands?

It depends when exactly you choose to compare. If you compare with 1950 there is strong evidence from American research that a woman in her 20s today is five times more likely to be mentally ill using the same method of measurement as a woman going back to 1938. Actually, it includes women in their late teens as well and there is a linear increase the closer you get to the present day, overall. So, no. It is a complete myth that feminism in the American form, and I’m talking only about Britain and America here – the picture is probably very different in Sweden and Italy or Spain… 

I live in Italy and it’s very macho. I wouldn’t really want my daughter to grow up here.

Well, it’s complicated but Italy does have the lowest rate of mental illness in the major European nations. Actually, though it’s very unfashionable to say it and women like yourself don’t want to hear it, but I’m telling you something that is absolutely certainly true: Bridget Jones is a hell of a lot more unhappy than her grandmother. 

That’s fairly clear, I think.

Well, you say that, but you started off with the comparison to medieval times… I’m not trying to be nostalgic. I’m not saying what the answer is but I’m saying that this is a fact. I don’t think any thinking people would suggest that the solution would be to return to a sort of collectivist society in which women were seen and not heard, but my point is that American feminism has adopted the men-in-skirts model in which men have not changed very much but women have adopted the worst characteristics of men and without women learning a new way of being women. 

More intelligent women in the upper echelons of our society really do need to get their heads around the fact that the form of feminism we’ve had has been an absolute disaster. Anyone who has teenage daughters will quickly agree. They look at their teenage daughters and just think: ‘What the fuck is this? Is this what we were fighting for? Ever shorter skirts, shagging on a random basis, completely obsessive concern with appearance, obsession with exam results? Is that what it was all about?’ Teenage girls at competitive schools are the most mentally ill group in our society.