The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is Better for Us All

by Simon Reid-Henry

This far-reaching study examines how political policies and paradigms have deepened global inequality, and how to reframe the debate to address it.Inequality is the defining issue of our time—one in which the global 1% now owns half the world’s wealth. In this magisterial study, Simon Reid-Henry rewrites the story of globalization as one about the management of inequality. Reaching back to the eighteenth century, The Political Origins of Inequality foregrounds the political turning points and decisions behind the making of today’s uneven societies. As it weaves together insights from the Victorian city to the Cold War, from US economic policy to Europe’s present migration crisis, a true picture emerges of the structure of inequality itself.Reid-Henry shows that the problem of inequality cannot be resolved by the conventional arguments of left versus right. Modern political discourse has no place for public reason or the common good. Yet, he argues, it is within our power to address this.To forge a better world, we must meet our political responsibilities to others, rather than simply offering the selective charity of the rich. We must think beyond economics and outside our national borders. But above all, we must reinvent the language of equality for a modern, global world.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, History, Philosophy

223 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 22, 2015

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was while I was in the midst of reading Reid-Henry's latest book – The Empire of Democracy – that I came across this book written a few years earlier, The Political Origins of Equality.

It was interesting to read them in this order. This earlier book reads almost as if it were an outline for, or perhaps more accurately, a distillation of, The Empire of Democracy. I suspect that Reid-Henry decided to write a much more comprehensive version of his survey of the past 50 years in which he could use more of the supporting data he must have gathered for The Political Origins of Equality.

So, if you find yourself balking at tackling the 750 some pages of The Empire of Democracy – although it is the more masterful account – I highly recommend this work of not quite 200 pages for his essential argument is the same. My copy has multiple pages’ edges turned down to mark an important passage, and almost every page has some notation or other that I made while reading it. It is a very fine book!

The kernel of his argument is this:

1) Beginning in the 1970s, leaders throughout the West began to turn to the promise of continued growth that they believed only “the markets” could provide as a replacement for the policies adopted after the Second World War that focused on specific national objectives, such as full employment, sound safety nets, and adequate income in old age.
2) While most of them did so not intending – let alone understanding – that this would come at the cost of these previous objectives – the diminution of labor unions, international competition for jobs that effectively depressed wages, and the transformation of decision-making power from national elected leaders to trans-national organizations which were little, if at all, accountable to citizens, some did. (Both Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain wanted to reduce the role of the state as well as the alleged “dependency of too many” citizens upon its social welfare provisions.)
3) This reliance upon market growth was a consequence of three developments: the reality that trade and markets were increasingly global and not national or regional, the doctrines successfully advocated by Austrian economists – and for which the Chicago School of Economics became its early champion – which celebrated the glories that laissez-faire capitalism could deliver, and the realization among many of the largest corporations that money was to be made by profiting on those many countries throughout the world that were successfully throwing off their colonial masters.
4) But market growth, argues Reid-Simon, “is good only if it is promoted as a means to prosperity (in the fuller sense of the term), not as an end in itself: as the only measure of prosperity.” He goes on to add that “social programmes are [all too often] cast aside in favour of a narrow fixation of growth: this is true in rich and poor countries alike.”
5) Through global trade compacts and rules established by non-elected people, effectively removing many of the most economic decisions from not only the needs but also the will of the people.
6) The most significant consequences of all this were:
a. The steady chipping away of social programs upon which large numbers of citizens throughout the West depended or, at least, would likely depend some day;
b. The increase in both income and wealth disparity resulting in today’s world of a relatively few obscenely wealthy persons and huge numbers of citizens struggling to just “get by.”
c. The exploitation of poorer nations – aided in many instances by their own corrupt rulers willing to play along – by wealthier nations choosing to buy from them only those goods we needed, while at the same time choosing to aid their development with an eye towards our future needs.
d. Disillusionment and anger of the many against those nominally in charge, and a surge of interest in individuals and parties that, while increasingly right-wing and nationalistic, nonetheless promise to act on the people’s interest.

“The real problem,” Reid-Henry says, “is that for all we live in an economically globalized world, we do not live in anything like a sufficiently politically globalized world. It is for this reason, and no other, that the international political system today suffers from a democratic deficit. And until we address this, until the public gives itself a voice at the negotiating table of planned trade deals like the TPP, we will continue to see our autonomy as national citizens dug out from underneath it.”

So how might we do this? We need, he argues, “to get something like an embedded liberal order back…[for] America’s postwar commitment to the values of embedded liberalism – that is, a liberal political order that accepts regulations on economic activity – had the distinct merit of seeing the market as the servant of the state.”

This is also central to Roman Catholic teachings about social justice and social solidarity.

The Right has managed to convince many of us that “the problem is government” when, in fact, there are times that government is the only solution for the many. The wealthy and powerful do just fine with limited government, especially since it is what they have shaped to meet their needs. They understand that strong and responsive governments, in intending to meet the needs of the people at large, will need to spend money and, thus, to have a sufficient flow of revenue. Since adequate taxation is anathema to the rich, they preach the evils of government so that the compliant shmoos – I mean, citizens – will keep it small and unable to perform.

Justice and fairness cannot be realized with a weak and powerless government!

However, just as a democracy functioning to meet the needs of the people has floundered in this country, so also has the vital element of civic virtue withered away.

The Founders of this country, agreeing with the famed theorist Montesquieu, knew that if any republic was to survive it would be because its citizens had possessed – and practiced – such civic virtue. In essence, this means putting the needs of the many ahead of our own.

While such an ethical orientation is still practiced within many families it has long been abandoned in the realm of public policy, including how such policy should regulate the functioning of the economy.

We Americans – and many others throughout the West, too – need to wake up and recognize what has happened. Unless we demand to reassert our control over the direction of economic policy – a minimum wage that is truly a living wage, for example, or ending the way corporations play off localities and states against each other in order to secure the best tax bargain for themselves – we will inevitably see ever more lower-wage jobs, positions that are both temporary and without benefits, and a rich who keep getting ever more wealthier every day.

The rhetoric from the Right – largely adopted by the Republican Party – intentionally keeps us at each other’s throats so that we do not see the truth. America has truly been dumb-downed, and we have all played a role in it, however passively or unwillingly.

Are we willing to play a role in reversing it?

[Bogdan Micu · Rating 1 out of 5]

lots of pompous statements, sweeping generalizations; very little substance

[vitellan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The real problem is that for all we live in an economically globalised world, we do not live in anything like a sufficiently politically globalised world...We will also continue to see a world in which global politics more broadly respects only the most powerful among us." (108-109)

Reid-Henry argues that attempts to address global inequality fall short because they originate from an often deliberately narrow and selfish, Eurocentric view of economics and Western determinism (re: forecasting trajectory of poorer nations) and, prioritizing "equality of opportunity" over "equality of outcome," ignore the role of geography and politics in the rise of the wealthier (Western) nations: empire, exploitation/colonialism, and hypocritical advocacy for deregulation of markets (though those measures even undermine progress for their own rich and poor domestically). He provides convincing examples of how inequality, "poverty," and other similar terms have been redefined through the decades in a self-serving and distancing manner by the traditionally more powerful national players.

Solutions and approaches should acknowledge the politics underlying these inequalities and be less strictly based on the metric of economic growth. Poverty is not just material but relational and power-based. Reid-Henry critiques the liberal West's both excessively technical (i.e., economic growth metric) and siloed approach (victim-blaming for programmatic failures, limited scope, where recipients of "aid" are prioritized according to how well those groups play the game dictated by powerful Western nations) toward addressing poverty. At the same time, proponents of free market forces deny that politics guide the "invisible hand" or consider these inequalities "not our problem" except when framed as a threat to "our security" - increasing the mental distance between "us" and "them."

"Our promises of 'protection' are collapsed into a simultaneous effort to order the world's societies, and its failed states especially, in a manner that is to our liking...Development [...] has itself now become a means to reshape poorer societies in light of the rich world's own particular needs and so in many ways it has merely reinforced the problem." (113-114)

Assistance and policy are to be approached as universal and integrative, not as demeaning alms-giving or commodification of its citizenry. And... taxes paired with "global public investment" (GPI). Reid-Henry advocates for social democracy "beyond the borders of the nation-state," "a politics that prioritises (it helps to avoid such loaded terms as "delivers") social prosperity over economic growth" (123), looking at examples beginning with the 1930s' Scandinavia. The question he poses is, "Do [people] not see that self-interest does not itself preclude acting in the wider public interest?" (155)

Other terms in the revised framework proposed: political responsibilities rather than moral obligations: "political responsibilities are obligations we incur by virtue of our structural position in society" (with reference to Iris Marion Young); existential guilt rather than personal guilt: "acknowledging one's material connection to a particular form of injustice" (re: Ruth Marcus).

The author takes a few chapters to get into the argument, but once it moves past the very broad and deceptively wishy-washy intro, it's definitely worth reading (and is somewhat more specific in the latter third than this review may show).

*This was the free e-book of the month from the University of Chicago Press.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

He is trying to make a case for more social democracy with the usual arguments disguised as something different and new. It's not. It's all about inequality, but he mixes it with poverty. However, getting rid of inequality is bad if it makes us equally poor. He can show to Brazil where the Gini has slowly dropped as a good example, but at the same time tell us how bad the US is where the systems have kept the Gini under the level of Brazil for many many years. Then he mixes up global inequality and those within countries, and those are different things entirely. The reason people are poor at one side of the world is not that it's exploited by the rich. It's because the poor countries lack in capitalism what the rich countries have had for a long time and prospered by. Simon Reid-Henry never goes into the details or principles, rather he argues by many many examples - that seems bad and then he points to badly argued reasons shy those things are bad - but very sloppily because there is never one reason for a bad thing(and he ignores many other reasons in order to create his narratives). He never touches upon the solution of a country having the mobility, the possibility of poor to become rich - opportunities. If people have them, then people will take them if they really want to become richer. Then the Gini will not matter at much - but in this book, it is the holy grail. More taxes on the rich. Less tax-evasion. More social programs. More government interference. Bad bad bad bad.

[Ahmed Al-Majid · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tad bit underwhelming if I judge it based on my expectations. It does delve into the issue of how politics fuels inequality and how we can start to make politics work to not lead to increasing inequality.

[Brendon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the authors desire to approach problems with an emphasis on creativity, cooperation and compromise. Discussion over such a complicated issue would have benefited from more tangible examples. Overall I enjoyed reading about ideas proposed.

[Mills College Library]

330.1 R355 2015