According to the Human Development Report 2016, India’s Human Development Index score shrank by 27% due to rise in different forms of inequality. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum warned that extreme inequality could throw the future of capitalism into question. And we keep getting periodic updates on how the world’s richest 1% are expanding their assets at the cost of the remaining 99%.
In other words, rising inequality is well-documented and widely acknowledged as bad. Yet, there are hardly any studies on the benefits of equality. Danny Dorling’s The No-Nonsense Guide to Equality plugs this gap.
Most arguments we hear against inequality are either moral or political. But in a refreshing departure, Dorling, a professor of social geography at Oxford, draws on anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, politics, and history to demonstrate that greater equality is in everyone’s self-interest, including that of the wealthy.
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He advances his arguments through elegant Socratic questions designed to jolt one out of the intellectual stupor induced by neoclassical economics. Here’s a sample: “What use would your wealth be if others did not need wages to be your servants?” He lays out the enormous costs of sustaining an unequal society, which don’t get adequate play in debates about equality. One such cost is fear, whose symptoms vary from the wealthy walling themselves off from the poor in gated communities, to more investments in ‘security’.
He shows how, even as humanity has made gains in equality (in the case of women and children), it has also suffered losses. Until World War I, anyone could travel anywhere. Then came immigration control, a hierarchy of passports and a world of travel inequality. This is a good illustration of the organic link between freedom and equality.
Dorling also presents examples from history that suggest a link between extreme inequality and the rise of religiosity. Both Christianity and Islam rose as egalitarian social movements against tyrannies. If countries are witnessing the rise of political mobilisation under the banner of religion, could it be a reaction to extreme inequality?
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This book is the perfect companion to some of the great theorists of equality, especially R.H. Tawney’s classic Equality and Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour . They present a strong case for a shift in focus from increasing growth (or reducing poverty) to increasing equality.