The document discusses why social inequality persists. It argues that in affluent nations, inequality is no longer caused by a lack of resources but by unrecognized beliefs that propagate it. These beliefs include that elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, and prejudice is natural. The document provides historical and statistical evidence to show how these beliefs have led to rising inequality in places like the UK over time through policies that concentrate wealth among a small minority.

1. Why social inequality persists Danny Dorling University of Sheffield Based on the book: “Injustice: why social inequality persists”, to be published by Policy Press in April 2010. www.shef.ac.uk/sasi 27 th January 2010 Lancaster Environment Centre and Royal Geographical Society Seminar University of Lancaster More than ever before we measure rates of social inequality and draw pictures of its human geography. Few would now dispute that we live in an unequal and unjust world. So what causes this inequality to persist? Within affluent nations inequality is no longer caused by not having enough resources to share, but by unrecognised and unacknowledged beliefs which actually propagate it. See Dorling (2010) for an elaboration of these arguments and further evidence: “Injustice: why social inequality persists”, Policy Press, April. This talk is a summary of that book. An audio-enabled multimedia-version of this talk given at the Sheffield Humanist Society Meeting can be accessed here: http://sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/presentations/injustice/

2. Of all the 25 richest countries in the world, the US and UK rank as 2nd and 4th most unequal respectively when the annual income of the best-off tenth of their population is compared that of the poorest tenth. In descending order of inequality the 10%:10% income ratios are: 17.7 Singapore, 15.9 United States, 15.0 Portugal, 13.8 United Kingdom, 13.4 Israel, 12.5 Australia, 12.5 New Zealand, 11.6 Italy, 10.3 Spain, 10.2 Greece, 9.4 Canada, 9.4 Ireland, 9.2 Netherlands, 9.1 France, 9.0 Switzerland, 8.2 Belgium, 8.1 Denmark, 7.8 Korea (Republic of), 7.3 Slovenia, 6.9 Austria, 6.9 Germany, 6.2 Sweden, 6.1 Norway, 5.6 Finland, and 4.5 Japan.

4. Extent of education in Britain 1880-2013 Who we think it is fitting to educate changes over time. When Nelson Mandela was put on trial in 1963 he faced a possible death sentence. In his concluding court statement he defined, as an equality worth fighting for, the right of children to be treated equally in education and for them to be taught that Africans and Europeans were equal and merited equal attention. At that time the South African government spent twelve times as much on educating each European child as on each African child. Lifetime ratios between the extremes in Britain are not dissimilar.

5. Children by ‘ability’, the Netherlands 2006 International tests are used today to label children by supposed ‘ability’. The above graph is derived from the OECD (2007). ‘None’ implies possessing no knowledge as far as can be measured. ‘Limited’ implies possessing very limited knowledge. ‘Barely’ stands for barely possessing adequate knowledge in the minds of the assessors. ‘Simple’ means understanding only simple concepts. ‘Effective’ is a little less damning. ‘Developed’ is better again; but only ‘Advanced’ pupils are found to be capable, it is said, of the kind of thinking that might include ‘critical insight’.

6. Children by ‘ability’, the elitist model Almost no matter how the students had ‘performed’ in the OECD tests, the curves drawn above from the results of those tests would have been bell shaped. When calibrating the results (adjusting the scores before release), it was “…assumed that students have been sampled from a multivariate normal distribution”. OECD (2009, page 145). These educational economists decided upon the ability distribution of children before they began testing them. If you do that, then, even in the Netherlands, every seventh child is, at best, “limited”.

7. Nobel Prizes illustrate bias (1901-2008) Until 2009 only around one in twenty top prices were awarded to women. Testing humans is almost always to an extent disingenuous. To win a Nobel Prize the key requirements were first to be alive in the right century and then to be of the right sex. Even male mainstream economists know that Albert Einstein, Alan Turing and James Watson were just the inventors of “…discoveries about to happen. If these particular individuals had not found them, others would have made these discoveries instead.” Kay, J. (2004, page 258).

8. Nobel Prizes to women 1901-2008, & 2009 In 2009 one glass ceiling was shattered. Over a third of Nobel prizes were awarded to women when usually a twentieth had been. On Monday October the 5th 2009 Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak jointly shared the award in medicine. On Tuesday October the 6th the Physics prize when to Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith. And on Wednesday October the 7th the Chemistry prize went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath. A third of the prize winners by the third day were women. Herta Müller was awarded the prize in literature on October 8th, yet another, Elinor Ostrom, shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics that was awarded on October 12th and was a huge surprise. No woman had been awarded that prize before. The unsurprising and predicable award was to President Obama, in hope of peace. History provides the measure of what there is to be overcome.

13. Geographical distribution of paupers, England and Wales, 1891 , by Karl Pearson There is a long history to suggesting that geographical concentrations of paupers imply exclusion is ‘naturally’ distributed. The figure above is redrawn from the original (Pearson 1895, Figure 17, plate 13). On the X axis: paupers per ten thousand people; Y axis: frequency of unions reporting each rate. Given what we now know – the graph suggests that despite the structures of the poor laws paupers did move out of poorer areas, but new paupers were constantly being created. Migration, not “in-breeding” segregated rich and poor over time.

14. What it means to be poor changes: Households - poor by different measures If a family is poor by two out of three ways of measuring poverty you can be sure they are badly off. One sixth of households in Britain are this poor. Those who are subjectively poor describe themselves as poor. Those who are necessities poor do not have access to the goods or services deemed necessary to be included in the normal life of society. Low income is the way poverty remains officially measured in the UK (source Bradshaw and Finch, 2003).

15. Households cycle into and above poverty: People get into debt to avoid their standard of living falling immediately when their incomes fall. Above, the X axis measures income poverty. The Y axis measures adequacy of material goods (necessities). Households tend to circulate anti-clockwise. Source: David Gordon, Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research, University of Bristol (http://www.bris.ac.uk/poverty/). Social mobility is lowest where the lengths of these axes are longest.

16. Sustaining postwar growth in rich nations after the 70s would have required another planet Decadal growth rates (in GDP) Poverty as measured through low income or by otherwise being excluded from the spending norms of society rose in Britain and America in the 1970s as the rich sought to maintain high growth in their wealth despite the worldwide slump. The poorest continent and poorer people in richer continents suffered most from the slump: ‘Real growth’ per decade in GDP (%) per person by continent 1955-2001 (drawn above) shows the widening gap. Source: Estimates by Angus Maddison, from versions provided in spreadsheets given in www.worldmapper.org.

17. The global bell-curve is of income distribution: The curve only looks ‘normal’ when money is valued multiplicatively (hence the log X axis). The affluent in rich countries excluding themselves from social norms results in ever greater consumption by smaller groups in the rich world that, in turn, causes want to rise elsewhere. It regenerates the old evil of the most basic of wants rises as peasants are made into paupers in the poorest of countries. “Pauperization is now clearly seen by many to be the direct end result of massive economic polarization on a world scale” (Amin, S., 2004).

19. How are you finding ‘things’? How’s life in the UK? Ask: How did we get to this? Households’ ability to get by on their income in Britain , 1984-2004. Source: Derived from (ONS, Social Trends, 2006, table 5.15, page 78, mean of 1984, 1994, and 2004 surveys). Finding ‘it difficult to manage’ is a very British euphemism for not managing. Among those doing better than this, almost half the population in Britain describe themselves ‘as only just coping’! So, how did we get to this situation? A lack of political ambition as compared to what politicians have achieved in the majority of affluent countries can be blamed. In most affluent countries people trust others more, are less scared of their neighbours, share their resources out more equitably and are less prejudiced in their opinions of others in their country (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009).

20. Answer: Enough people voted for it – in the right places at the right times Conservative vote concentration 1918-2005 Concentration of Conservative votes, general elections 1918-2005. This graph shows the spatial segregation index for Britain. The index shows the minimum proportion of such voters who would have to be transferred between a fixed set of parliamentary constituencies if each constituency were to have the same national proportion of Conservative voters at each general election. The geographical concentration reflects how people come less to know, to share the views of, their neighbours in other areas. The ‘over-concentration’ of votes since 1997 and not just their low numbers lost the Conservatives power from then until at least 2005, but the influence of their concentrating ‘geographical block’ affected all politics. Left wing politicians feared the right-wing “middle-Britain”.

22. The most harmful cost of inequality: Inequality in health – premature mortality Best and worse off area - differences from average In more unequal times, and in the aftermath of the shock of mass unemployment, more people in poorer areas die young as compared to other times and places. The prospects of the wealthy also move away from those of the average. The line marked by white squares shows how much lower the age-sex standardized under age 65 mortality rate of the best-off 10% by area is as compared to the average. The line marked by dark diamonds shows how much higher that of the worst-off 30% is than the average. (Source Dorling and Thomas 2009, derived from Table 4.3 with interpolation between five year rates in some circumstances).

25. We racked up our debt because of greed Debt in the USA Outstanding consumer debt as a proportion of disposable income, USA 1975-2005. The debt was needed to “keep up with the Joneses” and to keep living away from those you increasingly fear if you live in a more unequal affluent country. The bars show the ratio of debt to annual disposable income with axis to the right. The line shows the percentage change in that ratio over the coming five years (with axis to the left). Disposable income is the income after paying taxes. Derived from: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Flows of Funds, Accounts of the United States, Historical Series and Annual Flows and Outstandings, Fourth Quarter 2005 (Foster 2006).

26. We pollute the poor because of greed Poverty rate by NOx emission and ambient air quality for 10,444 British wards in 1999. When you drive a car (to let you live further from the poor but still get to work) it is not just you who suffers inconvenience. It is people living in those parts of inner cities which are poorest, where they are least likely to own cars, who breathe in the most air pollution from the exhausts of the cars of those who drive past their homes (graph from Mitchell and Dorling 2003). Note: low emitting and polluting quintiles are labelled 1, the highest are labelled 5. The proportion living in poverty is derived from breadline surveys.

27. We avoid/evade tax because of greed Social security and taxation prosecutions, Australia, counts, 1989-2003 Source: Redrawn from figures originally appearing as a graph in the Journal of Social Policy, and in a presentation by Greg Marston (2007). Much the same could be drawn for Britain except that social security fraud has been falling in recent years while tax avoidance/evasion has been rising greatly (Horton and Gregory, 2009, page 211). Widespread greed makes us progressively care more for ourselves and our immediate gratification and more suspicious of others and other types of planning.

28. We pay more in ‘interest’ because of greed personal income in the USA spent on interest and rent Debt payments as % of disposable income, United States, 1980-2008 One persons’ greed pollutes all others’ lives, raises house prices for them and sees less spent on social housing, further congests their roads, reduces educational spending for the many in favour of a few, sees health care being sold on a private market rather than allocated according to need, and even pollutes the thinking of society as a whole. The graph above is drawn from data provided by the Federal Reserve Board on required debt payments on mortgage and consumer debt, automobile lease payments, rental payments, insurance, and property tax payments (Foster 2006 gives data source).

30. Children in unequal rich countries are suffering rising anxiety Reports from trials Girls assessed in North America as depressed by around age 15 Adolescent girls assessed as depressed, %, North America, 1984-2001. In this graph circle size is drawn proportionate to clinical trail size. Source: Reanalysis of (Costello, Erkanli et al. 2006) The data shown above are for those studies where the children lived in the United States, the U. S. territory of Puerto Rico, or Canada. The same trend is not found in more equitable affluent nations, but is found in data drawn from Britain and among adults as well as children. One in three families in Britain now live with a family member suffering from poor mental health. This is most often depression or anxiety.

31. More and more pills are prescribed The rate of prescribing antidepressants by the NHS in Scotland Prescriptions per day per 1000 people, mainly of SSRIs (such as Prozac), 1992-2006. Across the whole of Scotland prescription of antidepressants rose over the course of the 1997 to 2005 period to include almost a tenth of the population regularly being dosed up (far more in parts of Glasgow). All this before the summer of 2007, the crash of 2008, and the gloom of 2009. Source: NHS (2007, Table 1.1, page 12). Measuring: Defined Daily Doses per 1,000 people aged 15+. Note: The National Health Service uses financial years when reporting on prescribing rates. Possibly because costs are still mainly counted in terms of money rather than human misery?

32. Young men are also particularly vulnerable Men dying per woman by age and birth cohort Cigarettes Failure Male/female mortality ratio by age in the rich world (1850–1999). Although higher rates of anxiety and depression are recorded for women than men, it is men who suffer the bulk of the excess premature mortality that now accompanies perceived economic failure and particularly age cohorts entering the labour market at the wrong time. Source: original figure given in Rigby and Dorling (2007), sample size 1 billion people. Note: Each line refers to the cohort born in the decade it is labelled by. The X axis gives ages. The Y axis gives how many more times a man of that age born in that decade is likely to die in a year as compared to a women living in the same set of countries born at the same time and of the same age.

42. This is a modified version from the original slideshow. To download the original version, please go to http://sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/presentations / An audio-enabled multimedia-version of this talk given at the Sheffield Humanist Society Meeting can be accessed here: http://sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/presentations/injustice/ Credits – Slides by Benjamin Hennig References Amin, S. (2004). “World poverty, pauperization & capital accumulation” Monthly Review 55(5). Atkinson, A.B. (2003). Top incomes in the United Kingdom over the twentieth century, Nuffield College Working Papers, Oxford (http://ideas.repec.org/p/nuf/esohwp/_043.html). Ball, S. J. (2008). The Education Debate. Bristol, Policy Press. (page 12). Bradshaw, J. and Finch, N. (2003). ‘Overlaps in dimensions of poverty’, Journal of Social Policy, vol. 32, no 4, pp 513-25. Brewer, M., Sibieta, L. and Wren-Lewis, L. (2008). Racing away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes, London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Costello, E.J., Erkanli, A. and Angold, A. (2006). ‘Is there an epidemic of child or adolescent depression?’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 47, no 12, pp 1263-71. Dorling, D. (2010). Injustice: Why social inequality persists, Bristol: Policy Press. Dorling, D. and Thomas, B. (2009). ‘Geographical inequalities in health over the last century’, in H. Graham (ed.) Health inequalities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 66-83. Foster, J.B. (2006b). ‘The household debt bubble’, Monthly Review, vol. 58, no 1 (www.monthlyreview.org/0506jbf.htm). Heinesen, E. and B. K. Graverseny (2005). "The Effect of School Resources on Educational Attainment: Evidence From Denmark." Bulletin of Economic Research 57(2): 109-143. (page 126). Irvin, G. (2008). Super Rich: The rise of inequality in Britain and the United States. Cambridge, Polity. (page 162). Horton, T. and Gregory, J. (2009). The Solidarity Society, London: Fabian Society (page 211). Kay, J. (2004 , 2nd edition). The Truth about Markets: why some nations are rich but most remain poor. London, Penguin. (page 258). Kelsey, J. (1997). The New Zealand Experiment: A world model for structural adjustment? Auckland, Auckland University Press. (page 256). Marston, G. (2007). presentation on “Welfare Fraud, Welfare Fiction”, Social Policy Unit, The University of Queensland: http://www.bsl.org.au/pdfs/Greg_Marston_Welfare_fraud&fiction_29Nov07_.pdf Mitchell, G. and Dorling, D. (2003). ‘An environmental justice analysis of British air quality’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 35, no 5, pp 909-29. NHS (2007). NHS quality improvement Scotland: Clinical indicators 2007, Glasgow: NHS Scotland. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2007). The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), OECD’s latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD OECD (2009). PISA 2006 Technical Report. Paris, Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's technical report on the latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds. (page 145). Rigby, J.E. and Dorling, D. (2007). ‘Mortality in relation to sex in the affluent world’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, vol.61, no 2, pp 159-64. Pearson, K. (1895). ‘Contributions to the mathematical theory of evolution – II. Skew variation in homogeneous material’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A, Mathematical, vol. 186, pp 343-414. Preston, R. (2008). Who runs Britain? How the super-rich are changing our lives. London, Hodder & Stoughton. (page 336). Wells, H. G., J. Huxley and G. P. Wells (1931). The Science of Life. London, Cassell and Company Limited. (page 822). Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London, Allen Lane. (chapter 8).