{"id":160,"date":"2019-12-03T13:52:03","date_gmt":"2019-12-03T13:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/?p=160"},"modified":"2020-03-19T07:13:38","modified_gmt":"2020-03-19T07:13:38","slug":"why-no-talk-of-an-inequality-emergency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/2019\/12\/03\/why-no-talk-of-an-inequality-emergency\/","title":{"rendered":"Why no talk of an inequality emergency?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We hear\nmuch talk now of a climate\nemergency<\/a>.  As I was revising a talk\nI give frequently on \u2018global health in an unequal world\u2019, I realised that there\nis no talk of an inequality emergency, either globally or close to home,\nalthough the same\nmacroeconomic trends<\/a> and political choices driving increased inequality\nwithin national borders and on a variety of smaller scales are often involved\nwherever on the map one happens to look. \n(On these inequalities at metropolitan scale, I cannot recommend too\nhighly photographer Johnny Miller\u2019s compelling\naerial images<\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is\nthere no talk of such an emergency?  Many\nmanifestations of climate change occur on a scale that makes them fodder for\nour spectacle-hungry visual media: think Californian and Australian wildfires;\ncollapsing glaciers; and catastrophic damage from hurricanes and floods.  The casualties of inequality tend to be\nsmaller in scale and less visible: the lives ended sooner and more painfully\nthan they should have been because of the accumulated damage done by relying\non food banks<\/a> and fearing\nthe \u2018brown envelope\u2019<\/a> that initiates the vicious privatised process of\nfitness-for-work assessments here in the UK, or the estimated 300,000\nwomen per year<\/a> who die in pregnancy or childbirth from causes that are\nroutinely avoided in the high-income world. \n Academically, it may be effective\nto compare the annual toll from death in pregnancy and childbirth to the crash\nof two or three airliners every day of the year, as a colleague and I have\ndone, but such comparisons have little salience in the broader, media-corrupted\nworld of political priorities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Relatively\nvast resources have been devoted to climate science \u2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a> is\nthe world\u2019s largest-ever scientific collaboration – and climate researchers  long ago realised that just generating more\nevidence was never going to be enough to generate the change needed.   So many became advocates, for example tracing 63\npercent<\/a> of cumulative worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide and methane between\n1751 and 2010 to just 90 massive state- and investor-owned corporations (and\ntheir customers, of course).  More\nrecently, another group of\nauthors<\/a> (supported by more than 11,000 signatories) argued that \u2018Scientists\nhave a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat\u2019.  Researchers on health inequalities, in\nparticular, have generally been more circumspect.  In the UK, advocacy that looks far enough\n\u2018upstream\u2019 at the economic and political substrates of health inequalities \u2013\nmore on that point later \u2013 is unlikely to be acceptable to agencies of the\ncapitalist state and the trustees of billionaires\u2019 fortunes whose funding\npriorities shape the direction of academic research and the career paths of\nacademics.  And the health inequalities\nof greatest concern, by definition, do not affect \u2018all of us\u2019.  Whether the consequences of climate change\nwill genuinely do so is too complex a question to be investigated here, but the\nquestion is well worth asking<\/a>. \nCertainly, its effects will be felt first and worst by those least\nimplicated in its origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another\nissue is the decades-long rhetorical and ideological Thatcherite drumbeat that\n\u2018there is no alternative\u2019 to rising inequality and the policies that drive\nit.  This problem is particularly acute\nwith regard to the austerity that has been thoroughly discredited in terms of\nthe macroeconomic objectives of sustaining growth that it was supposed to\nachieve, whether in the era of World Bank and IMF-mandated structural\nadjustment or, more recently, in post-2010 responses to the financial crisis.  As Nobel prize-winning economist Paul\nKrugman commented<\/a> in the run-up to the 2015 UK election: \u2018All of the\neconomic research that allegedly supported the austerity push has been\ndiscredited. On the other side of the ledger, the benefits of improved\nconfidence failed to make their promised appearance. Since the global turn to\nausterity in 2010, every country that introduced significant austerity has seen\nits economy suffer, with the depth of the suffering closely related to the\nharshness of the austerity\u2019.  Post-2015,\nof course, austerity in the UK became harsher still, demonstrably\nredistributing income and resources upward\n<\/em>within British society, through both tax\nand benefit \u2018reforms\u2019<\/a> and savagely destructive cuts to local\nauthority budgets<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, austerity has become normalised; it is part of the\nquotidian policy landscape to the extent that we are almost no longer capable\nof rage when the strutting, glossy Home Secretary straightfacedly\nclaims<\/a> that poverty is not the government\u2019s problem, when the evidence is\noverwhelming that post-2010 public policy has systematically and premeditatedly\nmade the problem worse.  Despite the best\nefforts of the fossil fuel industry, we can imagine a decarbonised economy,\neven though we may not be able to specify its details.  Too many of us now have difficulty imagining\neconomic systems that do not operate as what Serge Halimi, the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique<\/em>, has called\nan \u2018inequality machine\u2019<\/a>.  A\npowerful antidote to this well-funded<\/a>\nintellectual cauterisation is the United Nations Conference on Trade and\nDevelopment\u2019s 2017 blueprint for a\nglobal new deal<\/a>.  How many global\nhealth researchers have read it, I wonder? \nHow many medical or MPH students have been asked to do so? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to the view looking upstream.  Failure to understand and declare an\ninequality emergency reflects the success of neoliberalism or \u2018market\nfundamentalism\u2019 as a global class project\n<\/em>of restoring inequality and the privileges of the rich to the levels that\nprevailed before what has been called the \u2018great compression\u2019 that reduced\ninequality after World War II in much of the high-income world, and inspired\negalitarian visions far outside it.  The\nevidence on this point can\u2019t even be summarised here \u2013 I am glad to provide key\nsources – but in the context of the work that academics do, two decades of marketisation\nin British universities must be understood as part of the project.  Centrally funded institutions that served a\npublic educational and scholarly purpose were dismantled, replaced by corporate-style\nenterprises organised around generating income from deep-pocketed funders and\nindebted students, with careers often ended by failure to put out salable\nproducts.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isn\u2019t this a form of conspiracy theory, you ask?  Empirically, the best rejoinders come from the work of journalists like Jane Mayer<\/a> and historians like Stefan Collini<\/a> and Nancy MacLean<\/a>.  Conceptually, an especially apposite riposte comes from the brilliant legal historian Douglas Hay, who established himself in the field with the research that underpinned the following conclusion: \u2018The private manipulation of the law by the wealthy and powerful\u2019 in eighteenth-century England \u2018was in truth a ruling-class conspiracy, in the most exact meaning of the word. \u2026. The legal definition of conspiracy does not require explicit agreement; those party to it need not even all know one another, provided they are working together for the same ends.  In this case, the common assumptions of the conspirators lay so deep that they were never questioned, and rarely made explicit\u2019 (1).  Enough said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(1)  Hay, D.  Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law. In\nD. Hay et al., Albion\u2019s Fatal Tree: Crime\nand Society in Eighteenth-Century England<\/em> (pp. 17-64). New York: Pantheon,\n1975,  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We hear much talk now of a climate emergency.  As I was revising a talk I give frequently on \u2018global health in an unequal world\u2019, I realised that there is no talk of an inequality emergency, either globally or close … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1834,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,15,40],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-austerity","tag-health-equity","tag-inequality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}