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“There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, joy, and of admiration” (John Ruskin, in Unto this Life)

To be wealthy is to have a vast amount of money, isn’t it? So isn’t wealth just money? No. Money has no value in itself, and it is only useful as a means to an end. Money is just a claim on those kinds of wealth that happen to be for sale.

‘Wealth’ refers to whatever enables us to live and to live well. Most prosaically it includes goods and services. Some of these are provided without payment – most domestic labour, for example, or the food gardeners grow for their own use. Even though we don’t pay money for them, their products are a form of wealth. We should include nature’s bounties too – from clean water and sunlight, to fertile soil and all the plants, fishes and animals that grow themselves, but which we can use, often with little effort. Our own bodies are a form of wealth; our health is our wealth. And wealth includes some non-economic things, like being loved, which of course can’t be bought. We shouldn’t dismiss Ruskin’s claim as merely poetic or fanciful.

Aristotle saw the pursuit of money as an end in itself as a form of madness.

Photo: Democracy Chronicles, Creative Commons

But what was an exception 2,300 years ago has become widely taken for granted today, for under capitalism, the pursuit of money profits has to be the goal for capitalists if they want to survive in competition with others; if they’re not successful in this they go out of business. Whatever they may say about wanting to put their customers first or wanting to bring their product to the world, they ignore this imperative at their peril. For the rest of us, money is of course necessary as a means to an end, for getting the goods and services that we need, but it’s easy to slip into treating the pursuit of money itself as our main goal.

So who are the wealth creators?

Realising this is essential if we are to explode the myth of wealth creation as the preserve of the rich.  Everyone who contributes to the production and distribution of goods and services – in a broad sense – whether for sale or not, is a wealth creator. If you’re teaching a child to read, or looking after an old person, you’re creating wealth – even though you may not get paid for it.

What about the rich, then? As any get-rich-quick book will tell you, the way to become rich is not merely – or even – to work hard, but to get control of assets that others need but lack, so that you can charge them for their use, thus providing you with unearned income. You can get a lot of money – claims on wealth produced by others – without creating much wealth yourself, if you control some key assets, including money itself. The way to become rich is to become a wealth extractor! 

With the winners of other academic awards at the British Academy, in shiny red tie . . .

Professor Peter Townsend (1928-2009) was the authority on poverty and inequality in the UK. He is best known for his 1200+page Poverty in the UK in which he developed and applied the concept of ‘relative deprivation’.

The Peter Townsend  Prize, worth £2,000, is awarded biennially and supported by Policy Press for outstanding work with policy relevance on a topic to which Townsend made a major contribution. It is awarded in commemoration of Professor Peter Townsend, one of the most distinguished global figures in contemporary social policy and sociology. As an international researcher and public intellectual, he made an immeasurable contribution to analysis and policy-making in the areas of poverty and inequality, health inequalities, disability and older people. He was a Fellow of the British Academy. This prize was established to honour his memory following his death in 2009. The Prize was first awarded in 2011. The winner is selected by a committee that is independent of Policy Press. (I do not know who was on the panel or who nominated my book.)

The prize was awarded at the British Academy awards ceremony on 29th September 2015.  I have donated the money to the Child Poverty Action Group.

Given Townsend’s reputation, it is truly an honour to receive this prize. Yet I was very surprised to get it. I would never have imagined a book with such a provocative title and one written in a non-academic style could win an academic award.

I was also surprised because until recently it seems that it was widely considered unnecessary to say much about the rich in considering inequality, and unacceptable to argue that wealth and poverty are interdependent. But as Townsend said in Poverty in the UK: “To comprehend and explain poverty is also to comprehend and explain riches.” (p. 337). I agree. The converse is also true.

Now, things are changing. Not only has there been Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21^st Century, but several organizations which normally support the rich have recently called for reduced inequality: the IMF, the OECD, the World Economic Forum (the Davos set, see p. 244-5 of my book). An then of course, there’s the Pope.

Townsend also called for the abolition of excessive wealth and excessive incomes (Poverty in the UK, p.926). In light of that astonishing statistic from Oxfam – that the 80 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population, all 3.5 billion of them – one can only agree.

‘If there is a class war – and there is – it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. … it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.’ (Maurice Cowling – British neoconservative in his Conservative Essays, 1978)

‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (Warren Buffett, estimated ‘worth’ $44billion, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, quoted in The New York Times, November 26, 2006.[i]

And the coalition government has been winning its covert class war against the poor, the unemployed, people on benefits, whether for reasons of disability, lack of jobs, or inadequate pay. The bedroom tax is merely the most obvious example – financially-pointless, mean-spirited and nasty, and irrational and cruel, given the shortage of small houses for rent or sale.

At the last election, the Conservatives got 50% of their funding from the financial sector. Predictably, the coalition government did its funders’ bidding and blamed the Labour Party for the global financial crisis, while protecting the financial sector from any serious reform, so it’s free to wreck the economy again at the public’s expense.

We live in a democracy in the shadow of plutocracy – the rule of the rich. 85% of our newspapers are owned by right-wing plutocrats and non-UK taxpayers, and their mouthpieces’ headlines give their game away everyday.

When politicians wring their hands over finding an extra £8 billion to fund the NHS, remember this: the combined wealth of the richest thousand people in the UK is £547 billion, up 5% on last year, which is more than 4 times the size of the cost of the NHS (£127 billion) last year. Which of these figures can’t we afford? (Sources: Sunday Times Rich List, and Office of National Statistics.)

We need proportional representation plus an assault on the media plutocrats.

Please bear this in mind tomorrow when you vote.

[i] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett In 2013, Buffett was ranked as the fourth richest person in the world by Forbes.

Photo: Luke Jones, Accretion Disc, Creative Commons

It was predictable. After years of austerity, falling real wages, and failing to cut the deficit, George Osborne had to find something to brag about in his pre-election budget: zero inflation was the answer! It’s never happened before – at least since consumer price inflation was first measured.

You might say it’s good because it means people’s incomes are retaining their value, instead of being whittled away by inflation. But it’s also bad news for debtors – such as mortgage holders and students with loans – and good news for creditors, as the value of debts doesn’t decline. So those who lend more than they borrow – overwhelmingly the well-off and especially the rich, will be better off than before, while the majority, who pay more in interest on debts than they receive on savings, will feel worse off, other things equal.

So far so good. But also off the point, because inflation is not zero. Here’s why.

On one of its web pages, the Office of National Statistics tells us that “The rate of inflation faced by households has fallen to its lowest level on record.”

But on another page it tells us this: UK house prices increased by 9.8% in the year to December 2014, down from 9.9% in the year to November 2014. And in more detail:

• House price annual inflation was 10.2% in England, 4.0% in Wales, 5.5% in Scotland and 4.9% in Northern Ireland.
• House prices continue to increase strongly across the majority of the UK, with prices in London again showing the highest growth.
• Annual house price increases in England were driven by an annual increase in London of 13.3% and to a lesser extent increases in the South East (11.5%) and the East (11.4%).
• Excluding London and the South East, UK house prices increased by 7.4% in the 12 months to December 2014.
• In December 2014, prices paid by first-time buyers were 9.5% higher on average than in December 2013. For owner-occupiers (existing owners), prices increased by 9.8% for the same period.
  

  Photo: Chris Breeze, Creative Commons

How come the glaring contradiction between these two lots of official data? It’s because large elements of consumer spending, especially housing costs – usually nearly a quarter of spending, are excluded from the bundle of goods used to estimate the Consumer Price Index (CPI). In the UK, a million working households – mainly young, single, living in the South-East  and in the poorest 20% of households – spend over half their net income on housing. (1) The CPI is not an adequate measure of the cost of living.

A few may worry about young first time buyers facing ever bigger difficulties getting on ‘the housing ladder’. Others reply that assuming that their parents have a house (a big assumption!) and it’s rising in value, they can ‘borrow from the bank of mum and dad’. (As if all young people were happy to be dependent on their parents! Q. What happened to those neoliberal ‘self-reliant individuals’? A: They’ve got helicopter parents. )

A good inflation hedge?

But there’s another twist. Look this topic up on the web and you’ll find lots on how a house can provide you with a pension if it rises in value, and you ‘trade down’ by moving to a cheaper area or smaller house. So housing is often seen as ‘a good inflation hedge’. Well it is, if you’re a house owner and can do this, and if you take a myopic, individualistic and selfish view of the matter. Asset inflation is not wealth creation: it merely shifts wealth from the asset poor to the asset rich. Where do the beneficiaries imagine their housing windfalls come from? They only have any value if there are goods and services they can buy with them, so when they exchange their windfall for these they are getting something for nothing. (2)

(1) Source: The Resolution Foundation has produced a graph on what they call ‘the housing pinched’ – people spending over half their net income on housing.

(2) In my book, I argue that your pensions shouldn’t depend primarily on your economic power in terms of your control of assets, but derive from democratically-regulated transfers between the generations: i.e they should be state pensions.

Photo: Jim Linwood, Creative Commons

Want to get thousands of pounds for nothing? It’s easy if you own property in the right places.

In one in five local authorities, houses in the UK have ‘earned’ more than their owners over the last two years. For them, unearned income has exceeded earned income. Predictably, almost all these places are in the South-east and London. Top of the list is the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, with average house prices rising nearly £200,000 in this period, while the median household earnings in the borough have been £56,698.[1] You may say the owners can only realise these gains if they sell their property, but they can also take advantage of them because higher prices mean more collateral for borrowing to buy more property. And of course most bank lending goes not to productive business for investing, but for buying existing property, particularly housing. Housing in upcoming areas of London is becoming improperty – property bought not for use, but as a source of unearned income – something for nothing – an object of speculative investment.

So what’s the problem? Well, as many noted, such rises in house prices make things all the more difficult for those trying to buy a house first time, and anyone wanting to move into the south from outside. This is true enough, and it is a further indication that young people can increasingly expect to have to rent their homes from private landlords instead of owning it.

Photo: Alan Cleaver, Creative Commons

But what the reports missed was the simple injustice of the property windfall as unearned income. Think about those capital gains – for some, the equivalent of a lifetime of free lunches. The only way you can get a free lunch is if someone else produces it for you. Those who gain an extra £200,000 in this way have a claim on £200,000 of goods and services that others produce, and without having to produce any goods and services that didn’t already exist in exchange. If there were nothing to buy with the windfalls, then they would be worthless. Clearly those producers – wherever they may be – have to produce that extra over and above what their own pay (earned income) can buy, to support the unearned income of the rentiers.

So yes, we should worry about first time buyers, but we shouldn’t miss the elephant in the room: unearned income and the rentier economy. The broadsheets, BBC’s Newsnight and the chattering classes love discussing house prices but they seem incapable of noticing this. Could it be because of the massive over-representation of the 1% in the media?

It’s not only unjust: it’s also dysfunctional for the economy, as it’s unproductive. At this time when we urgently need massive investment in the green economy to cut CO2 emissions, and in the construction of new social housing, most bank lending is going to fuelling yet another property bubble in existing housing. Over the last 40 years, debt related to property has risen as a percentage of GDP, and it’s not because people want to buy bigger and better houses but because supply hasn’t kept up with demand, causing land values and house prices to inflate. It’s the kind of inflation neoliberals secretly love, but they keep it hidden by excluding mortgage interest repayments and house prices from the inflation figures. As political economist Colin Hay said, they clearly thought ‘retail inflation bad, house price inflation good’. It’s good for property owners, but at other people’s expense. When politicians and uncritical commentators talk about ‘reviving the housing market’ they mean making sure house price inflation continues, not building more houses.

Diana Parkhouse, Creative Commons

Those who seek out such gains may think of themselves as smart, prudent ‘investors’, exactly the kind of people the economy needs, but they couldn’t be more wrong; they are living off others’ work and drawing investment away from productive uses.

George Osborne’s latest budget threatened £12 billion cuts to welfare, but at the same time his giveaways on property enlarge the private welfare state for the rich and comfortably off. ‘Help-to-buy ISAs’ for first-time buyers further fuels demand for housing without increasing the supply. Result?: more windfalls for existing owners.

When will we stop asset-based unearned income?

[1] This is one reason why the ratio of wealth to national income has risen from c.200% in 1940s to over 500% in 2010. An increasing proportion of what we produce is soaked up through the inflation of property values.

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Everyone may have heard of Bill Gates, the richest person in the world, but not many people know of the Koch Brothers, David and Charles, who have long been in the list of the ten richest people in the US, with a combined ‘net worth’ of over $100 billion in 2014. They own the second biggest company in the US, with business interests ranging from oil (including from tar sands) and gas, to building materials, chemicals, fertilizers and electrical connectors – mostly heavily polluting industries. They clearly have an interest in climate change denial.

The leading climate change denier in Senate, James Inhofe, was funded to the tune of half a million dollars over five years by fossil fuel energy companies, particularly Koch Industries. Obama is reported to have got $884,000 from oil and gas companies in the run-up to the 2008 election. The Koch brothers also fund the lunatic fringe of the Republicans, the Tea Party. Amidst all the noise of the last US election, candidates were eerily silent about climate change. The Kochs are among the funders of the ‘State Policy Network’ – an $83 million network of right wing think tanks across every US state. Now a coalition centred on the brothers is planning to throw $889 million at the 2016 elections. This is plutocracy at its most brazen.

Matching or even outdoing the Koch brothers is Donors Trust – a US right wing organization that helps the rich avoid tax by making charitable gifts. (You may think that’s the wrong way round: shouldn’t charitable giving be an end in itself, not a means for avoiding tax? Well, this is how they put it themselves: “You just received a bonus, inheritance, or trust fund distribution. You need to give to charity to reduce your tax burden but don’t have time right now to figure out where and how much. Open an account at DonorsTrust, immediately receive your full tax deduction, and disburse charitable gifts at your leisure.”) Climate change denial is one of their funders’ most popular causes.

Photo: A Siegel, Creative Commons

In the UK, Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been an energetic denier of anthropogenic climate change, through his Global Warming Policy Foundation. Lawson has refused to name his funders, but they include supporters of the neoliberal thinktank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (itself funded partly by oil and tobacco companies), which also supports climate change denial. Matt Ridley, son of Thatcher’s henchman Nicholas Ridley, and former boss of Northern Rock, whose family estate in Northumberland has a coal mine on it that will generate an estimated £4.1 million every year until 2020, has also joined the deniers. Surprise, surprise.

Philip Mirowski has researched neoliberal think tanks, and argues that – contrary to appearances – neoliberals actually have a strategy for dealing with climate change. It has 3 parts:

First, deny climate change;

Second, advocate carbon markets, in which permissions to emit CO2 can be traded;

Third, invest in ‘geoengineering’ to weaken and reverse global warming and its effects. This might include cloud seeding, adding chemicals to the ocean to stimulate CO2 absorption, or capturing CO2 and storing it underground, putting mirrors in space to reflect back sunlight, and so on.

Photo: John Morgan, Creative Commons

This may indeed be the strategy, but as Mirowski points out, it’s madness. Each element of is flawed, though the first two are straightforward bits of deceit. The neoliberals know damn well that global warming is happening and that it’s the result of over two centuries of fossil-fuel burning. But in order to buy time, they deny its existence or say it’s nothing to do with human action, just as tobacco companies knew that smoking was a health hazard and yet denied it so they could continue to profit from it. And attacking scientists, especially where they come up with inconvenient truths, is always a good populist ploy.

Second, they advocate carbon markets because they know they don’t work. The idea is that the government sells permissions to businesses to emit carbon. Those involved in sectors that can reduce their emissions will profit from doing so because they can sell some of their permissions to others who can’t or won’t. By progressively restricting the total number of permissions the government can reduce emissions, and do so in a way that is responsive to the different needs of different businesses. But the business sector can easily prevent it reducing emissions: aside from the sheer political might of major energy companies, they also hold much of the technical information that the regulator needs in order to run the system, so they can protect themselves, and even make profit out of it, especially by constructing derivatives related to the carbon price – another financialization opportunity. Not surprisingly, experiments with such markets in Europe, the US and New Zealand to restrict emissions have failed miserably. But they appeal to mainstream economists, trained to think in terms of economic models rather than real political economic processes, and they are a good way of buying more time for capitalism.

Third, there’s the long-term neoliberal solution of geo-engineering. Technological optimists will always say the history of capitalism has been one of unpredicted inventions and innovations, some of them, like the internet, of vast consequence; so don’t worry, something will turn up. The dangers of creating unwanted side effects by meddling with highly complex and interdependent systems of climate and the ecology, including the chemistry and life of the oceans are huge. Nevertheless, having learnt nothing from over two centuries of imagining we can always dominate nature, there are research projects in progress on geo-engineering, and a feverish scramble for patents on technologies; the profit has to be the main thing, of course. The neoliberal dream is a world whose population is held to ransom by a few geoengineering companies that control the climate.

Some of the projects are funded by billionaires, such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Branson, self-publicist and head of the Virgin group of companies, was reported to have

Photo: D@LY3D, Creative Commons

said “If we could come up with a geo-engineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen [the Climate Change Conference of 2009] wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars”. (Branson, appropriately enough, lives on an island in the Virgin Islands, avoiding UK taxes.) So banking on geo-engineering also encourages complacency about our current fossil-fuel addicted economies and lifestyles. Branson’s imagined world is a bizarre one in which one part of capitalism freely burns still more carbon while another part mitigates its effects, both of them regulated by profit.

Many of the rich are banking on continued fossil fuel extraction – not only by investing in it, but through their dependence on unsustainable growth. As I argue in my book, if we are going to stop global warming we have to take back control of our economies from the rich. And as Naomi Klein notes, the rich also know this, and that’s why people like Nigel Lawson – who says ‘green is the new red’ – are so keen to deny climate change.

Other links on climate change deniers:

http://www.campaigncc.org/climate_change/sceptics/hall_of_shame

http://www.bravenewfilms.org/koch2014

http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/files/article/funding_climate_deniers.pdf

Picture this: You’re in deep financial trouble, so you ask a comfortably-off friend if they can lend you £1000 for a while. They say yes, but the loan will be at 5% interest, compound, and if you haven’t paid it off by a certain date, they will take possession of enough of your stuff to compensate them. That would be the end of the friendship. It would be glaringly obvious that your so-called friend was not helping you but taking advantage of your weakness. It’s one thing to pay back the £1000, quite another to pay any more than that. (You might buy them a little present or give them a treat when you’d done so, just to show you appreciated their help, but if you simply gave them some extra money, that would embarrass any true friend.)

Lending at interest, especially high rates of interest, is properly called ‘usury’. Usury refers to a relationship between strong and weak, in which the strong (the lender) expects not just repayment of a loan, but interest on top of it. Usury has been around for millennia, and reviled for allowing the rich to free-ride on the labour of others; at various times it’s been banned by some religions, mainly for this reason. The story of the borrower getting deeper in debt, having to work for the lender, or give up their property, or being thrown in a debtors’ prison is an old one, but modern usury operates in more impersonal but no less exploitative forms. The usurer benefits from the borrower remaining in debt, as long as they keep paying them interest. The net flow of money is from borrower to lender, not the reverse. In these circumstances, it’s the lender not the borrower, who gets the free-ride.

So it’s strange how we are told that debtors should repay their debts as if that were only fair. It is if it’s just a matter of returning the principal (plus administration costs and interest to cover inflation), then OK, but anything above that is unearned income for the lender. Even then, we need to check to see if the pre-existing situation under which the borrower came to seek the loan was fair, or if the creditor was helping or hindering them in becoming more economically sustainable.

Modern usurers and their apologists defend interest charges as compensation for taking a

Photo: Alopoudis Dimitris, Creative Commons

risk, but as we see in the Greek debt crisis, when the risk turns bad, the lenders can’t stomach taking a loss, and try to push the risk onto the debtor, or onto the public, as in the case of bank bailouts. And they usually have the political clout to do so. If interest is a payment for risk, then either the lender shares in that risk or it is money for nothing. For the lenders, these debts are ‘assets’ – sources of future income – and many have banked on getting the payments.(1) So the lenders are being bailed out. 92% of the €252 billion from the Troika (IMF, ECB and EU) that Greece received went to bailing out private lenders; only the remainder went to the Greek people. Sure, earlier Greek governments ‘agreed’ to the contracts, but they did so over the heads of the Greek people, and increasingly they have to negotiate under duress. Usury is precisely a relationship between unequals in which the borrower has fewer options than the lender.

The usurers don’t just want their loans and interest repaid, they want the borrowers’ property, and the debt is a useful stick to beat them with to get it. In classic neoliberal style, they demand privatizations – sell-offs of key state assets, particularly those that can provide rent for the owner. Before Syriza took power and stopped it, a body called the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund was busy selling off Greek assets from resorts, ports, marinas, golf courses, regional airports, government buildings (sale and leaseback), to rail transport, water supply, roads and energy. As it says on its website: “Privatisation is not seen as a mere sale of assets; rather, it is the key element in re-establishing credibility, itself the basic pre-requisite for Greece’s return to global capital markets.” The programme was set up as a condition of Greece’s earlier €245billion bailout.[2]

The other part of the usurers’ medicine – austerity – is not even in their own interest for cuts in income just depress spending and hence what businesses can sell, and the country’s ability to repay debts. Over 50+% of young people in Greece are unemployed. How can you make an economy viable by making its most valuable assets unproductive?[3] Austerity has shrunk the Greek economy by more than 20% since 2010 so its debts have become relatively larger, from 133% of GDP in 2010 to 174% in 2014.

A history lesson from Germany that it wants to forget

After the First World War, Germany was made to pay reparations of $33 billion – a burden which triggered hyperinflation and economic misery for many ordinary German households. At first the US intervened to stagger the payments and provide loans, but after the 1929 crash, it demanded full repayment of the loans. The result was economic decline and unemployment of 6million – fertile ground for the rise of Nazism. After World War Two, the cancellation of debts and the US’s provision of aid under the Marshall Plan enabled Germany’s economic recovery. Greece was one of the countries that took part in that debt cancellation. But of course, now, the roles have been reversed, and Germany will not consider acting similarly vis-à-vis Greece. (Greece’s own Nazi party, Golden Dawn, would benefit from more immiseration by the German-dominated Troika of the EU, European Central Bank, and IMF . . .)

[1] As in Spain, many of the loans were made recklessly before the crash by private banks in and outside Greece, against property, inflating property bubbles.

[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-open-to-selling-all-its-major-ports-1402070040 – see the wonderfully sarcastic comment from Basil Coukis, recommending selling off the Acropolis so it can be turned into a theme park.

[3] Much has been made of failures of Greece’s past governments to enforce taxes on the rich and the upper middle classes. This problem is not limited to Greece: As the HSBC scandal shows, Britain’s own government is in favour of such non-enforcement where the rich are concerned.

Photo: twintiger007, Creative Commons

Does being born into a rich family benefit you? Clearly it does. You inherit not merely money but ‘social capital’ – lots of connections in high places that will benefit you relative to others who lack them. You also inherit ‘cultural capital’ – an easy familiarity with the cultural goods and ways of speaking that play well with the rich and powerful: art (Renoir or abstract, not Jack Veltriano), music (cello or oboe, not banjo or bass guitar), elite sports (polo, lacrosse or tennis, not skateboarding or football), literature (Austen, not Dan Brown). You will probably have lots of holidays abroad, and hang out with rich people in other countries, and think of yourself as ‘well-travelled’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and see the world as your oyster. People will say you are ‘well-spoken’, ‘from a good family’ – euphemisms for posh – and defer to you. None of this has anything to do with merit, but you’ll probably be able to convert your inherited (i.e. unmerited) economic and cultural capital into the merited form of educational capital – qualifications, degrees.[1] And it will be easier for you to get these because in posh schools and universities and other ‘high places’ you will be a fish-in-water, already speaking their language.

Does being born into a rich family benefit your character? Probably not. Those who inherit a position of dominance are likely to overlook the fact that inheritance has nothing to do with merit or what we need or deserve. As C. Wright Mills said, “People with advantages are loath to believe they just happen to be people with advantages.”[2] You are unlikely to have much idea of what life is like for people who are born into disadvantaged positions. You might imagine that if you’d been born into a poor family, you would have fought your way up and out, but that’s a delusion, because you would have been a different person from the one you know. We are all substantially shaped by the position and circumstances that the lottery of birth in an unequal society gives us. Even motivation and aspirations are affected. Yes, we have some power to make a difference, but we don’t get to choose our parents or our environment in our most formative years.

If your family are in a position of power, able to make decisions that affect many others, and to give orders, then expecting others to defer to you, and assuming that you know best are hard to avoid given such an upbringing.[3] But the coupling of such a sense of entitlement with ignorance of what life is like for other less fortunate people breeds arrogance. None of this is inevitable in every case: some rich parents may strive to combat such arrogance. But it is probable, and common.

Photo: Matt Price, Creative Commons

You might say, what’s wrong with parents wanting the best for their children, and hence wanting to pass on any advantages they have? The answer is nothing. What is wrong is the arbitrary inequality in the distribution of advantages that can be passed on. The rich are in the strongest position to take advantage of the unequal opportunities that confront us.

Upper class child neglect

But that there’s one source of advantage which many of the rich pursue that both benefits and harms their children. If you get sent to boarding school – a strange practice of child neglect found in the British upper and upper middle classes – it will probably give you more power in terms of social and cultural capital, and offer the benefits of small class sizes in school and lavish resources, but the chances are it will damage your character, and in ways that damage others too.

Nick Duffell went to boarding school, and felt damaged by the experience. He went on to

become a psycho-therapist, and specialized in treating others similarly damaged by the experience. He’s written an important book about it – Wounded Leaders – following his TV documentary on the same subject called The Making of Them. Those who are sent away to school, especially at an early age, are deprived of the safe space of acceptance and unconditional love that families, at least good enough ones, can provide – a space where vulnerability does not have to be hidden or defended. They quickly learn that if they are to avoid bullying and ridicule they must present an appearance of absolute invulnerability, and use attack as the best form of defence. They develop what Duffell calls a ‘strategic survival personality’. This may include “a seamlessly smooth duplicity, an apparent unshakeable faith in his own ego, a tendency to bully when he feels cornered and a barely concealed contempt for being told what is what by women and foreigners . . .”[4]

Photo: artofthestate, Creative Commons

As an illustration, Duffell refers us to Prime Minister’s Questions, that awful weekly spectacle that appals viewers of British television news, in which the antagonists go for the withering put-down and the knock out punch. This is where Etonian David Cameron infamously told Anna Eagle, a member of the opposition, to ‘Calm down, dear, calm down. Calm down and listen to the doctor!’ Cameron was sent to boarding school at the age of 7.

The vulnerability and emotions that they fear in themselves are projected onto others. Many find that in later life that they struggle to form intimate relationships because they cannot accept, hold and love their partners’ vulnerability, neediness and emotions. Hence their need for therapy. But it also means they lack the emotional intelligence required for the jobs that they get, including in high political office. “Only 7% of members of the public attended a private school. But 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior officers in the armed forces, 55% of permanent secretaries in Whitehall, 53% of senior diplomats, 50% of members of the House of Lords and 45% of public body chairs did so.”

Boarding schools seek to build a particular version of masculinity. According to Duffell this applies to girls’ boarding schools too – forms of masculinity can be learned by women: they are not tied to biological sex. It was this upper class model of masculinity that dominated much of British literature and culture in the 20^th Century, and it trickled down

Photo: Creative Commons

to the middle classes, saturating much of what I read and learned about as a state school kid in the 1950s and 60s, from comics to war stories to ‘great man’ narratives in history. Rudyard Kipling’s awful poem ‘If’ represents it well; to become a man, a boy has to repress his emotions and assert his superiority over others who are to be regarded as fools at the mercy of dangerous irrational passions. This training would ‘armour’ him when he went out to the colonies, and enable him to subordinate his class and ethnic inferiors.

Some of the 1% see the character defects encouraged by public (i.e. private) boarding schools as virtues. Anthony Seldon, Headmaster of Wellington (public) School and co-founder of the neoliberal Institute of Economic Affairs, recommends the practice known at Eton as “’oiling’, which is learning how to win friends and influence others, and how to clamber over them to get what you want. It’s a mixture of ambition, self-confidence and bloody-mindedness . . . ” Seldon acknowledges that this will “nauseate many on the left” [and many others, surely?] and that for many the obsession with character is a “rightwing obsession, redolent of empire and all that is wrong with the class system.”[5] (I couldn’t have put it better myself.) But he is not discouraged in his desire to make a virtue out of a vice, arguing that oiling and the like are necessary for survival in a war of all against all, so the 93% who go to state schools better get over their moral scruples and get used to it, and also acquire the arch confidence that he admires in the public schooled. Though it sounds like self-parody of upper class overconfidence and the arrogance of ignorance, this was not an April 1^st article. He was serious.

Combating and undermining the rule of the rich is not only a matter of challenging their domination of politics and economics. It’s also about challenging their idea of ‘character’, their behaviour, and their model of masculinity.

[1] P. Bourdieu, P. and J-P. Passeron, . (1990) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Sage

[2] C. Wright Mills, 1956 [2000] The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, p.14.

[3] See A. Sayer (2005) The Moral Significance of Class, Cambridge University Press, and A. Lareau (2003) Unequal Childhoods, University of California Press

[4] Duffell, Wounded Leaders, pp.46-7

[5] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/public-schools-toby-young

Photo: Byzantine_K, Creative Commons

‘The something-for-nothing culture’ is a phrase used by the Right to bash those who live in areas with job shortages, or whose pay does not lift them out of poverty, or who have disabilities and who claim benefits to which they’re legally entitled. It’s a favourite of Iain Duncan-Smith’s – he of the Universal Credit shambles and the bedroom tax. Slandering the poor goes down well not only at Tory Party conferences, but also in newspapers owned by super-rich press barons – i.e. most papers – and, judging by continuing support for the Conservatives, by many of their readers.

It’s a bit rich, not simply because the phrase generally comes out of the mouths of a privileged minority who ooze entitlement from every pore, but because, starting with Margaret Thatcher, neoliberal governments (Tory, New Labour and Condem) have created a something-for-nothing culture of their own for the better off and especially for the rich.

While she preached against inflation, Thatcher’s deregulation of The City fuelled inflation in share and property values, benefitting the better off. Freeing up credit for buying houses inflated their price, as did restricting the creation of new social housing. An increase in the price of assets like houses may make their owners better off on paper in terms of financial wealth – potential claims on goods and services others have produced for sale, but it does not reflect any additional wealth creation, so ultimately the increase must come at the expense of others, including those unable to afford to buy such assets. Sometimes house-owners who benefit from such gains feel a bit guilty about it – quite rightly – though many seem to think it’s a reward for some kind of contribution they’ve made, or a mark of respectability, and hence OK. But it’s something-for-nothing.

As Shelter, the UK charity for the homeless, put it: “If food prices had risen at the same rate as house prices over the last 40 years, a chicken would cost £51.18. Four pints of milk would be £10.45, and a loaf of bread would set you back £4.36. We wouldn’t accept this with food. So why accept it with housing? Unless something changes, a generation will struggle to afford a home of their own.”

And that’s exactly what’s happening. London’s housing market is the most extreme example of the neoliberal something-for-nothing culture. The rich and super-rich are buying up properties merely as financial investments – not to live in and use, but to rent out to others and to enjoy the windfalls in capital gains. Hence it’s improperty.

Similarly with shares: over the last 30 years share prices have risen, not because of economic growth but simply because demand for shares grew with the rise of big institutional ‘investors’, driven by increasing numbers of people taking out private pensions and financial ‘investments’, while the supply of shares was fairly static. Rising share prices in turn drew in more buyers, seeking to enjoy these gains, which only pushed the prices still higher. Buying existing shares in a company just transfers money to those who previously held them; it need not result in any real investment by the company, so shareholders’ dividends and speculative gains were something-for-nothing. Likewise with the privatization of public utilities. Those people who bought the new shares and sold them off to big companies got windfalls. In the process they put public utilities beyond effective public control and handed them over to private companies who took advantage of the monopoly power they afforded and soaked customers.

Photo: Byzantine_K, Creative Commons

Then there was the great hand-out to the rich in the form of tax cuts and letting tax dodging rip. Thatcher cut the top rate of income tax wfrom 83% to 60%, and increased VAT, which relatively has a bigger impact on low incomes, from 8% to 15%. But that’s not all. Corporation tax has been cut from 52% in 1980 to 21% now. ‘Business-friendly’ means ‘business-compliant’: willing to give business whatever free-ride it wants – or is prepared to pay for in party funding. Remember, at the last election, the Conservative Party got 50% of its funding from the financial sector. Among the important policy changes won by finance lobbyists in Whitehall and Westminster in 2012 were:

• The slashing of UK corporation tax and taxes on banks’ overseas branches, after a lobbying barrage by the City of London Corporation, the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) and the Association of British Insurers. The reform will save the finance industry billions.
• The neutering of a national not-for-profit pension scheme launching in October that was supposed to benefit millions of low paid and temporary workers.
• The killing of government plans for a new corporate super-watchdog to police quoted companies.

UK tax expert Richard Murphy estimates tax avoidance (not illegal[1]) at £25billion and tax evasion (illegal) at £70 billion, or combined £260 million per day; that’s 260 times estimated benefit fraud. Many major multinationals each employ hundreds of lawyers and accountants to work out ever more ingenious ways of avoiding tax. Yet in 2009, the UK’s tax authority, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), employed only 600 workers to check the affairs of 700 companies, and only about 100 of those dealt with tax avoidance. In 2011, its budget was cut by £3 billion. But then, back in 2005, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had obsequiously reassured the Confederation of British Industry that the government would apply ‘not just a light touch, but a limited touch’ to financial regulation, and to tax too. He went to reassure his audience that he rejected the old assumption that business, unregulated, will invariably act irresponsibly. [Was he just remarkably gullible or bought off?] HMRC were then making job cuts of 25,000. This was completely false economy, for in 2008 its so-called ‘large business service recovered 92 times its costs’, while ‘the “special investigations section” fighting the most complex avoidance cases had yielded 450 times its costs.’

Photo: Mariscat, Creative Commons

We’ve seen this kind of thing before:

“Where the labourers and artisans are accustomed to work for low wages, and to retain but a small part of the fruits of their labour, it is difficult for them, even in a free government, to better their condition, or conspire among themselves to heighten their wages. But even where they are accustomed to a more plentiful way of life, it is easy for the rich, in an arbitrary government, to conspire against them, and throw the whole burthen of the taxes on their shoulders.”

(David Hume, 1752)

It’s time to throw the ‘something-for-nothing’ tag back at the Tories and their funders and supporters.

[1] To say it’s not illegal, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s legal: it includes avoidance schemes that haven’t yet been assessed in a court of law. (See my book, chapter 16).

Photo: Christian Guthier, net_efekt, Creative Commons

Turn to the back of most newspapers, at least the broadsheets, and you’ll come across the money pages – ‘your money and you’, etc.: how to get the best deal on energy suppliers, what to do with that inheritance, how to get on the property ladder, tips on buy-to-let, where ‘the smart money’ is going.

Here the economy appears as a game, full of risks and opportunities, that can be played safely, if only you are smart enough, or get the right advice. Some may see the money pages as a source of advice on how to be prudent and provide some security; others as how to make money and get rich.

But while the advice may seem sensible and what any smart person would heed, the implicit model of the economy is not ‘smart’ but actually a stupid and short-sighted one.

Money only has value if there are things on sale that it can buy. Those goods and services have to be produced. The money pages take the standpoint of the reader as a holder of money, and recommends actions that are likely to benefit them – either saving them money or making them additional money – regardless of whether they provide anything useful in return or do something that benefits others and the economy. On this view, economies are just the sum of individual choices. They promote a wholly self-interested view of economic life. Things are bought and sold, but without any consideration of who produces it, and what they get in return, or of any bad consequences for others.

Photo: Alan Cleaver, Creative Commons

The financial columns and websties appear to be for everyone, but what you can do with your money depends on how much you have, and many of the opportunities are simply beyond the pockets of many readers. What’s more, many offer ways of making money at the expense of other people.

Most people get money by working, but what’s distinctive about the money pages is that they deal with how to get more money without doing extra work, through so-called ‘investments’. These are assets that provide the holder with unearned income – that is, an income that doesn’t depend on providing a service of some sort in return. ‘Invest’ in buy-to-let housing and you’ll get money from rent and probably capital gains on the property too: any payment you receive that covers more than construction and maintenance costs is something for nothing.  (This is the something-for-nothing culture that we need to counteract!) Buy an ISA (Individual Savings Account) and the money will be ‘invested’ in stocks and bonds and other securities, and will yield you an income. Unless the shares or bonds are newly issued, then your money goes not to the firm but to the previous owners. (Even in the former case, the money need not be used for any productive investment: for example, it may just be used to raise funds to takeover another company – a mere change of ownership.) Only if your investment funds  improvements in the production of goods and services or of public wellbeing is it doing anything productive, and only then is the return something-for-something, as your action enabled that development. Otherwise it’s just a matter of buying a stream of unearned income or betting on the future value of things.

At this stage in the discussion someone usually pipes up with Adam Smith’s famous argument that in markets, it’s in the self-interest of sellers to give buyers what they want, because they’ll lose custom to competitors if they don’t. So, it’s best for everyone if each person follows their self-interest! Here’s the key sentence, the only one from Smith that some economists seem to know, or think they need to know.

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.” (Wealth of Nations, Bk I, ch.II)

It’s clear from the passage preceding this quote that he did not rule out benevolence altogether as a motive in economic matters, and it’s clear from his life work that he valued public spiritedness: “The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular or society.”(1) True, there are circumstances where the pursuit of self-interest in competititive markets does indeed encourage behaviour which benefits consumers. But it’s a huge jump from Smith’s tiny 18th century businesses to today’s Walmarts, Goldman Sachs and Microsofts. And Smith’s examples were businesses that produced goods, rather than operated in financial markets (e.g. for loans). And he was not talking about renting out property; let’s remember it was Smith who said of landlords that they love to reap where they have not sown (2); he was under no illusion that the pursuit of self-interest by landlords benefitted anyone else, least of all the tenants.

In markets, people generally do pursue their self-interest, partly because even if they wanted to know the social and environmental costs of their actions for others it would be difficult to get the information. But just because people follow their self-interest it doesn’t follow they have equal power to get what they want. The asset rich (bankers, landlords,  capitalists) can get what they want at the expense of the asset poor (borrowers, tenants,  employees). Nevertheless the butcher-baker-brewer quote has been used to whitewash anything and everything involving markets.

Particularly in the face of global warming, we cannot afford to perpetuate this myopic pursuit of self-interest, with no regard for the consequences for others and the planet. True, we need some markets, because there are lots of things whose production and distribution cannot be centrally planned; but you can have markets without minority private ownership of land and control of banks, and workers can have co-ownership of their market enterprises. But in addition economies need to be regulated to stop high carbon production and energy use, if we are not to give the next generation a frighteningly inhospitable planet. Only then would our economy be ‘smart’.

(1) Smith, A. (1759) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty Press, pt VI, sec ii, ch 3.1, p 235 (6th and final edition published in 1790, a year after the 5th and final

edition of The Wealth of Nations).

(2) (1776) The Wealth of Nations, Bk I ch.V