Unfair Shares (2011)

Book Review from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists. By Daniel Dorling. Polity Press £19.99.

The sub-title is the more important, as this is really about inequality, what it involves and why it continues to exist. On the one hand there is a small group of amazingly wealthy people, who have acquired their riches through inheritance, profit and interest. These super-rich cluster in enclaves, in particular regions, cities and streets (e.g. near Hyde Park in London). One way in which this elite is maintained is by careful selection of marriage partners: if you’re a member of this group and marry someone else from it (it’s called homogamy), you and your spouse are likely to remain in that upper part of society.

At the other pole is a group, the worst-off part of the working class, who are effectively destitute. One child in five in London has no annual holiday because their parents cannot afford one. A fifth of the population of Britain find it difficult or very difficult to get by on their incomes. People with depression or chronic anxiety are found in one-third of British families, as inequality increases and despair grows among the worst-off.

At the heart of this destitution is not primarily joblessness or old age, as was once the case, but debt. In a modern form of indenture, people are forced to borrow, not in order to live in luxury, but in order to simply keep going. The number of people taking out expensive ‘payday loans’ to get them through to the end of the month more than doubled in 2007-8. In 2005, members of an average household in the US owed 127 percent of their annual income in outstanding debt. A quarter of the ‘young elderly’ in the US, aged 65–69, have to work in order to get by.

This inequality extends of course to educational provision and the creation of and response to crime. The US now has ten times as many in prison as in 1940, and 70 percent of the two million prisoners are black: ‘their biggest mistake is not their crime, but having been born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, in the wrong place, in the wrong country’. The American dream remains an impossible fantasy for nearly everyone.

Apparently at least half of the US economy is devoted purely to ‘transactional purposes’, not designing or making beans but counting them. Dorling is aware that such nonsense as stocktaking and barcode scanning could be dispensed with ‘in a society where consumers and producers work much closer to (and more closely with) each other’. It will take more than that, but in socialism we could get rid not just of credit cards and tills but of the rich and poor too.

Paul Bennett