by Saul Friedman
Shirley Sherrod had it about right when she said,
“Y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have. It’s really
about those who have versus those who don’t. And they could be black,
they could be white, they could be Hispanic...”
That wasn’t exactly the whole truth, for she and her husband.
Charles, were ardent, longtime civil rights activists who understood
that years of racism, played a large role in perpetuating the ignorance
and poverty in the south among blacks as well as whites.
(Racism is here defined as the belief among many whites, supported by
the law, that Negroes were inferior. Only in America did the Supreme
Court, in Dred Scott, hold that black slaves were chattel, less than
human.)
Overcoming that sad heritage, Ms. Sherrod, who has spent a lifetime
helping in the struggles of the poor of all shades put her finger on a
fundamental human problem in much of the world, especially the United
States - the unequal distribution of wealth among too many of us.
That is the subject of a new book that has become the rage among
social scientists and activists in Europe, especially Britain. It’s
called
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger,
written by British public health researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate
Pickett who have produced an unprecedented rediscovery of the causes of
so much of today’s anger towards the institutions of government and
finance.
The book was called to my attention by a Canadian reader, Dr. Rob
Dumont, a PhD, from a prominent and wealthy family. In a reply to one of
my pieces on poverty, he quoted from the book to tell me that according
to its central thesis, the growing gap in many countries between the
haves and the have-nots is responsible for more than the misery of
poverty.
According to the book, such health and social problems as “Obesity,
Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, homicides, imprisonment rates,
lowered life expectancy, overconsumption of resources, teen pregnancy
and the lack of social mobility,” all have in common strong links to
inequality of wealth.
Interestingly, the authors, who have exhaustively documented their
work, do not denounce the wealthy. Rather they point out that the most
affluent citizens as well as the most wealthy countries also suffer from
these ills. Their analysis mocks the American Declaration of
Independence which proclaimed, “all men are created equal.” The original
sin of slavery gave lie to that promise and the lack of equality has
taken a toll in this nation even today.
As one knowledgeable Amazon reviewer, Dr. Nicholas P. G. Davies, a Briton, wrote,
“Inequality issues are often presented as being about the
poor, but this book shows we are all poorer for living in more unequal
societies. Inequality is as bad for the rich as it is for the poor.
Society is poorer as inequality becomes greater.”
As Wilkinson and Pickett make clear with dozens of graphs, which rate
the nations based on the problems that come with inequality,
“The impacts of inequality show up in poorer health, lower
educational attainment, higher crime rates, lower spending of social
capital, lower cooperation with and trust of government.”
One graph that shows the “health and social problems are worse in more unequal countries,” makes these points:
“The U.S, Portugal and the United Kingdom rate high in the
amount of income inequality. For the U.S., low taxes (by international
standards), a weak trade union movement, low minimum wage and a
tradition of individualism have resulted in a high level of income
inequality.”
Indeed, the U.S., with its obsession with the market economy, has
modest social programs, Social Security and Medicare, while most of the
other 20 nations listed are social democracies with a broad array of
social insurance benefits, including universal health care. Canada is
roughly in the middle of the pack, along with France, Spain and
Switzerland. Japan and the Scandinavian nations have the lowest income
inequality, offering cradle-to-grave social programs.
Some critics suggest that the book cherry picks its statistics and
the alleged problems to prove their point. But who could argue with the
graph that puts the U.S., the richest country, almost off the charts
showing the relationship between a huge income gap – perhaps the highest
among civilized countries – and such health and social problems as
infant mortality, higher than most European nations, homicide and
imprisonment rates (the highest in the world), obesity, child well-being
(poverty among children has reached new heights) and drug and alcohol
addiction?
Any thinking American can verify the sad truth in another graph that
shows these health and social problems are worse in more income-unequal
states. With the rise of unfettered rapacious, anti-labor capitalism,
which touted sweatshops and child labor, income inequality rose to
criminal levels.
And today, as you might expect, the southern states, namely
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West
Virginia and Florida “have high levels of income inequality and much
poorer outcomes in the health and social areas.”
These states also have the highest levels of poverty and the lowest
levels of education attainment, and in the last couple of years, income
inequality has become worse throughout the United States, especially in
the industrial north, as a result of the 2008-9 recession which has
increased home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and the numbers of
Americans – nearly 50 million – struggling against poverty or near
poverty.
Yet at the same time, the rich are becoming obscenely richer. Michelle Singletary,
reported in the Washington Post
last month that while the average income for the top one percent of
earners rose 281 percent, or $973,000 per household, in the last decade,
the bottom fifth saw their incomes increase 16 percent, or $2,400 per
household.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who wrote the forward for the
American edition of the book, noted that today’s CEOs are paid more than
350 times that of the average worker. Surely we’ll see the results of
such inequality in health and social problems in the next few years.
In his inaugural speech, President Obama said, “The nation cannot
prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.” But that’s exactly
what has happened as bankers have made huge profits and gotten
scandalous bonuses while real unemployment reaches towards 15 percent.
Franklin Roosevelt fought the economic royalists of his day to help
Shirley Sherrod’s Georgia get electricity and survive the Great
Depression with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress
Administration. What has Obama done?
One can blame the Republicans or the U.S. Senate, but where is the
leadership of the President? It won’t do to give Ms. Sherrod a job.
Platitudes like, “I feel your pain,” are not true. It might help to use
the powers of his federal government to put Americans to work. But as
she said,
“Folks with money want to stay in power and they’ll do what they need to do to stay in power...It’s always about money, y’all.”
Find out more about
Spirit Level, at the excellent British web site,
The Equality Trust, which supports the messages in the book.
Write to saulfriedman@comcast.net
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