Inequality and the 1%: what goes wrong when the rich become too rich (video)

a good evening everybody I'm Stuart Corbridge I'm the deputy director and provost here at LSE it's my very great pleasure to welcome you all to the school for this evening this evenings taught by Professor Danny darling on the topic of inequality in the 1% what goes wrong when the rich become too rich now is the time please if you could just turn your mobile devices or electronic devices to silent if you want to tweet tonight the events hashtag is LSE inequality tonight's talk is sponsored by two departments here at the school the department's of geography and environment and the Department of Sociology and I think that's very appropriate given Danny's own affiliations danny is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmith's here in London but his day job for the just over the last year is as the Halford mackinder professor of geography at Oxford University unlike McKim de who was one of the founders of LSE and one of the school's first directors from 1903 to 1908 Danny has not to my knowledge advised the British government on the virtues of liberal imperialism or the geographical pivot of history but he does regularly advise British government agencies and the Office of National Statistics on the state of the UK population notably in regard to health housing and inequality in recent years Danny has published extremely engaging books on unequal health the scandal of our times on Britain's great housing disaster in a book called all that is solid and just last month his account of inequality in the 1% on which we're going to hear tonight in addition to these and several other books and something like 200 academic journal articles Dan is an increasingly frequent contributor to radio and to TV and to newspapers including The Guardian and the New Statesman he also keeps up what most of us would regard as a punishing schedule of public lectures all the way I think doing is best to take the message across the country and to schools and youth theatres well as venues like the RSA and the LSE not surprisingly Danny's been honored as one of the best communicators of social science in the UK is also an academician of the Academy of the learning societies in the social sciences an honorary president of the Society of cartographers and a patron of Road peace most recently I was looking at this at the weekend Danny Danny has started a project to remap the world which you can find at w-w-world map org Danny we're delighted that you're with us here tonight at LSE there will be question and answers afterwards but please just give a warm welcome to Professor Danny dawnie thank you up so much for that and thank you for coming the short answer to what goes wrong when they which become to which is an awful lot goes wrong so I'm going to speed through a lot of things but to try to give you an idea about just how rich the rich are now what the directories of change are and what can be done about it so that I don't forget about what can be done about it there's some nice people here from the Equality trust and from my fair London there are now multiple groups opposing inequality in London as generation event is generational trust and so on but if you're interested this kind of thing Google the Equality trust or Google My Fair London and you can join organizations which are trying to do something about the state of inequalities in this country and particularly in this city now because they've reached historical peaks because things really haven't been this bad for an awful long time this cartoon was produced as a joke several years ago not many people find it that funny nowadays I like putting it up and measuring whether it gets any laughs at all and when I first put this up I don't know Thea's five six years ago people would laugh but they don't laugh anymore and I think that's telling it's not distancing the old picture people really do feel increasingly for most people as if they're losers you may not feel this way if you're young the young tend to be aspirational and optimistic it's great otherwise you couldn't get through today human beings tend to be pretty optimistic but the old you get the wiser you get the more you look at your finances and the way things are going it's harder to feel that you're a winner in this country unless you're in a very very small grid I'm going to show you a stretch map in a minute so here's a basic stretch map of the country this is showing where the population is distributed and of course London is large but London isn't as large as a London I'm about to show you and I'm going to start off right at the very top of the income and wealth spectrum this data comes from the Sunday Times The Sunday Times is a wonderful job of amassing information about the wealth of the one thousand which is people in the UK and Ireland every year they do a slightly worse job of been writing puff pieces about how wonderful these people are but it's highly entertaining to read that but as sunny times really tries hard to try to get the data vitae it's very hard to get a data libel to have a go so what you've got here the big blue circle is London and it's sized by the wealth of the members of the top 1,000 families in this country who live in London about five four almost five hundred families live in London in the top 1,000 but just these ten families have almost a quarter of the wealth of the super-rich in London if we were to add another three families to that they have a third of the wealth for the super-rich in London so you can be in The Sunday Times Rich List you can be one of the richest families in the country and you find yourself squeezed between these mega mega rich families there is more inequality within the 1% than there is within the other 99% and there is most inequality as you head towards the top of the 1% here's what the UK looks like shaped by the wealth of the thousand richest families according to where they live and your see for instance interesting things like Ireland is larger than Scotland and so on it's a very very interesting geography but of course it's dominated by London and this matters because it changes what London is it changes what's seen as normal in London they concentration an increase of massive amounts of wealth coming into this particular city has altered the housing market it affects the schools it affects the politics because if you look at who's donating money to the political parties large amounts of money are coming from some of these people and they've been attracted in by growing inequality as the inequality in Britain grew for the late seventies through to the 80s for to the 90s and including the naughties Britain in the particular London became a more and more attractive place to come to if you had lots of money because it's a place where your money will be safe our tax rates fell our property taxes are ridiculously low and London filling up with the very very rich is partly a product of widening inequality and then of course it increases inequality itself and even worse we then begin to think of this as some kind of asset can't we use a trickle down for the very rich as some kind of economic future for ourselves which is kind of inequality thinking can we create more jobs as butlers and maids and servants to the very rich and that's a form of employment and that's seen as a progressive thing in a country which had more servants per head than almost anywhere else in the world a century ago I'm going to show you some comparisons for Europe now these aren't in the book I was feeling a bit guilty after I did the book because the books almost entirely based on secondary sources and I fought I ought to play with some data myself with at least just check that the figures are correct so I used the European silk survey for household incomes took the largest five countries in Europe and how to look at the distribution of household incomes in those countries and how many euros you need to get into the top one percent by income and you'll see that it costs dramatically more to get into the top one percent in the UK than in other countries but also compare that to the median household the middle household and if you look carefully you'll see that in France and Germany the middle household is better off than the middle household in the UK so when people say that having lots of wealthy people here is somehow advantageous they have to explain well how come the middle household is living off less money than they are in similar countries where the rich have not been allowed to become as rich this is my favorite map of the country sadly I didn't draw it it was drawn by some journalist working for the Guardian it's a couple of years out-of-date which means it's uh I think at least a hundred billion maybe hundred fifty billion wrong now because the London housing market has been shooting up since this was drawn this is a map of the country by wealth if you've got good eyesight you can see some of our cheaper cities but there the small circles sixty percent of all our wealth is held in a form of housing equity in London absolutely dominates and if you're trying to figure what's going on and why things are done politically in certain ways it's very important to remember that uh members of parliament since marga fatsia introduced a current expensive system have been helped to live by being allowed to buy property in london relatively cheaply david cameron i begin to feel mean because I heard that the Blair's have bought another ten flats this week might not be true somebody texted me and told me but they have at least seven houses in London so amongst our political elite there's a concentration of ownership of property all three of the main political party leaders are now in the one-percent all thanks to their wives earning much more than their their earning but they're they're all way up there in the 1% a quarter of all members of parliament to landlord we're not represented by people like most of us anymore and part of the blame is that housing expenses system which moved MPs away from understanding most people's difficulties this is the last detailed slide I've I apologise for it but I got a bit excited that I was actually doing some top of the search for one so I fought tight I'd show you and it gives you the average incomes of various groups you're in the bottom ten percent in Britain if you're in a household with an income of about seven thousand pounds a year you're probably single you may well be a pensioner that's the bottom 10 percent the bottom ninety percent including that 10 percent have a mean of 32,000 quite high because pea at the top of that group of doing okay but if you look at the group just above them I've called them a nine percent so this is the top ten percent not including the top one percent you've got a mean of 100 16,000 we go up one more to get into the one percent you need an annual income before tax of about one hundred and sixty thousand if you're a couple so a hundred and sixty thousand just gets you into the one percent the average income is three hundred and five thousand but they don't feel rich and the reason they don't feel rich well if you're on one hundred and sixty thousand there's a couple in London you can just about get a mortgage to buy an average London house that's half a million but that's not the reason they don't feel richer they don't feel rich because the group just above them the one in 1000 people I want a million a year but they don't feel rich because you go above them and you find it it's three million you go up and up and up and eventually you get about three households with an annual income of a hundred million which sounds ridiculous until you go back to the Sunday Times Rich List and subtract the wealth last year from this year for somebody's households and you see that their wealth has risen by a hundred million which requires an income of at least 100 million it's a remarkably skewed distribution where the steps get bigger the higher up you go and the steps are widening so people within the 1% and within the bottom of the 1% are finding life hard to live in this city now almost all of you I can particularly tell because of you ages could help explain to these people that life isn't quite so bad but they don't mix with you you're not in they're in their bubble you're not in there they're kind of circles you're not trying to get your kids most of you into the same schools they're trying to get their kids into which means you're not trying to buy a house within walking distance of the bay school they might be after and so on and so on I can go in to very boring detail about having some sympathy for the rich but I think it is wrong to think of those in the top 1% as a group who are purely sitting there scheming and counting money in feeling happy I have yet to meet somebody in the bottom half the 1% he tells me that they're doing well and this is good news because if it's discontent at the top the options to do things are somewhat higher ons surveys of satisfaction find is actually more satisfaction in the group just below to 1% but at least have some idea that they're doing well than in the 1% one of the nicest things of researching inequality if any of you are thinking of researching inequality apart from the fact it's an incredibly important issue in becoming more important and underlies so many other things like health Variations housing market variations educational outcomes and so on is that personally it is remarkably hard to complain about your situation if you understand the distribution of income some wealth in a country it's very hard to feel that you're particularly badly off here's one example of the bad effects of the rich getting richer it's the country shaped by the increase in values of property in 2013 the value of property in London rose in aggregate that set of buffers in the middle by more than a North East Yorkshire and Humber sides in the northwest put together I spent a lot of my career trying to measure the north-south divide and arguing during the new labor years that it wasn't getting narrow it was getting worse we no longer have to do that research because it's so obviously is getting worse that nobody claims otherwise now but you get bubbles you get a housing bubble there is a huge amount of talk at the moment about the housing market slowing down in London desperate attempts to try to get it to slow down by talking it down as yet we have no Land Registry data released to say that the seventeen percent or twenty percent annual house house wises have actually slowed down the longer that carries on the faster they go up the more we begin to look a bit like Tokyo before the crash twenty odd years ago there I lied one more table of figures but again just to add to the evidence of these things and that the UK is unusual if you just take the second line the penultimate line from the bottom the ratio of the income of the 1% to the middle in Germany it's seven times as much in France it's ten in Italy it's eight in Spain is six and we're fourteen we're an outlier we have to understand we're an outlier with all this general data we know it from Pacific examples we know because the European Union collects the data that we have over 2,200 bankers in this country paid over a million euros a year over 2,200 the next highest country is Germany where they have a hundred and ninety seven paid that much bankers in Switzerland as I'll show you a bit later are paid on average half as much as bankers here and banking does lead this distribution at the top but then other people try to get salaries like bankers because they'd like to live in homes near to where the bankers lived but it's not just a bankers here's the landlord not all landlords are nasty I'll say that quickly because I get an amazing number of emails from aggrieved landlord who tell me they're only making six percent of our capital and how terrible it is and seems to be under the impression that everybody in Britain is seeing increases in their incomes which of course they're not among landlords there are group of landlords who are very good at being landlords since the crash in 2008 that group have been charging rent that's much much higher than they charge before because they could because people still have to move around and buy houses with that increased rents the landlord's started buying up more property more and more property and as they bought more property and this is just in four years they could rent out that property in charge great events because the house prices went up in places like Oxford and London and so on people couldn't afford to buy houses so they had to the aggregate effect and this is released by settles the estate agent if you like to the rich and the financial times which is hardly a radical newspaper is that the total wealth of landlords in Britain since 2008 those by two hundred and forty five billion the total wealth of owner occupiers rose by much less than that despite there being many many times more owner occupiers only two percent of people are landlords the average wealth of people with mortgages actually fell over that period you're seeing the most remarkable rapid redistribution of wealth in a short amount of time in this country that we have ever measured our being careful with my words it's possible that during the First World War there was a similar trend in the opposite direction but we were not as good measuring it then and here's that same thing shown as the graph and also including the ten year increased wealth of landlords those of you you're looking like an audience this is majority under forty even though you've probably done extremely well at school even though you've done pretty well at university or you're going to do very well at university cos we're going to give you almost all two ones and first relax and even though you're already in London and your networks and you're probably going to get jobs and unlike 20 percent of people of your age and even though you're going to get pretty good jobs you'll end up in publishing you end up in research you'll end up in some of the things you want to do you're going to be renting you're going to be renting and renting and renting and then some of you when you get to 41 or 42 or 43 will get best but those of you who did a bit better those of you who got promoted faster in that firm that you enter and then you'll bet everything on taking out an absolutely massive mortgage because you want to avoid a life of having to rent forever because renting is increasing that much in this country and that's a problem of the super-rich and wealth inequalities rising nobodies suddenly demolished housing we haven't had a catastrophe we haven't had an earthquake the reason for the change in in the problems are getting ourselves house is not due to aggregate demand for houses although we have more people coming in it's for how we sort it out the population of Harrison and Chelsea fell between the 2001 and 2011 censuses there are less people living there our housing system is becoming increasingly inefficient this is an old cartoon and it shows everybody stepping down in the past and the problem of everybody stepping down is if you're already at the bottom you're going to be drowning the equivalent today is you're going to be heading off to the food bank but today is different from when this cartoon was drawn because back then in 1920s and 30s everybody did step down and inequalities rose for 99% of people they have step-down inequalities within the 99% according to Institute of Fiscal Studies and now back to where they were in 1990 because child benefits been taken away from people in a top tenth and so on but that doesn't make people feel better and I would argue it's partly because this small group at the top have not stepped down with any with everybody else they are moving up and away and that's a unique political situation in last hundred years for the last hundred years the top 1% has traveled with the rest of the 10% when we became more equal they all came down together and women became more unequal from about 1978-79 onwards the top 1% did best but the rest of the top 10 percent so that saw their incomes rise from two and a half times average income where Margaret Thatcher came to power two three times average income when she left she took the ten percent with the one percent they've always traveled in concert until now and now does this rift that have and about the tumbler that the one-percent line here's your income distribution if you want to quickly work out where you are and you know what your income is a week you have to do some adjustment for household size and kids so those of you who are young our children are not doing quite as badly as you might think but that is our income distribution the gap between the two lines or benefit payments and Taxation so the taxation if you like pays the benefit payments if we didn't have benefits the bottom 10% would be dead because they would starve but the 1% 3000 pounds a week 160,000 pounds a year for a couple are heading up and up while the rest ever so gradually are moving together have been moving together if the cuts which were promised in the election promises of the party conferences materialized then will see growing inequality again amongst the 99 percent we are odd this isn't normal it's not part of playing the global race here's six countries which I didn't pick they were picked by two American offers when I was a child the UK we were the second most equal country of these six it's a share worth taken by the one percent over time the only country which was more equal than us was Sweden when I was a child things weren't perfect in Britain but the 1970s were much much better than they were painted and I'd happily take questions on that if you want to ask about about that if you look at our line you'll see without the second most unequal country in the USA the top one percent are taking now over twenty percent of all income leaving the rest of just 80 percent to live on in the UK if you include a few estimates for tax dodging the top 1% to taking 15 percent of all income the latest figure I can get for the Netherlands is just under seven percent inequality hasn't risen the same everywhere countries can work very well in fact do work better where they control their top one percent better here's a little infographic trying to show you about the unequal distribution of wealth wealth is much much more unequally distributed in ink and when income inequalities grow you see that effect multiplied about ten years later in terms of what happens with wealth inequalities the academics in the audience I can spot a few here sometimes say why do you concentrate so much on the one percent why don't you look at wider measures of inequality one reason is we've got the Gini coefficient along the bottom here we've got the 1% here they correlate remarkably well because the 1% essentially drives a Gini coefficient when the 1% get a lot more the people underneath them tend to get quite a lot of more to hang onto their coattails and that drives inequality you can have a very equal country like Japan Japan is one of the dots down here towards me where the 1% take less and the Gini coefficient is very less very lower but where the bottom 1% in Japan do very very badly there is no welfare state people are homeless at the very bottom of Japan but Japanese society can operate very well despite the fact it treats the bottom 1% so badly a society cannot operate very well when it treats the top 1% as if they should be allowed to do whatever they like things go wrong there I'm not advocating treating the bottom 1% badly what I'm trying to point out is that the standard policy discourse of can't we help the poor doesn't actually help everybody else that much whereas controlling what the 1% get bringing them down has an effect which ripples right across societies here's that same infographic for the United States it's much more staggering than the one for the UK the UK is the most unequal country in Europe we have the highest number of prisoners per head in Europe and there are numerous other statistics the bottom fifth of our society of the poorest in Western Europe and so on but although we say have between now 80 to 90 thousand people locked up in this country the US have two million the u.s. always trump as when it comes to inequality their wealth distribution looks like this oh it did look like this in 2007 the data here is old because when it came to 2010 and we got new data which we got a few years after 210 that bottom 40% had less than nothing they were literally in the Atlantic they couldn't be given any space at all and when we added on their housing equity it got even worse because the average member the bottom 40% of your society those who'd managed to buy a house on average had negative equity this was the point at which the US administration I probably describe it as began to panic will began to do something and you've seen tax changes in the u.s. to try to begin to redistribute things in a way that you haven't seen here almost the opposite here we're very unusual in terms of the numbers of very rich people we have we have a smaller country than Germany but have more households with over 100 million pounds we're an attractive place along with the US and Singapore we're an attractive place to be very very wealthy what happens when the wealthy get wealthier is shown I think very nicely by this graph I discovered this graph when I was writing the book it was produced by an obscure French economist called Piketty and I thought I was ever so clever going through the work of Piketty live the books got several Piketty graphs in it there's not much need to show these now and the nice thing about what Piketty has done is that this kind of thing is no longer controversial it's accepted and things are changing that fast it is interesting this is an index of deregulation of Finance in the United States and a taker the 1% as the 1% get more they use some of that money to influence policy to get financial deregulation so they can get even more when the 1% got less and less the rest of society was able to do things like control banks so that they were less than less likely to crash because that wouldn't be in our interest we get very few attempts to measure wealth in this country other than the Sunday Times having a go there isn't a decent measure of wealth distribution ons accidentally released some data and ask the people who drew graphs of it to take their grass down from the web luckily George Monbiot fused so here's John George Monbiot graph for the wealth distribution it's probably an underestimate for the top 1% but of course remember there's more inequality in that group than any other just a few more graphs to get a sense of why this matters and what's going on and why it could be different I'll zoom on the NEAs graphs in in a minute but they're 1 in all inch far away from me is the proportion of households in England who have children who are living in private renting and how fast that has risen this was never the plan we didn't plan to head up will now be over 25% of households with children renting privately it is not good for households with children to rent privately because you have very little stability you can be evicted with 2 months notice and that's not good for children because children need to grow up in the same neighborhood and stay in the same schools and keep their friends these are the kind of things that go rapidly wrong when you have a rapid increase in inequality in a country this graph here has us traders zoomed in one in a minute go ahead and a Milburn's report of last year the social mobility and child poverty Commission report had this graph in it quite a long way through there's nothing wrong inventing a decent Society has a large amount of property for rent and the rest for purchase and you purchase when you want to do it up and want to be really stable and you rent when you're less sure but in a decent society you have rent regulations you have all kinds of regulations because regulations make markets work better so if you look at Germany where a lot of people and families with children are venting their landlords have to buy them out to get them to move they actually have to offer the money and then up it until the point where the family are willing to move because the leases are so long these are the kind of things we need to move back to we used to have this for some strange reason in this country in economics 101 economic students are taught that rent controls are evil and I think that's one of the repercussions of living in an unequal society that we get simple things like that like that long rent regulation is not evil you just have to work out an efficient way to do it so look at where it's done in the u.s. look at where it's done in Vienna and you can see where it works or the Netherlands when people tell you that inequality is rising everywhere and it's inevitable look again to the Netherlands or look to Switzerland so it's not as easier for us to look at because it is a country that isn't that different in some ways from from our country as a country which has a large financial sector but the 1% have never had less in Switzerland and Switzerland functioned perfectly well this is why the bankers are getting half as much in Zurich as they get in London and it isn't just because they can go skiing it's it is because Swiss society has worked out that they need to control things so that they don't end up like Singapore which is of probably the most unequal of the richest 25 countries in the world it's not a utopia these places none of them are perfect but we are the dunce the class as Singapore and the USA are now almost certainly the three most unequal country the rich is 25 and Portugal used to be in that group I suspect it's become more equal with what's happened in Portugal and the next country down of the richest 25 is Israel and it's fairly obvious why Israel has incredibly stark income inequalities one group of people living in Israel do not have the human rights to another group of people living in Israel and we are economically more unequal than Israel what happens when inequality Rises is that you get tax cuts but their tax cuts for the rich these are the tax cuts in the United States over time but we've seen the same thing happen here our top tax rates were higher and then they went down we have a tiny blip when it went up to 50% has gone down to 45% again but other taxes have gone up v.a.t.s gone up governments talk about taking the poorest out of payment to pay tax they don't mention it the poor is pay the highest abortion of their income in tax mainly from indirect taxes there are other things which are like taxes the gas bill the electricity bill you can't really afford paying the gas bill particularly through the winter and they've gone up so consumption taxes and crazy.i taxes have gone up income taxes at the top have gone down I'll let you read this graph yourselves because I've shown too many graphs of you but this shows just how bad the situation in pensions is in the United States and if you're my age in the audience and you want to get scared or worried about this look at what's likely to happen to our pensions in future the way we're heading towards an american-style economy for those university academics the employers have helpfully speeded our thinking on by suggested what cuts we can take in our in our pensions in future but it's pretty bad in the u.s. it's much worse you end up with society where people fear for what's going to happen to them in old age which they don't fear in other affluent countries which haven't taken this particular route almost at the end of the graphs this is the Institute of Fiscal Studies estimate of the effects of the cuts up to 2015 17 who's most affected who isn't the poor is being most affected only the richest 10% doing better and when you look within that which is 10% you find it's actually the 1% who are doing better because 9 out of the 10 people did claim their child benefit at least half the 1% don't claim didn't claimed child benefit in the past that sum of money really makes little difference when you're right at the very top people really don't like inequality it's a very interesting international distribution but they they just don't like it there are some people there is a minority who think it fuels competition it fuels entrepreneurship before you know and I'm sure we get onto that and talk about it but if you want to look for the country where they register the most patents in the world that is Japan if you want to look for the countries where the most scientific papers have written behead their Scandinavian countries we tend to think we're entrepreneurial and we invent things and it's something we think we do it's extremely hard to find measures of it then when somebody finally does invent something say somebody invents a new kind of vacuum cleaner rather than doing what we did in the past which said well done you've invented a new vacuum cleaner that's nice we say all that justifies you being one of the richest 20 families in the country then because you've invented a new vacuum cleaner it's a very odd way of thinking we talk about Steve Jobs as if he single-handedly programmed all those devices that he's so famous for being associated with you know that isn't what happens this last graph comes from the book I did the start of this year about housing and it's just showing how housing has become incredibly unequal in the last 20 years we have more empty rooms than we have had per person than ever before the best or fifth of people throw the best off ten four people in the country now have five times more rooms in their homes per person than the worst of temp we've surpassed the 1911 peak of housing inequality we're using our housing incredibly inefficiently you could build hundreds of thousands of flats and homes and apartments but if we carry on getting more unequal economically in the way we have been doing you'll still find overcrowding increasing in London so the solution there are lots of little solutions the ultimate one is actually recognizing this as a problem and that is the hardest one but one of the solutions here and again this is a pictograph is to keep high rates of top taxation places like switzerland and germany have not seen reductions in their top tax rates in 30 or 40 years places like the UK and the u.s. have seen reductions of up to 40% in top tax rates and in those countries that take her the 1% has risen by 6 percent and 10 percent of all income respectively what top marginal taxes do is not raise money it's not about raising money what a 70 or 80 or 90 percent tax at say an income of a million two million three million does is help that young banker who is on 4 million this was last year who went to his chairman have said I've just discovered that my equivalent in the other bank is on 6 I have to get 6 million 4 million isn't enough it helps that young man not feel so aggrieved about it because if he were to increase his income by 2 million he wouldn't get to see most of the money this is the benefits of high rates of marginal taxation currently the 1% are paying 33 percent of all our income tax and they're paying 33% because they pay themselves so much it's not actually beneficial we would be in a much better situation if they were paid less more people were employed and more people were on incomes that enabled them to pay tax and to share it out more equally and finally if you want to get very depressed finally there is what's happening worldwide I can now I'll give you good news stories in the questions and answers I I personally think we're very very near a peak in this country but we may not be near a peak worldwide now the worldwide situation is complicated there may be a growing middle class worldwide greater equality if you like from the 95 percent worldwide around about the Chinese average income without the very bottom the worst of people in world are getting a smaller and smaller share of income the fact that some of them may have tip from a dollar where they de $2 they really given food prices is immaterial at the very bottom things are getting worse and at the very top we're seeing the zooming away to the point where Oxfam produced at 85 figure then forbes updated it false figures may be wrong because they only updated the numerator they knew that the multi-billionaires were going up that fast they didn't update the numerator so Oxfam will come out with new figures soon but to me this feels a bit like Britain in 1912 1913 when we were at our peak of inequality when there were families that were just so incredibly rich and a mass who rented that we're so incredibly poor and it did come to an end these things do come to an end but if you want to get depressed about it look at the worldwide situation and that tells us that we have some very very serious changes in the next two or three generations to come if we're actually going to have a more equal planet thank you very much thanks Danny we've got about 40 minutes for questions and then there's going to be a book signing afterwards danny has said he's going to take questions in twos so we'll try and go upstairs Downstairs a microphone will come to you if you could please say your name and keep your questions very short that would be helpful start downstairs if there are any questions Jen with the back you two at the back and then come up to you next time so given that the UK and United States are so unequal why do those countries remain attractive to particularly attractive to immigrants from more equitable countries like France okay there's a second gap just behind right at the bank though hi thanks honey you mentioned about the opportunities that we may have to adjust the situation of inequality that we have and it seems that the main suggestion is a institutional change in terms of tax do you think there are any opportunities of a more grassroots approach to altering inequality thank you on immigration I think there's two points to make the first one has to be said that in the more equal countries particularly of Europe a lot of particularly young people get quite borders with greater equality and the idea that you can't shoot above other people that fast you have to wait your turn and so on and so the UK is a particular magnet a particular London for disaffected people from Denmark and Sweden and France in particular who don't like society being as equal as it is there and what their chance a bit like weak in terms of you know coming to London them and and doing well and there are downsides to equality more equal societies have a bit more claustrophobic you have to behave in a similar way more there's greater freedom of expression say more unequal societies but the more important thing to say about immigration is that you almost always get higher rates of immigration in more unequal countries the US has one of the highest rates of immigration because it has numerous opportunities at the bottom really poorly paid jobs that need to be filled by somebody that sucks people in we have quite a few of those despite our government's attempts to stop people coming there are enormous numbers opportunities to do very badly paid jobs in something like London when I was a child in London there was hardly any security guards now we have a plethora of people on all the doors of London so there tends to be this relationship between high rates of immigration and inequality is mainly driven by people coming in at the bottom I'm a bit of people coming in at the tongue there are exceptions that Scandinavian countries have open themselves up to immigration was going on their way to get it despite the fact it being hard to get in there raising top taxes is just one of many things that you could do grassroots is much more important there was a bank who in the 30s called Ozwald folks it was a friend of john maynard keynes and was what folks had obtained what he and those arguing with him really helped to do was to change them all fabric of the time to change what people thought was right and wrong and I suspect we won't see significant change in Britain until a sense that it is wrong for a few people to have so much and get so much more becomes more widespread we are beginning to move towards that if you look at the top of the BBC the salaries have come down at the top of the BBC I'm told that the entire talent budge it's been half since 2008 and hopefully at some point in the future we'll stop calling it a talent budget honestly the number of men you could get he liked driving cars around probably women now you don't need Jeremy Clarkson but that and we we're beginning to get to otter nobody's paid as much as Bob Diamond the bank of anymore if you compare newspaper stories from 2005 to now you won't see the kind of celebration of riches that you made in the papers in 2005 anymore and that requires Westbridge change that requires people saying that they're not impressed by people simply making money question is what else are you doing or what are you doing instead I am convinced by this argument because I talked to my granddad quite a lot when he was alive he was born in 1916 so he was a child in the 20s and then a young adult in the 30s and talks about how his entire cohort distrusted big business big finance because of what had happened and it wasn't just a war the Second World War which did abide them they just didn't believe it and then when they found themselves in power in the 50s and 60s they were part of the architects of the change that we got in this country and I think it's very possible this is happening again and it will happen to university students 50% of all women in Britain go to university now once they're going out getting jobs realizing how hard it is the idea that this group going to carry on blaming themselves not having become rich and won't become angrier and talk about this as wrong I find it hard to believe that we will carry on with a kind of plan a that says you'll be okay just as long as you make enough money because we can't all make enough money you're upstairs go to the to the front row here getting all men putting their hands up at the moment I'm sorry I'm a man Malcom McIntosh can you answer the question what happens next what are the politics of this that was a brilliant speech lots of facts and statistics Britain isn't America when's it going to break here thank you thank you for a wonderful speech several years ago Sir Richard jolly gave a similar speech in the annual Erskine Childers lecture he suggested that one of the solution should be redistributed growth where by most of the growth in the economy is distributed amongst the 90% rather than the 1% as it is at the moment what's your take on that and is it practical for the economists the politicians and the media to report what percentage of growth the 90% get thank you when will it break it could have broken a few weeks ago if five point five percent of Scots it takes yes rather than though I surely would have broken I mean that was inequality was more important than Scotland than patriotism for that vote not important enough to win it but it became the main argument within Scotland if the Scots had voted yes we would have had a vote on the pound we would form a certain had a housing market crash we may love the bank and it's well worth trying to work out if the government really can guarantee eighty five thousand pounds in every current account so if that's how close it is I could have done it if we have a second major crisis in Europe which is possible again these are the events that are most likely to occur when it happened last time these things move very slowly after 1913 it was clearly a war the cost of fighting that war was so high dat which had to be practiced an incredible way to pay for it these shifts don't tend to happen without other events occurring to help trigger them off and you can't predict what the event will be but it's very important and we should have learned this in 2008 you have to present an alternative and talk about it in the aftermath of one of these events so that next time we have a financial crisis we are not trying to take the money from the middle of society there's no more the bottom anymore from the middle and keeping things as they are but it's I think purely a question of time and it's partly Britain accepting it's no longer the kind of country tries to think it is for the people at the top I think part of our problem is the empire and the slow adjustment format and part of the United States problem is they currently are the Empire and when you when you are the most powerful which is country in the world you make enough money you can actually afford to find high rates of inequality it's costly is it possible to produce the statistics about how much is going to the bottom 90% and so on they manage it in the United States if you look at those websites that the groups I mentioned and start the Equality trust at my face Londyn you will see estimates there about what has happened over time the Institute of Fiscal Studies is a very good job of trying to digital income it is harder to do it with wealth but it's possible to do and it's what happens in most of our a seedy countries in a way this is relatively easy for us if we try to imagine that we're sitting in Oslo rather than London and talking about what should we do to make Norwegian society better it's not perfect but you are already sitting in a fairly good situation you have the lowest child poverty rate in the world getting better is uncharted territory all we have to do is to look at most other countries in almost every direction to us and what they do or does look back at our past and what we used to do all look forward at what people's aspirations are they simply want I simply want some stability about the home I live in to know I can live there I want to be able to work I want my children to get jobs and that probably gets me what more wilder than anything else I want basic services I'd like a holiday year but I don't want the yacht or even two cars you know it's what do most people want they want a degree of security they don't want precarity and what they're being offered is increasing precarity so I think this is very very possible but it requires people to think it's possible otherwise you collapse into just myself and my family I look after myself and my and then you get this incredible situation in Britain where we have millions of relatively affluent elderly people hanging on to family homes for bed houses just one of them can't afford to heat this house but they're hanging onto the house so they can give them money to their children so that she'll have a chance in future these individual little welfare states end up using up all our housing it is it is inefficient and it is dangerous it is not a safe safety net to be relying on such a small group of people let's come back here get you front-row stay up skating contest and thank you for your talk professor darling due to the international mobility of the top one percent worldwide surely even if the UK does clamp down on increasing inequality there surely they can just move away to other parts of the world notably what's happened in France recently what do you suggest can be done to prevent this thank you with a green shirt I think your graph showing inequality in Britain from the late 70s worsening to become the second most equal society in the world and did show that but all other countries did also increase inequality how much has this got to do with the neoliberal commercial and international trade policies that were pursuing okay one of the first thing about how to hold on to the 1% it's two things to say one is it's often not a great disaster if some of them leave fact quite a lot and we're not here that much of the time anyway you know officially this often when I has a residence here that he's not really really here however there is one important thing to think about the 1% George Osborne's began to think about it in a very small way in that he's introduced capital gains tax on property but only from a 215 onwards we really do need to quickly alter our property taxes I would say just add council tax bans rather than call it a mansion tax and make it smoother so that if the 1% do go if many of the 1% do goes they find it harder to take all their money with them because their money is held here in the form of property and land but at the moment we have the lowest property taxation in the world but the other thing that was happened though if the waters had began to leave is house prices would fall but first of all fall at the top because you couldn't sell the freemen semi in Mayfair for 25 million by building a deaf chaplains in the basement they're calling it a swimming pool coming up pain in these houses I wouldn't live in novel kids if the Whomper said they'd begin to leave some of the top 1% began to leave the top of the London market would begin to crash the rest would come down if you're trying to increase living standards in this country the fastest most effective way to rise living standards is falling rents and falling house prices it's the equivalent of several thousand Trade Union successfully increasing their workers income and that would be highly beneficial to most people so I wouldn't worry about it they've also not got many places to go it's remarkable how concentrated the 1% are into particular pockets worldwide where they feel comfortable so I suspect we could become a lot more draconian and still hang on to at least half of the top tenth of the 1% who for many reasons really do want to still be a Britain and would be willing to pay a lot more to actually stay in Britain the second question about all those countries rising they don't all live Switzerland evidence of - that shows all possible but you're right most do and we have had a change in trend since the 1970s that as mend it's in general there has been a rise but it's very different to the trend before from again around about nineteen twelve thirteen all countries became more we call the map remarkably similarly I mean there's a whole series of events it was the first world war but it was also a successful revolution in Russia successful for me didn't mention of my about my chance named after half of Mukunda one of the things that's not much known about him is that he was involved in leading the British force to Russia to put the revolution we tend not to be told about this in our history books he didn't do a very good job but he did come back alive that revolution in Russia really concentrated minds amongst the elite because suddenly revolution was possible and so a lot of people in the elite work very hard to make countries more equal after 1970 those are fanning out so small vices in the Cortese in some countries big rises and others in Japan they've had the most tiny increase they think it's terrible there's been dozens of books written about inequality rising in Japan and they get very upset if you talk to Japanese be you say well done on your incredibly the low rate of inequality because I say don't you know is going up and part of the reason the Japanese are keeping lid on inequality is because they are angry about it rising they have a 90% middle class where you could call it a 9% working class it becomes the same thing at that point and apparently this is a very Genesis book and I haven't double-checked exits the most remarkable statistic but it is believable apparently there were fewer people in Japan paid over a million pounds a year then evolved in Barclays Bank and people you know people live for the longest in the world in Japan lots of things work in Japan advanced as yesterday take the two of the back as I came in I heard you're saying something about people out retired people rattling around in four bedroom houses and you seemed to think that it was our housing stock I would point out firstly people with four bedroom houses are hardly likely to be in the 1% and secondly it's not our housing stock those houses that people have fought if they choose to stay in them they have every right to do so they're not council houses they are cell-phones houses do you lad can you explain how there's been such an absence of event of an alysus of how QE quantitative easing both in the United States and in Britain as said purchasing how that's clearly benefited the 1% or the 0.1% at the cut at the cost of total negligence of assistance to anyone outside of that bracket the first point about housing I I wouldn't force that videos of their house particularly including people who are not currently being forced out of the house by the bedroom tax the way well you and I have different ideas about property but I but my point about these people are asking working around in the large house is four bedroom five six is that when surveyed you find a remarkably high numbers saying they don't want to be living in a house is size anymore they actually say it they don't have the opportunity to downsize now partly because we haven't built things for people to downsize into because we have a housing stock designed first to happily live creative family then die convenient age 71 and longevity has is one of the reasons why it's become harder but the lots of people are holding on to property because they know it's their children or grandchildren chance and they're doing it well they find it hard to heat the house that they're in is just inefficient and the danger is that if you leave markets just themselves if you don't regulate it intervene you get gross inefficiencies one problem of housing is that there's a finite amount of land so me getting a property somewhere stocks are for people doing it you see the extreme case in Australia where everybody wanted a half acre plot with a garden you get half acre plot after half a dozen Baker plots and then you have 20 mile commute into cities so you need to regulate housing particularly on the packed Island in some way otherwise the inefficiencies you get are enormous you don't have to do with finance you don't have to do with wine it's actually bad for you you don't even need to do with gold it's not useful for very many things but housing is a real problem when people start to hoard housing and it's actually a problem for many of the people who are hoarding the housing but they're they're hoarding it's a completely rational reasons that this is their family's best chance and it makes sense to them to stay in their house because there isn't anywhere else they can put that assets unlike say in Germany where people put their assets in investments in industry and don't hold us much because housing is so much better distributed in Germany this housing was built by other people I mean the bulk of it Fairey Fuhrer has actually built the property that we we live in we're lucky to have it we're lucky to have the sewer systems under the streets that we've got but we collectively created these and we have to think about them partly collectively that's planning the alternative you fueled a nice free market one get rid of all panic controls and the question then is what kind of shanty towns are you going to get them High Park because people want housing for the handle of the money to pay for it on QE there have been a series of reports as a Bank of England reports showing that the top 20% benefited almost entirely from QE and amongst their wheels that the richest and so on because they helped shared prices to rise so it's well known that QE benefited those of the most at the top most I don't think it was known that that was what was going to happen the reason you hear so little argument about it is that we don't know what the alternative to QE would have been if we hadn't done it what would have happened it was it was very scary it is very interesting often it's not interesting to talk to economists but it is fascinating to talk to economists in the know who were there in 10,000 made nine or who flew to Washington and who around that weekend and when you talk to them you can actually watch the color drain from their face as they describe what it felt like so part of the reason that we don't criticize QE so much is that we were very close to a situation that we'd have no idea how we would have handled it at the extreme how would we have persuaded the ships from China not to turn around and you do get this I get this talking to people whose politics is far to the right of mine but who were genuinely scared by their experiences of that weekend in those few months and of course it could happen again so looking shirt and blue sweater yes thank you a presentation my name is Matthew seller sadly I'm an economist so really boring quick question what would you respond to people that say that if you look currently within developed economies those trying a highest GDP growth per year or those with the highest inequality ie the USA and the UK at the moment is there a problem with the indicator of GDP per capita I mean that is the headline indicator rolled out both in the news and by our politicians thanks hello thank you thank you very much for the talk to what extent do you think that inequality is and it's sensual ingredients for capitalism please thank you um first of all on GDP from 2008 for about four years we had this incredible drop in GDP per capita there's a graph comparing this Great Recession to all the other recessions and to the depression of the 30s and this was a bigger job for longer than any of those it's partly because the drop is so great that now we see apparently the highest rate per capita because we've got so low and then we go Romney grade we've got the fastest up but the medium household is still worse off and that brings a second point most of the increase in GDP hasn't been an increase to salaries it's been an increase to capital into people's investments as you've got them not to wages and that part which has been seen as an increase in wages has hardly gone to the to the top small front of the 1% one way one way to kind of understand this sort we'll think about the United States the top 1% getting 20% all the income it's like having a hundred kids in the class and one of those children gets 20 pounds a day pocket money and everybody else on average gets ATP a day that's what the inequality is and if you gave our money to children like that you'd say you had a problem the GDP is it is something invented in 1950s it's a very crude measure it measures things that can be counted in a particular way but it's not that helpful it really isn't it's just convenient it's it's there it's produced every quarter or faster and economics correspondence or the BBC love it and they need to be kind of weaned off this and to talk about the situation of the middle household it'll be far better if they led with that method by the way even though the middle household say has gone down GDP per than 5% you know and then people would learn that GDP was a different thing to most people's life inequalities who inherit in all kinds of social systems so if you look back over thousands of years you'll find inequalities you've got to go back a lot earlier than that to find a pretty absence of inequality as soon as you've got a surplus in somewhere in this you've got agriculture you begin to get inequality in hierarchy all societies tend to confront inequalities when they get to a particular point when they get particularly bad you can do a nice comparison of various world religions and almost every world religion began at the time in the place of great inequality if you just take Christianity people were not very happy with what the Romans are doing that at the time but you can look at the Buddha and what he was saying the beginning so the policy isn't just a feature of capitalism it's a feature of human societies we tend to get it it tends to rise we tend to find ways to controlling it historically that's involved inventing new religions all of which tend to say treat each other a bit better so greedy in one way or another and hopefully we're going to get them again I would say that the interest the most interesting thing to look at or to worry about is the fact that we're mammals and mammals do have a tendency to rank order and to behave in typically male mammals behave in a particular way and worry about status and there may be something inherent in us which involves grandstanding and yeah and which we need to literally control but the nice thing on this again if you just take the long sweep of world history is the most remarkable revolution in world histories happen in last 100 years which you can see in this room even though you're not putting up your hands to ask questions which is a majority of your female and if you're going to see a change in human behavior that is likely to have an effect that we haven't predicted as women finally get more freedom and more power and ask questions could you just right in the middle here please and then on the left thank you I'm James Gilligan did 20 years of research in the States that and found that during times when there was no safety net particularly under Republican administrations and in red Republican states the suicide homicide rate increased markedly and noticeably and he tracked it back to a lack of a safety net what's happening here with the 1% and the the austerity budgets and the cuts and the benefits it's IDI it's just so horrifying to me that people don't the legal aids and all that stuff people don't have the rights that they used to have all of it thank you and I studied economics and in my economics 101 course I was told that rank control are incredibly bad and I mean I'm studying sociology so I was wondering apart from Piketty do you see any change in economists view on inequalities James James Gilligan is a brilliant author to read a lot of his studies were about violence and about men and he's been studying a men in prison in particular and people get angrier and I know more violence in more unequal societies so we look up more people in our prisons than anywhere else in Europe and it's not because our judges are nasty they're actually slightly more lenient to commit the same crime in another European country involving the same degree of violence you're more likely to be locked up so to it there is there is this relationship of how people behave the flip side of that and officers internal violence so you see violence within the home of course far more than fathers outside the home and then you see violence to yourself so you become angry of yourself so we have a suicide rate which is 10 times higher than our homicide rate but it's not that easy because we have had a drop in violence in the last 10 years that we really can't we find very hard to explain people have tried to explain it but I I find it hard to explain it up in my head I put it down to this slow revolution happening in what it means to be human partly to do with divisive the power and respect for women and the declining need to be masculine or to behave in a certain way as a man I don't know enough about this but I think it's is interesting we haven't yet seen a rise in mugging we haven't seen that kind of increase we haven't seen amaizing overdoses yet in fact that only increase investors been amongst the elderly which has hardly noticed those 5% advice there is a rise in people stealing and shoplifting but they're now much more likely to be shoplifting food whereas before you an shoplift things like DVD players but they're not worth enough what you actually need is the food is it's easier to make the food in the supermarket but to make the photo pound DVD player and sell it until I buy some food so you're seeing that kind of desperation lies but interestingly the kind of things we saw in the 80s which was a crash which wasn't so bad the mass influx of heroin and so on the actual absolute rising mortality amongst young men across the whole country that we are not seeing yet and this is different to me it's hard to know why we may be protecting our children from it desperately trying to protect our children from it more so the number of people who've got their 20 year old children living back there being sheltered the number of people are paying their kids 10 pounds a day so half a million and not claiming Jobseeker's Allowance because mom and dad are given the equivalent ten pounds a day and then they can describe themselves as self-employed and have some respect we're doing a lot more of that than we used to I did suddenly realize that I'm in the Elysee and I shouldn't have said that about that can only hear that but for given the timing of my career given I began in late 80s and so on as a social scientist even one part of my background was maths you know so I've always been numerous and this has been annoying to watch in the 80s and then the 90s the economy's kind of move away from the rest of social science look down on the other social scientists as a numerous and a bit lower you know where the kings of policy watch the civil service fill up economists and hardly anybody else and now we're getting a bit more learning a little bit more humility but it's slow with the trickery of rent controls is to call them regulation you're halfway there as long as you don't use the word rent control so you call it regulation and then you talk about how all markets or form of regulation the original idea of a market is a place when you come together and trade in a regulated way to stop some people behaving badly so markets work well when they're well regulated economics itself is is changing but it's it was as such a pinnacle for so many decades that you don't suddenly switch a discipline around and it's worship of mathematics and the identity was supremely able that's going to take longer to change so I have I have some sympathy for this the same thing happened in Midas pretty much early I'm a geographer what we used to do the reason why we have geography in this country and so many universities have it is because it's a discipline you needed to Train colonial officers to go out of the world that's have you ever wondered why you teach people about mountains and rivers and tea and coffee and it was a geography education for when the Empire went when there was no longer any demand for colonial officers the subject of geography have to change what assuming our decline we change we do inequality we do all kinds of things you can an academic subject can change how it behaves and what it does but it helps have a crisis like losing an empire or crisis like the Queen asking you so why did that happen there she did last two questions so so you've been asking and then right at the back there generally Jackie that work have fun I'm hoping this isn't going to sound too naive is largest companies because of it I'm hoping this isn't going to sound too naive in this illustrious company you're an advisor to government don't they believe you cuz I go on yeah the you're an advisor the government don't leave don't you believe don't they believe you yeah I think that was the question last one yeah perhaps a fitting last question and I'm just reflecting that some of the graphs you've shown us are quite similar to graphs that have come out quite recently about inequalities within universities and the fact that so many people working in universities are scraping a minimum wage whilst is kind of an increasing fashion for Vice Chancellors to be paid five hundred thousand pounds a year um on the other hand thanks on the other hand you're saying we need to challenge the dominant discourses you're speaking out within a university to challenge the dominant discourses um so we've got these two different outlooks of higher education systems that are looking increasingly unequal and you're able to provide dominant discourses I was just wondering where you stand on that kind of juxtaposition let me do with occasionally I get asked to do things by by governments and then they put it on your things advise the cover government isn't isn't going to touch me with a bargepole although I used to live in Sheffield Hallam it's amazing how often my local MP would ask me to come home on a Friday because he wanted to talk to me as his constituent laughter talk to Otto's constituents with more pressing problems if you take the Labor Party which I think is the interesting one here what involvement I have had with the Labour Party is often involve me saying why don't you do this incredibly modest policy such as the one that they've actually done in Scotland the example I gave was regulate people who are letting property so they can't charge you all these things which are illegal in Scotland to do and the rental market still works in Scotland and I get incredible cold feet from people in the new labor part of labour or we can't do that we can't touch the market and that's where a lot of lot not all but a lot of Labor's do this so you you have a lack a big lag amongst our three main parties and passive effect of that lack in understanding and catching up with what's occurred is the rise in the small parties it's an the NHS party the Green Party UK because of the parties are not separating themselves or creating university inequality it is of course affected or caused by the general inequality in society so not the VC pay and we nee honestly could sort themselves out and when the crisis hit a number of VCS froze their pay for one year but only about eight of them and then the prob what happens is that universities end up harming people like me and paying people like me a salary that lets me buy in a very small house in Oxford in an average area of Oxford but if you know how much of a small house in an adversary of Oxford costs you can work out what my son of ears and professors are in the 4% of 3% in the 2% that's the entire professorial salary range I'm not a clinician I don't work out business schools are not in the 2% completes it at the top you have this then you have this enormous number of temporary staff very low pay staff and then the rest of distribution including people on the minimum wage or even below the minimum wage because they're partly paid in food illegally in some places universities desperately need this thing sorted out for them and they need 40 house prices and they can pay people like me less because all I need is a house and once universities can do that and this is why it has to be solved for society as a whole they can start employing far more people for the 9000 toil we could even not charge nine thousand pounds a year but let's not be that you know it's impossible Germany doesn't do it oh yeah no fees in Germany universities could employ huge numbers of people's in their 20s and 30s to do research to teach and very often 18 19 20 year-olds want to be taught by people are not that not the age of their father we could do it inside the existing very large salary budget the way to do it is to stop the salaries rising at the top you could do that little bit already the VCS could take small cuts the effects of a VC taking the cut is at the senior management team and have to take the drugs they got to be beneath it you clinical professors don't have to take less and so on the savings from doing this are massive you can use that money to employ far more people from amongst a group who are currently not being employed and provide a much better service to your students in general but the way society is at the moment you could only do a little bit of that if society were to change you could do an awful lot of it so again if I just end on this if you go back to nineteen thirties you can see people like turning in a university or beverage in the university aptly when it was at university writing things about how we were too unequal that how it had to change these are all members of the 1% in universities that were incredibly unequal at the time there are still universities which have servants making people's bed so don't try and get myself into any more hot water than that but the last time we came more equal that rise in equality involved people from some of the top universities arguing for it and it resulted in a saving of so much money that we could expand and build universities all across the country and millions more people could go to university to get to a point where half of young women and over a third of all young men are able to go to university we've now begun to see the first of that we've seen it looks like maybe new things are possibly a 5% reverse in the numbers going to university heading back there's old times when it's just a small number of people and the really interesting thing on this or why it's not going to be possible to do that is that the wrong people who want their children to go to university more than any other group are women who BT University themselves and half of our young women have been to university and they do not want their children want to go so you have this force for progress against a force of conservatives and trying to move things back to where they were those two things are going to hit at some point and it's you've got to look at your child and say do all my child to have a good and safe and rewarding life not a rich life necessarily but a good life or do I want my child to be a servant for somebody who's very rich that is the future choice that we are having to make and to make that choice we have to realize that that's a choice in front of us and as yet we don't realize that that is what we're choosing if we choose greater inequality which isn't to go back to a time when large numbers of our children will be surfers for a few other people thank you very much you

Channel: LSE

Views: 8,683

Rating: 4.5999999 out of 5

Keywords: LSE, London School Of Economics And Political Science (College/University), Inequality, Geography (Field Of Study), Sociology, Danny, Dorling

Id: xw0Mi2YNfzQ

Length: 85min 59sec (5159 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 09 2014