Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Projects
    • Corporate Taxation in a Globalised Era
    • US Election 2020
    • The Transformation of Work
    • The Coronavirus Crisis and the Welfare State
    • Just Transition
    • Artificial intelligence, work and society
    • What is inequality?
    • Europe 2025
    • The Crisis Of Globalisation
  • Audiovisual
    • Audio Podcast
    • Video Podcasts
    • Social Europe Talk Videos
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Shop
  • Membership
  • Ads
  • Newsletter

Greater equality: our guide through Covid-19 to sustainable wellbeing

by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson on 25th November 2020 @ProfKEPickett

TwitterFacebookLinkedIn

The pandemic has reinforced the case for egalitarianism to define the ethos of the welfare state.

economic democracy, employee ownership
Kate Pickett

The living standards of the poor differ dramatically between low- and high-income countries. In India, living in poverty may mean living in a one-roomed shack with no sewerage, whereas in Norway it may mean living in a three-bedroom, centrally-heated flat with many modern appliances.

But the overriding subjective experience of poverty is substantially the same, regardless of those differences. Interviews with those regarded as poor in richer and poorer countries found: ‘Respondents universally despised poverty and frequently despised themselves for being poor.’ By being poor, they felt that they ‘had both failed themselves and that others saw them as failures’ and their sense of shame ‘was reinforced in the family, the workplace and in their dealings with officialdom’.

economic democracy, employee ownership
Richard Wilkinson

Inequality and hierarchy

That poverty should make people feel so shamed, devalued and humiliated, despite such different material circumstances, highlights the overriding importance of relativities and of inequality itself. Inequality brings hierarchy into social relationships.

Get our latest articles straight to your inbox!

"Social Europe publishes thought-provoking articles on the big political and economic issues of our time analysed from a European viewpoint. Indispensable reading!"

Polly Toynbee

Columnist for The Guardian

Thank you very much for your interest! Now please check your email to confirm your subscription.

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

Powered by ConvertKit

The material differences in a society, the ‘vertical’ inequalities of income, wealth and power, are foundational. They are the inequalities through which the various ‘horizontal’ inequalities of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability are expressed and experienced. They create the social distances of class and status, of superiority and inferiority, exacerbating the downward prejudices and discrimination experienced by women, black, ethnic and other minorities. How large the overall ‘vertical’ inequalities are across a society—from the heights of privilege to the depths of deprivation and degradation—the scale of material inequality tells us how far societies are from treating all members as of equal human worth.

Larger material gaps in a society make class and status differences more important. They increase the prevalence of a wide range of health and social problems associated with low status. Most of the problems that we know are related to status within societies become more common when bigger income differences make the differences in social status larger. Examples include health, child wellbeing, violence, social cohesion, social mobility, imprisonment rates and the educational performance of schoolchildren.

Crucial importance

The coronavirus pandemic has focused attention—once again—on the crucial importance of the scale of income differences. In a comparison of 84 countries as well as among the 50 states of the USA, coronavirus death rates have been found to be higher where income spreads are larger (after controlling for confounding factors).

Societies with female political leaders have been more successful than others in limiting the pandemic. This appears to be because more equal societies are not only more likely to elect women to leadership positions but also, due to their greater equality, were already healthier and more cohesive before the pandemic.

Although inequality increases violence (as measured by homicide rates), there are not yet studies of whether the rise in domestic violence during the Covid-19 lockdown has been greater in more unequal societies.

Welfare system

One of the most crucial functions of welfare states should therefore be to reduce inequalities in income and wealth. But that does not tell us much about what kind of welfare system is most desirable.


We need your help! Please support our cause.


As you may know, Social Europe is an independent publisher. We aren't backed by a large publishing house, big advertising partners or a multi-million euro enterprise. For the longevity of Social Europe we depend on our loyal readers - we depend on you. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

As Gøsta Esping-Andersen and others have shown, bigger welfare states do not always produce greater equality. The relationship between different welfare-state systems and inequality is more complicated than might at first be imagined. The same system applied to different populations may produce different levels of inequality—depending, for instance, on the proportion of elderly or single parents in the population.

Large-scale redistribution, through progressive taxation and generous social-security systems, is however essential. That is necessary not only to support the economically inactive population but also because the inequalities of pre-tax (‘market’) incomes are intolerably large.

Over the last 40 years, inequality has increased in so many countries mainly because income differences before taxes and transfers have widened so dramatically—particularly as a result of the take-off of top incomes. It has thus also become increasingly important to reduce income differences before tax.

The picture is broadly similar in many countries: the historic strengthening of the labour movement and social-democratic parties led to a decline in inequality from sometime in the 1930s. That continued through to the late 1970s, to be followed—because of the rise of neoliberalism and the decline of the labour movement—by the modern rise in inequality from around 1980. The politics behind these changes is illustrated clearly by the way trends in inequality in different countries almost exactly mirror changes in trade union membership.

Economic democracy

We need to develop new means of bringing top incomes under democratic constraint. Perhaps the most promising are forms of economic democracy—not only substantial and increasing employee representation on the boards of larger companies but also incentives to expand the small sector of more thoroughly democratic models, such as employee co-operatives and employee-owned companies.

As well as smaller income differences, more democratic forms of management have many other advantages, including improvements in productivity. That is in stark contrast to conventional companies, in which those with the largest pay differentials perform less well than those with smaller differentials.

Extending democracy into the economic sphere may have the important additional advantage of underpinning our political democracies—which have become increasingly dysfunctional—and embedding equality fundamentally in the social structure. Because some multinational corporations not only have revenues bigger than the gross domestic product of smaller countries but also exercise high control over the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees, they inevitably raise issues of democratic accountability. The same ethical justifications used historically to replace political dictatorships with democracy are just as relevant to the demand for economic democracy today.

Reining in consumerism

Greater equality is also key if, over the next 10 or 20 years, we are to rein in consumerism and waste and achieve carbon neutrality. Research has shown that inequality intensifies the status competition that drives consumerism. Inequality makes money more important: it becomes the measure of the person—so much so, that people living in more unequal areas have been found to spend more on status goods, including ostentatious cars and clothes with designer labels. Not only that but borrowing tends to increase with inequality and bankruptcies become more common.

The pandemic has shown that our societies are more flexible, and their populations more vulnerable, than most people had previously recognised. Given the urgency of making the transition to sustainable wellbeing, these are valuable lessons. Greater equality has been shown to be a powerful asset, in increasing society’s flexibility and in reducing our vulnerability to Covid-19.

The prize of sustainable wellbeing requires that populations of high-income countries abandon the goal of economic growth, which no longer improves the health or wellbeing of their populations, and turn their attention instead to improving the quality of the social environment. We know that social relations are powerful determinants of health and wellbeing—and both can be improved by reducing inequality.

This is part of a series on the Coronavirus and the Welfare State supported by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

TwitterFacebookLinkedIn
Home ・ Society ・ Greater equality: our guide through Covid-19 to sustainable wellbeing

Filed Under: Society Tagged With: coronavirus and welfare state, tackling inequality

About Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson

Kate Pickett is professor of epidemiology at the University of York. Richard Wilkinson is honorary visiting professor at the University of York.

Partner Ads

Most Popular Posts

sovereignty Brexit and the misunderstanding of sovereignty Peter Verovšek
globalisation of labour,deglobalisation The first global event in the history of humankind Branko Milanovic
centre-left, Democratic Party The Biden victory and the future of the centre-left EJ Dionne Jr
Covid 19 vaccine Designing vaccines for people, not profits Mariana Mazzucato, Henry Lishi Li and Els Torreele
EU recovery package,Next Generation EU Light in the tunnel or oncoming train? Adam Tooze

Other Social Europe Publications

US election 2020
Corporate taxation in a globalised era
The transformation of work
The coronavirus crisis and the welfare state
Whither Social Rights in (Post-)Brexit Europe?

Social Europe Publishing book

With a pandemic raging, for those countries most affected by Brexit the end of the transition could not come at a worse time. Yet, might the UK's withdrawal be a blessing in disguise? With its biggest veto player gone, might the European Pillar of Social Rights take centre stage? This book brings together leading experts in European politics and policy to examine social citizenship rights across the European continent in the wake of Brexit. Will member states see an enhanced social Europe or a race to the bottom?

'This book correctly emphasises the need to place the future of social rights in Europe front and centre in the post-Brexit debate, to move on from the economistic bias that has obscured our vision of a progressive social Europe.' Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland


MORE INFO

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

Renewing labour relations in the German meat industry: an end to 'organised irresponsibility'?

Over the course of 2020, repeated outbreaks of Covid-19 in a number of large German meat-processing plants led to renewed public concern about the longstanding labour abuses in this industry. New legislation providing for enhanced inspection on health and safety, together with a ban on contract work and limitations on the use of temporary agency employees, holds out the prospect of a profound change in employment practices and labour relations in the meat industry. Changes in the law are not sufficient, on their own, to ensure decent working conditions, however. There is also a need to re-establish the previously high level of collective-bargaining coverage in the industry, underpinned by an industry-wide collective agreement extended by law to cover the entire sector.


FREE DOWNLOAD

ETUI advertisement

ETUI/ETUC (online) conference Towards a new socio-ecological contract 3-5 February 2021

The need to effectively tackle global warming puts under pressure the existing industrial relations models in Europe. A viable world of labour requires a new sustainability paradigm: economic, social and environmental.

The required paradigm shift implies large-scale economic and societal change and serious deliberation. All workers need to be actively involved and nobody should be left behind. Massive societal coalitions will have to be built for a shared vision to emerge and for a just transition, with fairly distributed costs, to be supported. But this is also an opportunity to redefine our societal goals and how they relate to the current focus on (green) growth.

What targets or objectives should be set and how might they be reached? How can we create a sustainable European growth model? How can we reverse the trend towards growing inequalities? What kind of Green New Deal is a realistic and feasible prospect for Europe? What elements of justice, solidarity and equity constitute a fair and sustainable social foundation? What are the roles of the market, the state, industry and civil society? And what role can trade unions play to build a sustainable future that addresses all of these dimensions?


FOR PROGRAMME CLICK HERE

Confirmed speakers include: Ursula von der Leyen, Mariana Mazzucato, Nicolas Schmit, Dominique Meda, Tim Jackson, Juliet Schor, Frans Timmermans and many more.


TO REGISTER CLICK HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Industrial relations: developments 2015-2019

Eurofound has monitored and analysed developments in industrial relations systems at EU level and in EU member states for over 40 years. This new flagship report provides an overview of developments in industrial relations and social dialogue in the years immediately prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. Findings are placed in the context of the key developments in EU policy affecting employment, working conditions and social policy, and linked to the work done by social partners—as well as public authorities—at European and national levels.


CLICK FOR MORE INFO

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Read FEPS Covid Response Papers

In this moment, more than ever, policy-making requires support and ideas to design further responses that can meet the scale of the problem. FEPS contributes to this reflection with policy ideas, analysis of the different proposals and open reflections with the new FEPS Covid Response Papers series and the FEPS Covid Response Webinars. The latest FEPS Covid Response Paper by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 'Recovering from the pandemic: an appraisal of lessons learned', provides an overview of the failures and successes in dealing with Covid-19 and its economic aftermath. Among the authors: Lodewijk Asscher, László Andor, Estrella Durá, Daniela Gabor, Amandine Crespy, Alberto Botta, Francesco Corti, and many more.


CLICK HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Find Social Europe Content

Search Social Europe

Project Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

.EU Web Awards