may be necessary to motivate people to behave in certain socially valuable ways, but the idea that people do not want to work, that they need to be driven by threats and promises to get anything done, is a misconception.72 If work enhances our autonomy, if it can be done under dignified conditions, and if we believe it is valuable, most of us welcome it. The Russian scientist and political philosopher Peter Kropotkin held that ‘Overwork is repulsive to human nature – not work . . . Work is a physiological necessity, a necessity of spending accumulated bodily energy, a necessity which is health and life itself.’73
Of course, not all jobs are equally rewarding. Some tasks carry little or no intrinsic reward and are risky and unpleasant. Today, the most undesirable – though essential – work is largely done by those who are paid the least. A subordinate class of people is obliged to accept these jobs or go hungry. This is a coercive form of motivation based on fear and desperation. Kropotkin writes ‘If there is . . . work which is really disagreeable in itself, it is only because our scientific men have never cared to consider the means of rendering it less so. They have always known that there were plenty of starving men who would do it for a few cents a day.’74 Given our current technological knowledge (and expanding the point to include women), this is truer today than ever before. As Bertrand Russell observed, if we ‘had to be tempted to work instead of driven to it, the obvious interest of the community would be to make work pleasant’.75
What of the unpleasant work left over? It should either be shared out fairly or carry financial incentives to compensate proportionately for the sacrifice entailed by doing it. Other strategies are coercive and incompatible with a free society. The American historian Howard Zinn writes: ‘I worked hard as a college professor, but it was pleasant work compared to the man who came around to clean my office. By what criterion (except that created artificially by our culture) do I need more incentive than he does?’76
Incentive-based arguments are often little more than ad hoc justifications for inequality. When examined, they betray a double standard. Cuts to social welfare programmes are justified by the claim they incentivise people out of the ‘poverty trap’ – as though poverty weren’t incentive enough. The reasoning is that if we make poor people poorer by removing their social safety net, they will be forced to go out and find a job or, since many benefit claimants are already in work, a second job. On the other hand, when it comes to discussing incentives for the rich, the opposite reasoning is employed. High salaries for corporate executives are justified as incentivising higher performance, which ends up benefiting the whole of society. The double standard is glaring and ugly. As economist Ha-Joon Chang asks, ‘why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?’.77
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Plato believed that myths to justify inequalities of wealth and power were essential to preserve order in society. He offered the following story: that each citizen was born with a certain kind of metal mixed in with his or her soul. Natural rulers had gold mixed with their soul, their soldiers and assistants had silver, and natural workers had either bronze or iron. According to a divine oracle, if the city were to be ruled by those who lacked gold in their soul, all would be ruined. Later myths, designed to serve a similar purpose, include the divine right of kings, hereditary nobility and the discredited theory of ‘trickle down economics’.78 For millennia, those with power and privilege have used convenient myths to justify their position. Arguably, these myths arise as much to reassure those with wealth as those without it – it’s harder to enjoy privileges if you don’t believe you deserve them. A sense of entitlement to wealth is nearly as valuable as wealth itself.
In his history of economics, John Kenneth Galbraith writes: ‘The explanations and rationalizations of . . . inequality over the centuries have commanded some of the greatest . . . talent of the economics profession. In nearly all of economic history, most people have been poor and a comparative few have been very rich. Accordingly, there has been a compelling need to explain why this is so – and, alas, on frequent occasion, to tell why it should be so.’79 Like their earlier elitist, racist and sexist counterparts, today’s justifications of inequality are baseless – yet they provide a veneer of legitimacy to the poverty and oppression around us. They are embedded deeply in the fabric of society, just out of sight, beyond the light of critical scrutiny.
The nineteenth-century English philosopher and father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, based his moral philosophy on the idea that ‘it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong’. According to Bentham, the best allocation of resources is one that maximises human well-being. A key assumption he made was that the well-being a person experiences from an additional dollar decreases as that person becomes richer. That is to say, ten additional dollars produce more well-being in someone extremely poor than in someone very rich. The radical implication is that society as a whole becomes better off as material equality increases. We don’t have to be utilitarians to see the value of this common-sense insight.
Subjective states like ‘well-being’ and ‘happiness’ may be difficult to define and measure, but, as long as large inequalities exist, there is every reason to believe that transferring money from the rich to the poor increases the overall welfare of society. The evidence, in fact, is overwhelming. Many researchers today believe it is possible to collect meaningful data on subjective feelings. Individual self-assessments of well-being are now regarded as an important addition to government statistics, correlating strongly with more objective indicators such as rates of depression and suicide. What the data suggest is that, beyond a certain level of affluence, more money makes no difference to a person’s happiness. One analysis of more than 450,000 responses to a daily survey of Americans in 2010 revealed that ‘The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no longer increases was a household income of about $75,000 [roughly £47,000] in high-cost areas (it could be less in areas where the cost of living is lower). The average increase of experienced well-being associated with incomes beyond that level was precisely zero.’80
For those who are sceptical about the reliability of ‘happiness data’, there are more objective indicators. Based on the analysis of extensive data spanning many countries and decades, epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson confirm that reducing inequality benefits the whole of society in fundamentally important and sometimes surprising ways:
In societies where income differences between rich and poor are smaller, the statistics show that community life is stronger and levels of trust are higher. There is also less violence, including lower homicide rates; physical and mental health tends to be better and life expectancy is higher. In fact, most of the problems related to relative deprivation are reduced: prison populations are smaller, teenage birth rates are lower, educational scores tend to be higher, there is less obesity and more social mobility. What is surprising is how big these differences are. Mental illness is three times more common in more unequal countries than in the most equal, obesity rates are twice as high, rates of imprisonment eight times higher, and teenage births increase tenfold.81
Humanity has the resources to eradicate starvation, illiteracy, extreme poverty and some of the world’s deadliest diseases; it has the means to deepen and expand human freedom for every person on the planet. So why does deprivation and inequality persist? Why do Earth’s bountiful resources and humanity’s endless creativity serve so few at the expense of so many? Not because the rewards in our society go to those who deserve them, not because it’s necessary to incentivise people, and not because it benefits the whole of society. The great imbalance of wealth simply reflects the great imbalance of power.
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Once we discard the myth of responsibility, the framework of desert that leads us to punish and reward also falls away. We’ve seen that the distribution of punishment and reward in society cannot
