Inequality - and what we need to do about it.

The Old Government House lecture theatre was filled to capacity last night, to listen to Robert Wade explain Inequality in the West. And the crowd stayed around, too, to eat all the cheese before I even got into the Staff Common Room, and launch Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis, which you should go and purchase RIGHT NOW.

Wade , who said to me after the talk how glad he was to see so many "young people" there (I think I was included in that group), noted four salient points that distinguish this Second Great Depression from other recessions, crises, and bubbles. We, in the west, particularly the Anglophone West, have:
1. income disparity on a scale not seen since pre-democratic times;
2. a surge in the relative size and power of the financial sector as opposed to the productive economy;
3. a significant weakening of what Wade calls "substantive democracy," which is different to formal democracy. Substantive democracy relates to what one might think of as the social contract - the sense of common values and objectives, shared by a country despite political or ideological differences.
4. a weakening of national sovereignty as nation states' decison-making is constrained by the financial sector.

Wade goes on to make the claim that what ties these together is the increased dependence of governments and political parties on funding from the financial sector; so much so that we are moving towards what  he calls "substantive oligarchy." As a historian, the use of this term is terrifying - as is the data that shows that the current income concentration at the top is analogous to income distributions in pre-democratic times. Current levels of inequality threaten to destroy the human sense of progress. While obviously the metanarrative of "progress" requires constant questioning, there is a very real sense that the social and political movements of the last 250 years have created a fairer, more equal society. That has begun to change.

There were a couple of key statements that have sat with me since last night: right now, Wade states, capitalism and democracy are working at cross-purposes - and that thus making capitalism work for everybody is the critical issue of our time. He expanded this challenge in his concluding remarks; noting that if we don't reduce income concentration at the top, we will inevitably transition from "democratic market capitalism" to "oligarchic impunity capitalism" where the financial sector makes all the profit and what remains of government, the public etc absorbs all the risk. The economic, social, health, and political costs of this transition are immense.

But it is not all bad news - as Wade said last night, the high attendance at his lecture is evidence in itself of a concern for the state of civic (civil) society. And as Dr Tracey McIntosh reminded us in her remarks at the book launch - it is time for a movement, or collection of movements.

I'm back where I started, as an ideological fifteen year old - writing quotes out in my quote book. "When bad [people] combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." (Edmund Burke)

It is time for the good to associate. It is time for the commons.