Toward a Ceiling at the Top

A Too Much review of
Rich Britain: The rise and rise of the new super-wealthy
Stewart Lansley
Politico's, 2006.

October 9, 2006

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

In our cynical, ever more unequal world, this old saw seems to convincingly describe the eternal way of the world.

But the world doesn’t necessarily always work that way, as journalist Stewart Lansley helps us understand in his absorbing new book, Rich Britain: The rise and rise of the new super-wealthy. In the mid 20th century, Lansley relates, the British rich actually became distinctly less rich and the British poor distinctly less poor.

Now that situation has reversed, and that reversal raises a question that desperately needs asking: Was the “Great Compression” of the mid 20th century some sort of a never-to-be-repeated accident of history — or an inspiring example of what any society, given a deep enough commitment to greater equality, can accomplish?

Rich Britain explores this question, naturally, by focusing in on the economic, social, and political evolution of the contemporary UK. But author Lansley tells, in effect, two parallel stories. He traces the modern histories of both the UK and the United States. These two histories, he notes repeatedly, have been inextricably interlinked.

Indeed, “Rich Britain” largely owes its emergence to “Rich America.”

“During the 1980s,” Lansley explains, “Britain’s wealthiest began their upward march to new heights, a process fuelled by the importing of American values, business methods, and tax policies.”

Britain’s wealthiest — and their apologists — defend their nation’s enormous new concentrations of private wealth as “a justified reward for promoting a new economic, entrepreneurial and artistic leap forward.”

Lansley dissects that claim, economic sector by sector, mixing statistics and capsulized case studies that leave today’s British mega fortunes exposed as little more “than a large windfall gain” that stems from a “shift in the political and cultural climate, one in which increasingly generous rewards, sometimes staggeringly so, have become acceptable.”

Lansley contrasts today's winking at grand fortune with the disgust at excess that the vast majority of the British people felt just a generation ago.

“For half a century from the great crash of 1929, not only did governments intervene to protect the poor, but a social climate emerged that acted as a kind of natural limit to the size of personal fortunes that could be accumulated,” he notes. “A cultural, political and social consensus developed and was largely observed. The reasons were clear and, at least for a while, widely accepted — that a socially integrated society would be more economically effective and just than one with extremes of poverty and wealth.”

The dominant view today? The wealth gap “no longer matters,” or so insists what Lansley delightfully labels the “Reagan-Thatcher-Bush-Bush-Blair doctrine.” Social decency, this doctrine holds, demands only an effort to raise up the poor.

This modern conventional wisdom, Lansley observes, has switched our political and social “emphasis from the goal of equality of outcomes to one of equality of opportunities.” But the hard truth remains, he adds, “that we are receding from both objectives.”

How can we move back in the opposite direction?

Advocates for justice, Rich Britain contends, need to recognize that decency demands more than “a minimum living standard below which it would be socially unacceptable for people to have to live.” Decency may well also demand a “ceiling at the top,” a “norm” about what constitutes “an acceptable limit” of income and wealth.

Without such a limit, the wealthiest in Britain — and any other deeply unequal society — will continue “to lead segregated lives, unaware of the reality of everyday life, increasingly divorced from common experience and independent of the society that enabled them to build the wealth that gives them the choices denied to most of the population.”

Inequality, Rich Britain goes on to emphasize, reflects no catastrophic, unavoidable, unfathomable act of nature.

“The fluctuating fortunes of the rich and the poor, and the gap between them, can be traced to the way in which the political and public climate and wider economic conditions interact,” Lansley points out. “Governments can leave the issue of distribution alone or intervene to raise the floor or cap the ceiling.”

Rich Britain discusses, in its final pages, a variety of approaches that could impact this “issue of distribution.” But Lansley offers his countrymen and women no guarantees for success should his specific policy initiatives be followed. Events may simply be moving too swiftly in the wrong direction.

In 2001, Lansley relates, six bond traders in London spent £44,007, the equivalent of about $82,050, on a single meal at an exclusive restaurant. That outrageous gluttony, once reported in the press, cost five of the bond traders their jobs. Three years later, at the same restaurant, another six financial wizards took in a meal that cost £42,000 — "this time," Lansley notes, with "no such fuss."

“It may well be that we are already on course for creating a detached and insular super-class, a parallel at the top to the ‘underclass’ at the bottom,” he concludes. “That is certainly a strong and possibly irreversible trend in the United States, a society where the very rich exercise considerable political power for their own benefit.”

For our own benefit, in the UK, the United States, and across the world, we need to expand the discussion Rich Britain so potently encourages.

“The distribution of rewards,” Lansley reminds us, “should be a central issue of public policy.”

And not just in the UK.

— Sam Pizzigati

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the online weekly on excess and inequality. For updates on inequality books — and everything else inequality-related — sign up here for a free subscription.