Politics for the New Dark Age covers a wide variety of topics in my quest to provide a comprehensive approach to modern progressivism. Some chapters look at areas of traditional strength for parties of the left (health, education), others look at areas of traditional weakness (individual rights, foreign policy). But no issue is arguably more important to left identity than inequality, which I tackle at length in Chapter IX. My central thesis, that socialists’ focus on equality and fraternity represents a necessary return to the core values of the liberal enlightenment, is a philosophical call to arms.

In some ways, I wish I’d been bolder. Tackling inequality was an unsexy concept in the 90s and early 2000s when I was educated, and it’s rarely taken seriously as an ethical or policy position in Canberra. Classical liberals, including many in the centre-left, argue at length that what matters most is inequality of opportunity. Beyond pointing out the importance of inequality of risk as well, in the book I argue that material inequality is bad for society largely in terms of its negative effect on material outcomes: lower, shorter, riskier economic growth. In other words, I am fighting for equality on the enemy’s [technocratic] territory. It’s an argument I think the left can win on the evidence, but it’s not our best frame.

The bottom line

So let me be clear: equality of outcomes matters for every single metric of a good society the left should hold dear. Whether it’s individual or group performance; economic or productivity growth; citizens’ trust in and the resilience of social institutions; or individual health and well-being. Material and social inequality is universally and uniquely harmful. It is harmful to the social contract, inasmuch as it creates markers of hierarchy and difference that corrode the mutual trust necessary for people to act cooperatively. And it is deeply corrosive for individuals, as we are all biologically conditioned by evolution to react to markers of hierarchy and difference with psychological responses and behaviour sets that are socially and personally harmful. There is no single policy the left could pursue that could have better results on every metric of social health and resilience than to advance equality at every turn.

Which brings to an article in Evonomics (which I highly recommend) by the power duo of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Wilkinson & Pickett’s 2011 book, “The Spirit Level: Why Equality Makes Societies Stronger”, lays out the fundamental evidence for inequality’s pernicious effect(s) on social outcomes; the piece is a useful and timely reminder of the book’s key arguments. Wilkinson & Pikett are epidemiologists first and foremost, and what biology tells us is that citizens of more equal societies life longer, healthier lives than citizens of unequal countries regardless of their absolute level of income. The harms of inequality are:

“not caused by the society not being rich enough (or even being too rich), but by the material differences between people within each society being too big. What matters is where we stand in relation to others in our own society.”

Inequality doesn’t only affect the worst-off in society (that’s poverty, a denial of basic rights), but worsens social and individual outcomes for everyone. If you consider how rising middle-incomes in Australia and other developed countries have been coupled with massive increases in social fear and anxiety, you can start to see how the effect operates. Beyond the physiological impacts, the effects of inequality on cognition and individual behaviour are even more concerning. Multiple recent studies have shown that priming children with an awareness of their place in social hierarchies dramatically lowers test performance. 

Once this realisation is made, policy interventions to address social harms rapidly simplify:

“[Traditionally, e]very problem is seen as needing its own solution—unrelated to others. People are encouraged to exercise, not to have unprotected sex, to say no to drugs, to try to relax, to sort out their work-life balance, and to give their children “quality” time. The only thing that many of these policies do have in common is that they often seem to be based on the belief that the poor need to be taught to be more sensible. The glaringly obvious fact that these problems have common roots in inequality and relative deprivation disappears from view. However, it is now clear that income distribution provides policymakers with a way of improving the psychosocial well-being of whole populations.”

As I have written elsewhere, we don’t need to merely educate people to eat right, exercise and avoid self-destructive behaviours. We need to address the root cause of why they perform those behaviours in the first place. In fact, telling people how to behave without addressing the underlying material and social inequalities that affect them will likely only exacerbate such behaviour. When people are economically and socially secure, when they believe that risk and opportunity are socialised, then I suspect we’ll find that many of their anxieties about novelty – for example, doing something in energy policy to prevent climate change, or to help refugees fleeing conflict ­– will similarly melt away.

In the final analysis therefore, when someone on the left equivocates about whether or not striving equality should be our goal, look them in the face and tell them it must be.