Since the birth of civilisation there have always been extremes of wealth and poverty. Many societies from the Roman Empire to Victorian Britain have had a small very rich elite who rule over the masses. The Roman Empire had very high levels of slavery. The working class in Victorian Britain was exploited and impoverished. And yet they were both societies that survived and thrived.
Why then should the increasing levels of inequality in the West be destabilising? Peter Turchin in his recently published book End Times has developed an interesting explanation which has implications for all of us. He says increasing levels of inequality have two negative effects that mutually reinforce each other: immiseration and elite overpopulation.
By immiseration he means that the reduction in income levels of the poor is so significant that their quality-of-life declines. This might be manifested in lower life expectancy, less healthy, shorter children or less home ownership. It probably also involves increased levels of stress, child poverty, poor diet and drug abuse.
The USA has demonstrated the worst of these effects in recent years. Overall life expectancy has now declined for 2 decades and is significantly less than levels in Europe. The life expectancy of the white working class was particularly affected by the over-prescription of opioids in the early twenty-first century. Britain is not immune to the same trends. According to the Kings Fund:
In 2018–20, males in the least deprived 10 per cent of areas in England could expect to live almost a decade longer than males in the 10 per cent most deprived areas; for females the difference was 8 years. About one-third of these inequalities in life expectancy are caused by higher mortality rates from heart and respiratory disease, and lung cancer in more deprived areas. These conditions are potentially preventable: smoking and obesity, the main risk factors, are higher among more deprived groups.
It matters not that in the West we still have a much more affluent lifestyle, than Third World countries; that by living in the West an individual is so much more prosperous than he would be in Africa, China or India. Immiseration occurs if the current generation has a less fulfilling lifestyle than the previous generation. The poor feel that the elite ruling classes have exploited them; that the elite are actively pursuing their own get-rich agenda at the expense of the less well off. Trust in government breaks down and conspiracy theories abound.
At the other end of the scale, as society becomes more unequal, more people enter the elite group of high wage earners. More elite children are educated at private schools. They all enter the world with the expectation of getting good jobs with high incomes. The difficulty is that the number of good jobs is relatively static. The number of high-ranking posts in industry, finance and government is limited. Not all can succeed. Those that are not successful become frustrated and more likely to breach the cultural norms of society by cheating the system. They also have a grudge against the successful elite and thus have a natural affiliation with the immiserated poor. They become the ‘counter-elite’ in Turchin’s terminology.
This is very dangerous for democracy. The counter-elite shares the anger, frustration and conspiracy theories of the immiserated. If they are politically adept, they can mobilise immiserated votes against the ruling classes. This is what Johnson and Trump managed to do. It is dangerous, because both men (being unsuccessful members of the elite) were poor managers and presided over chaotic governments that further immiserated the poor.
This is just the first stage effect of increasing levels of inequality. Turchin opines that the situation is so bad in the US that there is a danger that a further break down in society is possible. A large counter-elite will be very disruptive to the normal functions of society, at the extreme they are capable of instigating an insurrection. With the high levels of gun ownership in America, this is a frightening prospect.
We in Britain are currently following the same track as America, although at least a decade behind. Growth in life expectancy has stalled, the economy is stagnating, young families struggle to own their own homes, all signs of growing immiseration. At the other end of the scale universities are turning out record numbers of graduates, most of whom will not get plum jobs, indicating a growing frustrated counter-elite.
Turchin believes that all societies eventually become unstable and that at an interval of around 200 years, every society has the risk of a major breakdown. The American civil war was around 1860. Could it be that America is due for another internal conflict by 2060? The French 3rd republic was formed in 1870 after the Franco-Prussian war. Could the race riots in France, get worse and threaten their political system in the next 50 years? Not all crisis points end in conflict and violence. According to Turchin, Britain successfully overcame the last crisis in the mid-1800s by extending the voting franchise and enabling trade-unions to operate; this eventually enabled a more equal society to emerge. It is an open question whether Britain again has the political will to avoid the next major crisis by reversing the current inequality trends.
