Why Assumptions About 'Rising Inequality' Are Wrong

The past year has seen a spate of books worrying about the decline of Western liberal democracy. One of the lazy and unexamined assumptions in these books is the idea that rising inequality is a causal factor for the current wave of so-called populism witnessed in Europe and America. This cliché is trotted out by writers across the political spectrum. For example, in Why Liberalism Failed, the conservative Patrick J. Deneen points to a growing gap … between wealthy haves and left-behind have-nots. In How Democracy Ends, the centre-leftish David Runicman writes, a driver of populism [is] rising inequality. Similarly, Edward Luce in The Retreat of Western Liberalism reports in glib and journalistic prose that we live in times of stark and growing inequality. The problem with these platitudes is that they bear virtually no relationship to the lived reality of millions of people in the West. I will explain why. Recent Inequality In Great Britain, with changes in the type of work people do, and as capital has been reallocated from manufacturing to services, …