The economy: from inequality to extreme evolution

The fight for a more meaningful economy is gathering pace. The battleground has now been defined as the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Over the last month, two gauntlets have been thrown into this ring that spurred me to blog this week. The first, a culmination of decades of analysis, is neat and sublime. The other is frankly ridiculous. But the combination is utterly compelling. A few years ago, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in their book, "The Spirit Level", launched a big debate on the link between economic inequalities and some of our most entrenched social and health problems. While it simmered for a while it never fully caught on. This time however, a French academic called Thomas Piketty along with his co-conspirator, Emmanuel Saez have set a fire ablaze in the US academic world which has now got serious UK national papers devoting column inches to his work. He shows how capitalism will make the rich richer even when the countries they operate in slip into decline. Economic failure is rewarded and result is simply an ever-widening chasm between rich and poor. His solution is for governments to tax wealth, not just income. His analysis is hard to shrug off because Piketty has looked back 200 years, taken in the two World Wars, and expanded his analysis to include the accelerated growth (until recently) of the emerging economies. Unlike economic theorists, he's obsessed with making sure his conclusions are 100% evidence-based. Sublime indeed. Here’s the ridiculous one. Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics has done some research which suggests that the human race could begin to split in two after the year 3000, with a genetic upper class and a “dim-witted” underclass gradually emerging. An extreme and comical view, perhaps it illustrates the direction we may be heading in unless we equalise our economy.

The economic and social case for rethinking our economic model has now been made.

While I don't expect an HG Wells vision of the poor and marginalised  'Eloi' being farmed by evil Morlocks in 10,000 years’ time, the economic and social case for rethinking our economic model has now been made. A battle of ideas is now finally underway between the so called 'neo-liberal' view of trickle down economic growth, and the view that our current dominant approach the economy is simply dividing us into haves and have-nots. SCVO is fully committed to changing our economic model to one which reverses inequality and brings prosperity to the many, not the few. We will be releasing a discussion paper soon. It will show that we already have all the solutions and arguments we need. As a sector, I believe that we are now more than ready to get our perspective into this debate.