Labour - where now?

[baboon2004]

In a sense, it's a presumption that you are making as well. You want income growth for the poor rather than across the board. But why? Why shouldn't we cap income at the level of the poor? Why does everybody even need £18k a year? It's all totally arbitrary. From there, you can even call the rich a foreign country and stop worrying about them, and then you've gone right round in a circle.

In response to the first question, because, according to whatever measure you choose to use (and obviosuly there's a huge amount of disagreement about how to measure poverty), there are people in this country (obv. including a lot of children) who live in poverty. And I think that's pretty disgusting in a country as rich as this.

Well, I've lived on £18K in London - of course it can be done. And yes, the line drawn is arbitrary, but you can say that about most numerical lines. The point is, the line drawn by those who reserach such things, isn't being met.

In terms of calling the rich a foreign country, how do you mean? I worry about the fact so many people are limitlessly greedy, even though the majority of their wealth is just sitting there. That's pretty insane, in my view.

 

[grizzleb]

In a sense, it's a presumption that you are making as well. You want income growth for the poor rather than across the board. But why? Why shouldn't we cap income at the level of the poor? Why does everybody even need £18k a year? It's all totally arbitrary. From there, you can even call the rich a foreign country and stop worrying about them, and then you've gone right round in a circle.

It's not really arbitrary though is it. What you've said is pretty much an argument for slavery.

 

[vimothy]

In response to the first question, because, according to whatever measure you choose to use (and obviosuly there's a huge amount of disagreement about how to measure poverty), there are people in this country (obv. including a lot of children) who live in poverty. And I think that's pretty disgusting in a country as rich as this.

Measuring poverty is a thorny issue (e.g. you can measure the present discounted value of future income streams from benefits and savings from welfare spending and the UK poor can look quite wealthy). But what I'm trying to say is... imagine, for a moment, that you are king and the date is 1910. You decide that Britain is massively wealthy, and that further growth is unnecessary. You redistribute the pie and hold economic growth in line with population growth, so that pc GDP is stable. Fast forward 100 years and everyone's income in paralleloland is at the same level as the contemporary UK poor IRL. Sound optimal? The fact that it is not is implicit in your argument, it seems to me. Why do we want people who are poor to have higher incomes?

Well, I've lived on £18K in London - of course it can be done.

How many kids do you have?

Of course--it is done, but it doesn't follow that therefore this is a good thing.

 

[Slothrop]

How many kids do you have?

Of course--it is done, but it doesn't follow that therefore this is a good thing.

But a large part of the difficulty there would come from the cost of housing. Which is extremely high in london because of (guess what) the pressure on the market due to large number of people making large amounts of money.

 

[vimothy]

Okay, so just ignore the presence of rich people for a moment--why is the fact that housing is expensive relative to income a bad thing?

 

[baboon2004]

Measuring poverty is a thorny issue (e.g. you can measure the present discounted value of future income streams from benefits and savings from welfare spending and the UK poor can look quite wealthy). But what I'm trying to say is... imagine, for a moment, that you are king and the date is 1910. You decide that Britain is massively wealthy, and that further growth is unnecessary. You redistribute the pie and hold economic growth in line with population growth, so that pc GDP is stable. Fast forward 100 years and everyone's income in paralleloland is at the same level as the contemporary UK poor IRL. Sound optimal? The fact that it is not is implicit in your argument, it seems to me. Why do we want people who are poor to have higher incomes?

How many kids do you have?

Of course--it is done, but it doesn't follow that therefore this is a good thing.

Point taken, but I'm not advocating zero growth per se, so much as saying growth is fine, as long as redistributive issues are taken just as seriously (more seriously, at present), which they're not. Until those issues are considered, further growth will not help anyone but those already well off (as those stats I attached to the last post show, notwithstanding certain areas in which Labour have done fairly well).

Re the 18K, absolutely, my bad - no kids, therefore much easier. It's relative to circumstance, and I should've said that.

My point is, all things remianing the same, I wouldn't be any more content per se at £50K than I am at a very comfortable £30K. As long as people are enslaved to the idea that they will be happier with more money, once they earn enough to get the basics they need for a contented life, people will care more about money than they do about other people. And as an ultimate optimist about human beings, I'd say that this goes contrary to a people's deeper-seated nature, whereby helping other people gives you a bigger kick than helping yourself does.

 

[baboon2004]

Okay, so just ignore the presence of rich people for a moment--why is the fact that housing is expensive relative to income a bad thing?

This is a slightly tangential answer, maybe, but because renting laws in this country are so skewed towards the landlord/estate agent, that in the absence of owning one's own place, many people feel in a very precarious position.

So therefore a lot of people feel 'forced' into getting into the housing market, which is kept high in London precisely because there are a lot of rich people here (I presumer - can't think of any other reason).

 

[massrock]

Housing is basically a necessity that is in limited supply and as such prices in a property market that is not properly managed will tend towards (actually way beyond, as we see again and again) the upper limit of what is tenable, let alone reasonable. I'd say 'properly managed' in this case means at the very least not encouraging unchecked speculation.

 

[vimothy]

I quite agree re excessive wealth being unnecessary and do find it personally distasteful. But it's not something that I think is important in and of itself. The presence of inequality on the other hand is important and morally wrong and should be ameliorated by redistributive policy. But it's important because higher income = better standard of living, not because higher incomes are bad (on the contrary, low incomes are bad).

 

[vimothy]

BTW, housing in the UK is expensive because not enough houses are built: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/consultations_and_legislation/barker/consult_barker_index.cfm#report

 

[baboon2004]

I quite agree re excessive wealth being unnecessary and do find it personally distasteful. But it's not something that I think is important in and of itself. The presence of inequality on the other hand is important and morally wrong and should be ameliorated by redistributive policy. But it's important because higher income = better standard of living, not because higher incomes are bad (on the contrary, low incomes are bad).

yeah, i find it distasteful only because of what exists at the other end of the scale. S'all relative, exactly.

but on top of that, i do find it genuinely mentally disturbing, the way people have internalised 'wealth = happiness', whilst paying lip service to the opposite.

Re housing - not enough houses are built because land is so goddamn expensive, correct?

 

[Slothrop]

Tbh, I think the idea is less that having more stuff makes you less happy, more that the gap between the (real) wealth of people on low and high incomes has more to do with how happy people on low incomes are than the absolute level of how much stuff they've got - because it's a lot harder to be content with what you've got when utterly unattainable things are constantly paraded in front of you and you're told that this is what you should be aspiring to or even (since the people constructing the narrative of what's normal tend to be at the top of the pile not the bottom) what you're failing if you haven't already got.

 

[baboon2004]

Tbh, I think the idea is less that having more stuff makes you less happy, more that the gap between the (real) wealth of people on low and high incomes has more to do with how happy people on low incomes are than the absolute level of how much stuff they've got - because it's a lot harder to be content with what you've got when utterly unattainable things are constantly paraded in front of you and you're told that this is what you should be aspiring to or even (since the people constructing the narrative of what's normal tend to be at the top of the pile not the bottom) what you're failing if you haven't already got.

oh, wasn't saying necessarily that it makes you less happy, just that it's irrelevant past a certain level of wealth (but that worrying about it might in itself make you less happy, I suppose).

Agree with you on this though. And the creation of new markets depends upon convincing people they need new things all the time, and thus keeping them unfulfilled on a material level, while (mostly) not addressing other areas of fulfilment. Keeping people dissatisfied is the way to make money.

 

[massrock]

The excessive wealth of some is not entirely unrelated to the extreme poverty of others though is it.

Also 'poverty' is not entirely relative - there is a certain level below which a person or a society is dealing with unacceptable poverty, I would say.

We don't know so much about that 'here' but again that's not entirely unrelated to why they do know about that 'there'.

Maybe stating the obv. and talking at cross purposes to the thread...

 

[Mr. Tea]

My very half-arsed and cod-psychological take on this is that it's not so much being rich that makes people happy, it's getting rich(er). Stasis is not in itself fulfilling for a lot of folks, it's the sense of "going up in the world" that hits the spot.

 

[baboon2004]

My very half-arsed and cod-psychological take on this is that it's not so much being rich that makes people happy, it's getting rich(er). Stasis is not in itself fulfilling for a lot of folks, it's the sense of "going up in the world" that hits the spot.

Definitely something in this. Mostly this kind of empty ambition illustrates self-doubt/dissatisfaction in other areas of one's life, which can be alleviated only by feeling 'better' than others in generally-accepted currency (no pun intended).

 

[hucks]

My very half-arsed and cod-psychological take on this is that it's not so much being rich that makes people happy, it's getting rich(er). Stasis is not in itself fulfilling for a lot of folks, it's the sense of "going up in the world" that hits the spot.

It's both, innit? There are two ongoing comparisons - to where you were and to others around you. One of the contradictions in that is that as you move up in the world, you change your peer group, so your comparators are higher, so you don't get to bank that happiness. Richer peple are happier than poor ones, though, cos they still have the poor to look down on, albeit from a distance. I digress...

 

[vimothy]

Some interesting findings re poverty and inequality and violent conflict in this paper, "Economics and violent conflict": http://www.preventconflict.org/portal/economics/Essay.pdf

 

[Pestario]

Re housing - not enough houses are built because land is so goddamn expensive, correct?

Expensive land is conducive to construction, hence why residential skyscrapers are built in city centres and not out in random fields. The high cost of housing in London results from a combination of inadequate supply and the amount of money available to pay for housing (due to high income earners).

However the high cost of land inhibits construction in cases where the number of flats which need to be built to make the development of said land profitable can't be attained because of planning issues or other remedial costs imposed on the developer. In some cases the govt's requirement for the inclusion of 'affordable' housing units in a development puts such a cost on the developer that the whole project becomes unviable and you're left with no housing at all.

I may sound anti-planning but I'm not, town planning is generally pro-development, however the most important planning decisions are often not made by planners themselves but are at the mercy of extreme NIMBYism and petty politics which stop otherwise reasonable developments. The end result is a very slow, uncertain and costly process which stifles residential development.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's both, innit?

Oh yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with your points at all - I think feeling 'poor' relative to the very rich people who live nearby is a huge source of dissatisfaction for a lot of people in this country who, let's face it, actually have far greater material wealth than the vast majority of the world's population.

Thing is, this wealth-relativity effect in the opposite direction depresses people as well, because they see adverts for Oxfam or whatever with starving kids on TV and then feel guilty about what they have got, in addition to feeling inadequate about what they haven't got. Few things make you feel more miserable than the feeling that you're miserable despite not really having a good tangible reason to feel miserable...