Danny Dorling's Blog, page 35

Three hundred years of arguments for a basic income

Review of ‘Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’

by Danny Dorling, March 16th 2017, Times Higher

This is a book about multiple emancipations. What would it take for all women to be free – by unshackling the countless numbers who are financially dependent on men? What action would free up enough people, men and women, to care for others who might otherwise live in fear, especially in countries where much more social care will be needed in the very near future?

Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, an economist and a political scientist, respectively, explain how the academic arguments for a basic income have been growing in strength since they were first made in the late 1700s. Since then, it has become clear to a still small (but growing) group of people that with so many of us no longer able to earn a subsistence income from the land, and with growing automation and ecological limits to sensible consumption, social progress without a basic income cannot be sustainable.

Today the vast majority of our food is grown and harvested through automation, and robots make more and more of our goods; but we cannot use machines to care for each other. Not yet – and, if we are to stay sane, hopefully never. A concern with sanity in a book on economics is refreshing.

A basic income would allow people to care for each other more and to work for others (for whom they would rather not work) less. However, say the authors, “we very much doubt that a generous unconditional basic income will ever be introduced anywhere as a result of a big triumphal revolution. It is more likely to enter through the back door.” By the back door they mean the gradual adaptation of existing complex benefit regimes, via thousands of adaptations following hundreds of experiments.

The authors agree with the late Sir Tony Atkinson, the economist and inequality studies pioneer, that a basic income is likely to be introduced gradually, by compromising primarily on the payment being unconditional. In one such scenario, anyone working in education, or caring for children, the sick or the elderly for 35 hours or more a week (which includes so many current ­working-age adults) would receive a basic income proportionate to their length of contribution in any tax jurisdiction. It would later be extended to all adults, not least because this approach so dramatically cuts administration costs.

The introduction of basic income would result in less production within firms and more within households. As production within the household is not included in gross domestic product, GDP volume would thus appear to fall, although entrepreneurship should rise as more people would be free to dabble. Van Parijs and Vanderborght explain all this patiently, providing argument after argument as to why its introduction would be “economically clever” and why it is the next logical step to take in a long history of social policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality. Their proposals are not only clear but also extremely pragmatic.

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The wealth parade by Ella Furness

Building Better Cities: 7th Annual Lecture of the Human City Institute

We think of cities as having existing for millennia, but only a few cities are that old and they were almost all extremely small. Most people in the world who have ever lived in a city as large as Birmingham, where this lecture is being given, are alive today. So we fool ourselves if we imagine that we have a wealth of historical evidence to draw on over how a large city is well run.

The city I grew up in and in which I now live is Oxford, still a small city but – like Birmingham – most of the city is less than one hundred years old. Most of the roads, most of the homes, most of the schools, most of the workplaces, are new. What most effects life in both Oxford and the West Midlands (and the country as a whole) is how economically unequal we are. All cities in the UK have a similar steep inequality gradient within them – from the richest suburb through to the poorest enclave. At times different cities are said to be the “most unequal” in the country. But they are all very similarly unequal and suffer from the effects of inequality greatly as compared to cities on most of the mainland of Europe. For instance, nowhere else in Europe is there so much crime resulting in so much imprisonment.

The recent economic crisis has exacerbated our problems. The main cause of homelessness for families in England today is being evicted from private rented accommodation. This is three times more common now than it was in 2010. Overall we don’t have too few homes, but we share out what we do have increasingly badly. Worse than at any time since 1911, which was when we first recorded their distribution properly. Many homes are under occupied; others are more and more overcrowded.

Our health has also worsened significantly since 2010 and that is mostly because the public services that cities provide are being cut. However, this is part of a wider urban crisis. We are also now failing to recruit teachers to work in schools in urban areas especially and seeing many other basic aspects of urban live become worse in absolute terms. This is something that has not been measured as failing to progress so badly since the 1930s. The slides with the references, maps and graphs that illustrate the lecture (that these words are a summary) of can be found here.

Other countries demonstrate how we could do better. Turn to France to look at health funding, Germany to looking at how to better house people in the city, or Finland for schooling. We are not very good at learning from abroad, despite being fortunate that enough people migrated into our cities from abroad in recent years to bring a halt to the housing demolition programs that so blighted many northern, Scottish and midland cities in the 1980s and 1990s.

At the heart of our urban problems is high and rising inequality. As economic inequality rises, more and more people near the very top of the income distribution begin to lose out as well as those in the middle and at the bottom. Equality is increased below the fabled 1%, an equality of austerity for those with less. If this continues it then spreads to all those below the 0.1%; but the take of those who have most still grows and grows. In recent years, and as a direct result of such a concentration of income and wealth at the top, the UK has become the most economically unequal country in Europe. It is no coincidence that it is also the first country after Greenland to propose to leave the EU.

Dutch and Danish cities show us how we could better plan our housing and workplaces to commute and get to school each day more easily. Norway and Sweden show how a high quality urban life is possible, even with cold weather! There are lessons from outside Europe too, from Japan and Korea that we could learn from (if only we looked there more often). The one places where there are few positive lessons to draw on is the USA, but we can look to there to see what might happen to our cities if we were to follow the American nightmare and become even more unequal in future.

Cities are just one object of geographical study. Everything is connected. By comparing the fortunes of people living in different cities in different countries we can begin to see just what is possible. We can see that there is an alternative to how we currently choose to live and arrange our urban life. And we can draw hope that a dystopian future is entirely avoidable. In most of the world, and in most cities in the world, peoples’ quality of life is rising rapidly. In the UK and USA we took the wrong road a few decades ago and are paying for it now. To hear the full lecture click ‘play’ below:

What geography can teach us about inequality

Geography is the subject that shows you how everything is connected to everything else.

Royal Geographical Society Lecture, given by Danny Dorling at the University of Portsmouth, UK, February 22nd 2017

This talk begins by showing some new maps of the world stretched to include all of humanity with equal prominence. It then zooms into Europe and considers issues such as population mobility (often called migration in the UK). Where across Europe do you think the most people have settled who have moved from one European country to live in another? The map might surprise you. The bulk of the lecture considers the UK and asks what we and the rest of the world can learn from us being unusual among European countries.

Proportion of international migrants in each region of Europe in 2014, cartogram by Ben Hennig

American political scientist Benjamin Radcliff recently used statistics to show that: ‘The differences in your feeling of well-being living in a Scandinavian country (where welfare programs are large) versus the US are going to be larger than the individual factors in your life. The political differences trump all the individual things you’re supposed to do to make yourself happier – to have fulfilling personal relationships, to have a job, to have more income. The political factors swamp all those individual factors. Countries with high levels of gross domestic product consumed by government have higher levels of personal satisfaction.’ Read more on a Better Politics: here.

It is not just political scientists that are beginning to come round to what most sociologists have presumed to be true for decades. Fewer economists (than used to be the case) now think that being taxed as little as possible results in people better enjoying ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Geographers can study the outcomes of natural experiment of low public spending in the UK and USA. But what can we do if we happen to live and work in the UK or USA in place of providing such good evidence and setting such a bad example?

The proportion of adults reporting poor health in the UK has more than doubled since 2010

There has been a rapid deterioration in self-reported health in recent years with a doubling of the proportion of the population aged 16 years or over that were ‘mostly dissatisfied’ with their health since 2010.

Self-reported health has continued to decline since the statistics used in this commentary were released in March 2015. Only one aggregate figure was released in early 2016. It combined three of the categories. Just one mention of this was made in the most recent 2016 Office for National Statistics (ONS) ‘measuring the quality of life’ report. The 2017 report has yet to be released.

As the table below shows, the latest (2013–2014) statistic is worse than any recorded since 2002 and lies well outside the range of confidence limits last published by the ONS in their 2015 release (58.8–59.8%). Self-reported health in the UK is deteriorating at an alarming rate with acceleration in that deterioration in the year 2011. In “A Better Politics: How Government can make us happier” I used statistics collected by the British Household Panel Survey in the 1990s to show that health is overwhelmingly the most important short-term determinant of wellbeing. People can and do adapt to a deterioration in their health, but not when how they are having to live is making them, and especially those around them, ill.

Read more in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society

Trends in UK self-reported health

Excess deaths in 2015 may be linked to failures in health and social care

Excess deaths in 2015 may be linked to failures in health and social care

Martin McKee on Channel 4 news

Researchers exploring why there has been a substantial increase in mortality in England and Wales in 2015 have concluded that failures in the health and social care system linked to disinvestment are likely to be the main cause.

There were 30,000 excess deaths in 2015, representing the largest increase in deaths in the post-war period. The excess deaths, which included a large spike in January that year, were largely in the older population who are most dependent on health and social care. Reporting their analysis in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Professor Danny Dorling, and colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, tested four possible explanations for the January 2015 spike in mortality.

After ruling out data errors, cold weather and flu as main causes for the spike, the researchers found that NHS performance data revealed clear evidence of health system failures. Almost all targets were missed including ambulance call-out times and A&E waiting times, despite unexceptional A&E attendances compared to the same month in previous years. Staff absence rates rose and more posts remained empty as staff had not been appointed.

The researchers note the limitations of the study, stressing that it is an exploratory analysis attempting to address a complex phenomenon, and have called for further investigation.

More information

The Geography of a rapid rise in elderly mortality in England and Wales, 2014-15

Since at least the early 1900s almost all affluent nations in the world have continually experienced improvements in human longevity. Using ONS mid-year population and deaths estimates for Local Authorities for England and Wales, in a new paper published Today in “Health and Place” we show that these improvements have recently reversed. We estimate that in England and Wales there were 39,074 more deaths in the year to July 2015 as compared to the year to July 2014 (32,208 of these were of individuals aged 80+). We demonstrate that these increases occurred almost everywhere geographically; in poor and affluent areas, in rural and urban areas. The implications of our findings are profound given what has come before them, combined with the current political climate of austerity.

This new paper looks in detail at the geography of the rises in mortality in the year to July 2015 and suggests that mortality has risen almost everywhere. As yet there is no evidence that these elevated mortality rates haven fallen during 2016 or in early 2017: read more

The image below is from an earlier paper which illustrated the rising reporting of poor health in the UK up until 2014.

Trends in UK self-reported health

The Geography of a rapid rise in elderly mortality in England and Wales, 2014-15

<< previous publication

Green, M., Dorling, D., and Minton, J. (2017)

The Geography of a rapid rise in elderly mortality

in England and Wales, 2014-15

Heath and Place, 44, pp.77-85

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Annual Politics Lecture: Leeds Beckett University

I am always surprised that more people in the UK do not know that we now have the greatest economic inequality of any large country in Europe (if the share of the best-off 10% or 1% is used to rank countries). Many people do not know that we have chosen to tax and spend far less than almost any other country in Europe, apart from Ireland. I am surprised people do not know that we fund our National Health Service at half the rate that the Swiss fund their public health services per head, or that their 1% take half as much as our 1%.

Some changes are underway. Disastrous government polices such as “help to buy” were scrapped in December 2016 (apart from new build help to buy). The policy of “pay to stay” in social housing policy was abandoned in November 2016. And this is just in housing. However we have a huge way to go if we are to even try to even begin to move towards emulating the living standards of an average Western European country. First we need to know how much worse we do in education, health and housing as compared to most other Europeans, and that none of these problems are a result of immigration.

Without continued immigration it will become much harder to staff our schools, hospitals and care homes and to build those homes that we do need. A great deal needs to change. It will most probably change slowly, one policy at a time, many things will get worse; but when it comes to economic inequality they can only get better – because it is not possible to do worse than be the most economically unequal country in Europe.

The Annual Lecture, with slides, can be listened to here

It is based on the book, A Better Politics, free PDF here

A Better Politics

Reducing Inequality: Reasons for Hope for 2017

If high and growing inequality is benefitting fewer and fewer people in the UK and the USA we should be glad that more people now recognise this and not be surprised that when offered a binary choice between business as usual and change a large number will vote for change, almost irrespective of the nature of that single alternative option that is offered to them.

In the USA ‘The life expectancy at 40 years of age in the top income percentile of the United States is better than the mean in any other country for life expectancy at 40 years of age. However, not by a lot, and likely not better than the top percentile in Sweden or the Netherlands. In contrast, the life expectancy at 40 years of age in the bottom income percentile of the United States is located between the mean for Pakistan and Sudan for life expectancy at 40 years of age.’

In the UK in 2016 an annual survey of wellbeing for young people aged 16 to 25 recorded its worse results since it had first been taken in 2009. It found that more than a quarter no longer felt in control of their lives. A third said they expected to have a worse standard of living than their parents. More than a third did not feel in control of their job prospects. A fifth said they did not have the ability to change their circumstances. A sixth said that they thought their life would amount to nothing, no matter how hard they try. And fully 42% said that traditional goals like owning a house or getting a steady job are unrealistic.

Equality in Europe, the landscape, battle and war

Equality in Europe, the landscape, battle and war, public lecture by Danny Dorling, St Cross College, Oxford, January 24th.

At the moment the most interesting question is this – how on earth have we got to where we are, and then what might happen next. I’ve divided this talk into three parts, the landscape, the battle and the war. The landscape is my take on the history of how we got to where we are. The middle part of the talk, the battle, is about the Brexit referendum. And the war is where we currently are. I think it is a war about equality and inequality.