The reason why skin colour is such a poor guide to other genetic characteristics is likely to be that lighter skin colours may be very recent developments. The genetic analysis of a prehistoric human skeleton found in Spain suggests that as recently as 7,000 years ago its owner had dark skin but blue eyes. The authors of the research report say: ‘Our results indicate that the adaptive spread of light skin pigmentation … was not complete in some European populations by the Mesolithic’ period, implying that it has become complete only during the last 7,000 years – the briefest moment in genetic terms.390 Because skin colour cannot be regarded as a predictor of other genetic characteristics, there will be multitudes of people of a different skin colour from you with whom you nonetheless share many other genetic similarities, and many people with the same skin colour with whom you share relatively few. What matters then, are not any insurmountable biological differences, but the social prejudices which lead us to burden anything associated with low social status with a raft of imagined inferior characteristics. It is as if we believed any visible difference was like the tip of an iceberg, indicative of its submerged 90 per cent. But for the vast majority of individual genetic or cultural differences this view is simply mistaken.
The Holocaust, which led to the deaths of more than 80 per cent of Jews in Germany, was based in part on the false belief that people who were culturally Jewish were a distinct genetic race.391 The same goes for the genetically very similar Hutu and Tutsi, resulting in mass slaughter in Rwanda in 1994. Once any characteristic, whether physical or cultural, becomes a social status marker, it becomes overloaded with scientifically untenable inferences about inherent differences. The ‘fundamental attribution’ error leads us constantly to imagine that problems arise from people’s inherent characteristics rather than from their circumstances, and the racializing of class or cultural characteristics is a prime example of this process at work.
Rich and poor attribute quite different inherent personality characteristics to each other. By seeing these issues as if, for instance, they reflected heightened inbuilt levels of greediness or laziness, we fail to see how most of us would respond much like the rich and poor do to the experience of living in wealth or poverty.
Although there is a strong tendency to imagine that the social class hierarchy is a meritocracy which reflects innate differences in people’s abilities, we saw in Chapter 6 that the truth is the other way round: one’s starting position in the social hierarchy is the primary cause of the differences in ability that ensue. In this chapter we have also seen that the unthinking tendency to explain people’s class position in terms of innate characteristics, rather than in terms of their circumstances, is a widespread psychological error. Social prejudice exacts an appalling human price in terms of stunted lives and unrealized potential; as prejudices are internalized and transmitted from one generation to the next, the harm is magnified and perpetuated. But the most important cost for most people in everyday life comes from the creation and maintenance of the divisions which are at its core – from the social awkwardness they create, from the damage they do to friendship, conviviality and community life, as well as from the fear of being seen as inferior which makes so many people shun the social contact we need.
Modern societies are in a position to counter these hierarchies and make the next great leap in human social development. The necessary background conditions – not only of affluence but also of the interdependent and co-operative nature of modern production and consumption – are in place. Equally important is the conceptual background: the evidence that shows beyond doubt that the importance of class and status can be reduced by making the material differences between us smaller. In The Spirit Level, we showed that the many problems associated with low social status become much less common throughout society when income differences are smaller. We have also seen that how people treat each other is negatively affected by larger income differences: people trust each other less, they are less likely to be helpful to others, violence is more common, and community life atrophies. At the same time, we see unmistakable signs of class and status once again becoming increasingly important in more unequal societies: social mobility slows, people are less likely to marry across social classes, and measures of status anxiety are higher at all income levels. Responding to these raised status anxieties, people in more unequal societies spend more on status goods; they work longer hours and get into debt more as they try to appear successful.
Envisioning a future in which these problems are dramatically reduced is difficult. It will involve a great transition, changing how we live with each other and enabling us to live within the environmental limits of the planet. A better world is not only possible but essential. We shall discuss its outlines in the next two chapters.
Part Three
* * *
THE ROAD AHEAD
8
A Sustainable Future?fn1
The final chapter of this book will set out practical policies for increasing equality, but it would be wrong to do so without first thinking about how greater equality can be integrated with the need to move towards environmental sustainability. The long-term well-being of populations requires that we take an integrated view of the direction in which our societies should be moving. Fortunately, as we shall show in this chapter, greater equality not only contributes to the well-being of entire populations, but also eases the path to sustainability by lessening the environmental impact of those populations.
LIMITS TO GROWTH
We should start with the relationship between economic growth and well-being. Although economic development in rich countries has transformed people’s real quality of life during the last couple of centuries, a large and growing body of evidence suggests that when societies have reached current levels of prosperity, growth has largely finished its work. Measures of the quality of life show that higher average material standards in the rich countries no longer improve well-being.392 Given that throughout human history ‘more’ has almost always meant ‘better’, this marks a fundamental turning point in human development.
The changing relation between life expectancy and national income per head (shown for countries at all stages in economic development in Figure 8.1) illustrates this pattern. Life expectancy rises rapidly in the early stages of economic growth and then gradually levels out until, among the richest countries, the relationship becomes horizontal and the connection disappears: as growth continues it is no longer associated with increases in life expectancy. Indeed, some countries – such as Cuba and Costa Rica – achieve levels of life expectancy comparable with the richest countries despite being only one-third as wealthy in terms of their GDP per head.
This plateau is not a ‘ceiling effect’ caused by nudging up against the limits of human life expectancy. Even in societies where longevity is greatest, life expectancy continues to rise just as fast as it has done in other periods during the last century: we continue to gain two to three years’ longer life expectancy with every decade that passes (except under conditions of austerity, as in the UK in recent years). The difference is that these gains now take place regardless of the pace of economic growth. Even over periods of ten, twenty or forty years, there is little or no correlation in these countries between rising national income per head and changes in life expectancy.393
Figure 8.1: Life expectancy levels off at higher levels of economic development.
Similar patterns can be seen if, instead of life expectancy, we look at measures of happiness and well-being. Rapid rises in the early stages of economic development are followed by a levelling out, even though countries continue to get richer. What the data are telling us is a simple but fundamental truth: for people in less developed countries, where many do not have access to basic necessities, economic development and rising material standards remain important drivers of well-being. But, for people in rich countries, having more and more of everything makes less and less difference. After our most urgent needs have been sat
isfied, there are only diminishing returns to further increases in income. It is a pattern that is almost bound to emerge at some point as countries get richer over the long course of economic development. Although higher material standards continue to be needed in low-income countries, in rich societies they have ceased to make important contributions to well-being: having more clearly makes least difference to those who have most. Rather than there being a well-defined threshold level of income or standard of material adequacy, it appears from Figure 8.1 that there is a long, slow transition as economic growth makes a gradually diminishing contribution.
The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to provide a better measure of economic well-being than Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Unlike measures of subjective well-being, which reflect our experience of the totality of emotional, social and economic life, it is (like GDP) a measure only of the value of economic transactions, but with some major adjustments. It is calculated by subtracting from GDP the many harmful things which nevertheless generate economic activity (such as car crashes and air pollution, environmental damage and loss of leisure) and then adding in the value of unpaid work (including caring and volunteering). The aim is to provide an estimate of the economic activity which we value positively. GPI has now been measured in at least seventeen different developed countries and the results confirm that economic well-being has ceased to increase with economic growth.392 Averaging the data across these countries shows that despite continuing huge rises in GDP per head, measures of economic well-being peaked in the later 1970s. Figure 8.2 shows the data for the USA. Note that even if economic growth had fewer negative consequences and the calculation of the GPI continued to produce a positive balance, this would not necessarily – as the USA life satisfaction data in Figure 8.2 shows – translate into an increase in human subjective well-being. The process of diminishing returns to well-being from increased production is more fundamental than that. The problem is not just a matter of subtracting the ‘bads’ from economic activity, it is also that the more we already have, the less difference additions to consumption make to well-being. In short, you can have enough – even of a good thing.
As soon as economic growth parts company from increases in well-being for society as a whole, continued economic growth loses its rational basis. But everyone’s desire for a higher income continues to be driven by status competition, although it no longer serves the overall well-being of the population and causes significant damage to the environment (see below).
Figure 8.2: GDP per head continues upwards, but Life Satisfaction and the Genuine Progress Indicator no longer rise with it. Figures for the USA 1950–2008.392
A common argument marshalled against attempts to redirect economic policy away from growth is that doing so will diminish innovation. Clearly, however, if we are going to reduce carbon emissions, cut our use of non-renewable resources and develop a high and sustainable quality of life, technical change must be made to serve new objectives. New technologies must be harnessed to the development of cleaner and more resource-efficient ways of living. Rather than growing the economy, we need to ‘grow’ sustainable well-being. As Tim Jackson, an ecological economist and professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, has argued, our task now is to improve well-being without growth.394 And, as continued innovation raises productivity, we must use it to increase time devoted to leisure rather than consumption. Leisure, as time freed from the demands of necessity, to be spent with friends, family and community, or doing whatever we enjoy, makes a major contribution to well-being. And as automation and artificial intelligence replace many forms of employment, it is crucial that this change is used to increase leisure for everyone, rather than increase unemployment for a growing minority.202
CLIMATE CHANGE NEEDS A NEW ECONOMY
It is a remarkable coincidence that, in the period in which it has become clear that economic growth in the rich countries has largely finished its work in transforming the quality of human life, we have also become aware of the environmental limits to growth. Though ignored by sceptics, the scientific evidence on the consequences of carbon emissions is incontrovertible. In May 2013, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere (measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific – far away from any local sources of pollution) surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time. That is 40 per cent higher than before industrialization – and higher than humans have ever breathed before.
For those who find it hard to imagine how human activity can change the climate, it may help to imagine that, if you were to take a desktop model of the globe, about 30 centimetres in diameter, 95 per cent of our atmosphere would lie within a very thin layer round it, only about a quarter of the thickness of a credit card. Now imagine pumping world emissions of 36 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into that layer each year.
Global warming is an inescapable consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which allow the sun’s rays in through our atmosphere but prevent some of the heat they generate from escaping back into space. The separate contributions to the increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere from each of the main sources – the burning of oil, coal and natural gas, from forest clearance and cement production – are well-known. Measurements by key institutions such as NASA in the USA and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, show how CO2 concentrations and global average temperatures have been rising almost in lockstep. Others show the rapid shrinking of the polar ice-caps and the rise in sea levels.
As long ago as 2007, James Hansen (head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies), working with an international scientific team, estimated that 350 ppm was the upper limit for atmospheric CO2 concentrations if we were to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2°C – the level once regarded as relatively safe.395
A decade on, it now appears that the consequences of the 1°C rise in global temperatures that has already taken place are closer to those originally predicted for a 2°C rise, and that there is probably no such thing as a ‘safe’ rise in global temperatures. In 2009, the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, presided over by Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, estimated that, through heatwaves, drought, water shortages and flooding, climate change was already causing 300,000 deaths a year and that it had already displaced 26 million people; the number of deaths is thought likely to triple by the 2020s. Ninety per cent of these deaths occurred in developing countries, rather than in the rich countries which produce the highest carbon emissions per head. The World Health Organization has estimated that, through floods, drought and crop failure, global warming will, between 2030 and 2050, cause 250,000 additional deaths each year just from heat exposure, diarrhoea, malaria and childhood undernutrition.396
Global warming is proceeding more rapidly than previous estimates had suggested. The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that global average temperatures for 2016 were the highest recorded; in addition, the sixteen warmest years ever recorded were all in the period 1998–2015. Because some of the effects already set in train by higher CO2 levels take long periods of time to work their way through, even if we stopped further increases in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere immediately, sea level rises (currently around 3mm per year) and climate change will continue into the distant future.397 It is estimated that to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the carbon emissions caused by global human activity would have to be reduced by 80 per cent on 1990 levels.398
The environmental crisis caused by human activity is, however, greater and more pervasive than climate change. It extends to soil erosion, deforestation, water salinization, the systemic effects of insecticides and pesticides, toxic chemical waste, species loss, acidification of the oceans, decline of fish stocks, hormone discharges into the water supply and a multitude of other forms of devastation.399
Many climate scientists believe that without sufficiently rapid and drastic reducti
ons in world greenhouse gas emissions we could soon be locked into the devastating consequences of 4°C of global warming by 2060 – when present-day schoolchildren reach middle age. Carbon emissions have been cut substantially in a number of developed countries in recent years. Some of this is simply a result of the decline in their manufacturing sectors and growing dependence on imports from countries like China, but the replacement of coal – one of the most polluting sources of energy – by oil and gas has been a significant factor. Once coal use has been eliminated altogether, further reductions in emissions may be substantially more difficult. And the development of cleaner sources of power to fuel the economic development of poorer countries is particularly urgent.
Even as the costs of climate change and environmental devastation become frighteningly tangible, the kind of urgent political action that might address this crisis has not been forthcoming. Why? Climate change denial aside, an important reason is that reducing carbon emissions is perceived as an unwelcome belt-tightening exercise. People assume it would mean policies such as carbon taxes, which would reduce real incomes and material living standards, thereby lowering the ‘quality of life’ as it is usually understood. New technologies such as low-emission car engines and environmentally friendly light bulbs are adopted only when, by saving costly energy, they serve to increase rather than reduce our real incomes. A car that uses less petrol means you can afford to travel further or have some spare cash to spend on other consumables. In short, sustainability is welcome when it is presented as a matter of preserving our lifestyles and way of life as far as possible in the face of the threatening implications of climate science. The truth, however, is almost the opposite: sustainability will remain beyond our reach unless we make fundamental changes in social organization.
The Inner Level Page 24
