How David Cameron could make Britain happier

February 23, 2009 by
Filed under: Politics, Public policy, The RSA 

In response to the growing Conservative lead in the polls a number of commentators, including Michael Portillo and Andrew Rawnsley, used weekend articles to ask questions about how ready is David Cameron for power.  The thrust of the pieces was that Labour is almost down but that the Conservatives still have work to do, not just to secure a workable majority but also to show they are fully prepared for the difficult circumstances the country will face in 2010.

It may be that team Cameron can win just by not being Labour, but if the Tories do desire more definition I suggest they dip into two books I have been reading this weekend (I had to have something to take my mind of West Brom’s abject defeat by Fulham).

The first, which I am helping to launch at the LSE on Wednesday, is ‘Towards a more equal society?’ edited by John Hills and colleagues from the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion. The book is a comprehensive and data rich analysis of Labour’s record on inequality. One of its general conclusions is that Labour succeeded in marginally reducing inequality in those policy (and geographical) areas to which it devoted substantial and consistent time, energy and money. The implication is that there are gravitational forces in the modern world which tend to increase inequality. On the socio-economic side these include labour market globalisation and the importance of post compulsory education, while, on the political side there is there disproportionate attention paid to the needs of ‘middle England’ as a result of the electoral system, and the commercial interests of the print media. Unless Government is very determined, the UK will drift towards greater social inequality.

The other book (which is the subject of an RSA Thursday on 5 March) is an authoritative overview of research on the relationship between social inequality and individual well being, measured by such indicators as levels of reported well-being, trust, criminality and mental illness. Richard Wilkinson, who has spent a lifetime making this point, and Fellow author Kate Pickett, demonstrate conclusively that among developed nations more equal societies are more successful. Indeed, so strong is the correlation that even if it were the case that strategies to reduce inequality had a detrimental impact on overall growth (and there is no evidence that they do) those living in the slower growing more equal societies would still be safer, happier and enjoy better health. Politicians have no difficulty in signing up either to meritocracy or to tackling poverty. In both cases they can – spuriously – imply they have policies which help the poor without taking away from the middle or top. But the same politicians tend to avoid any commitment to tackle overall social inequality. For example, to my dismay, my old boss Tony Blair made it a matter of political pride that he was insouciant in the face of massive income disparities.

Labour’s big stride forward was the commitment to abolish child poverty (although the strategy is now a long way off target), and David Cameron has committed to maintaining that aspiration. But if the Conservatives wanted real definition, and at the same time, to place millions of traditional Labour supporters in a quandary, how about David Cameron committing to a concrete target (there are plenty to choose from) to reduce social inequality in the UK?

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10 Comments on How David Cameron could make Britain happier

  1. Richard Green on Mon, 23rd Feb 2009 12:13 pm

    2. Matthew, there is all the difference in the world between a commitment to abolish child poverty and an ‘aspiration’ to do the same. I’m really surprised you haven’t highlighted that.

  2. Tessy Britton on Mon, 23rd Feb 2009 6:50 pm

    3. This topic is so interesting I wish I could go to the session on the 5th. A new papaper was published last year which challenged the happiness ‘set-point’ and looked very closely at societal shifts in tolerance and democracy, showing that they had a significant impact on wellbeing. The paper included the results of a longitudinal research analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science (July, 2008) Development, Freedom, and Happiness: A Global Perspective.

    “Democratization and rising social tolerance contributed even more than economic development to a growing sense of free choice, and thus to rising levels of happiness.”

    “These findings suggest that subjective well-being has important social consequences: Falling levels of subjective well-being were a leading indicator of the collapse of former communist systems. These findings also have important implications for social scientists and policymakers, for they imply that human happiness is not fixed, but can be influenced by belief systems and social policies.”

    “Rich countries had relatively little economic growth (in the range of 1 to 3%), but they experienced remarkable rates of social liberation, with hard-core opposition to gender equality and homosexuality falling by roughly half since 1981 (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005).”

    http://thrivingtoo.typepad.com/thriving_too/2008/07/one-of-the-most.html
    http://thrivingtoo.typepad.com/thriving_too/files/happiness_paper.pdf

  3. matthewtaylor on Tue, 24th Feb 2009 9:56 am

    4. Thanks Tessy

    This is fascinating. An extra wrinkle is that while ‘social liberation’ may make people happier there is lots of evidence that local social diversity is correlated with lower of life satisfaction

    Matthew

  4. Tessy Britton on Tue, 24th Feb 2009 11:43 am

    5. That’s research for you :)

  5. Mark Demmen on Wed, 25th Feb 2009 10:38 am

    6. I see what Guido means when he says that you’ve turned the once magnificent RSA into just enough left-wing think tank.

    There are plenty of people who reject the ideological drivel of ‘inequality’ and ‘relative poverty’, and plenty who’ll do their best to make sure that it’s rejected by a future Conservative government.

  6. matthewtaylor on Wed, 25th Feb 2009 6:28 pm

    7. Hi Mark

    You may disagree with the concept of relative inequality (although if you do it would be interesting to know at what date you would have liked to fix the measure of absolute poverty – 1997,1979, 1879, 1779?). As for inequality this isn’t ideology it a statistics. I guess what you mean is that it is ideological to want to reduce inequality. If so I fear you are out of sympathy with the leaders of your own party, and that well-known leftie Iain Duncan Smith in particular.

    Thanks for the comment

    Matthew

  7. Fourcultures on Sun, 1st Mar 2009 5:29 am

    8. I loved Mark Demmen’s comment about ‘inequality’ as ‘ideological drivel’ and Matthew Taylor’s response: ‘this isn’t ideology it’s statistics’.

    In elegantly few words this exchange really gets to the nub of the issue.

    Each of the Four Cultures of Cultural theory see the ‘facts’ that suit their worldview (and their worldview is constituted, largely, by these ‘facts’). Statistics are a means of measuring what matters, but it is culture that tells us what matters, and therefore what to measure. Egalitarians, obviously, like measuring ‘equality’, the presence or absence of which is REAL – at least for them. They also like measuring global temperature changes that presage the end of civilisation as we know it.
    Individualists, however, are so certain such concepts are nonsense that they don’t even bother measuring them, and therefore they don’t exist (a bit like Iraqi casualties in the Gulf Wars). Instead it is considered essential to measure ‘economic growth rates’ and ‘personal equity’ (which has nothing to do with the way Egalitarianism would use the word equity). Actually, even the act of measurement is suspect. Counting money may well be part of a Hierarchical plot to tax it. For Individualists, the question of who has how much is trumped by the ‘more significant question: who wants to know?

    It is very seldom a debate about agreed ‘facts’, but rather an argument about which facts are worth counting. Every so often, there is a temporary truce and the different sides begrudgingly agree to use common metrics – but only for as long as it suits them. Personally, I find this hard to take. For me, average life expectancy is unambiguously the sine qua non of ‘social progress’. Yet I have to live in a world where plenty of people just don’t see that at all. Cultural theory aids an understanding that it’s not because they are blind to the facts, or, worse, stupid, or, even worse, evil – it’s because people really do have genuinely differing worldviews.

    Taking Cultural Theory seriously requires a certain flexibility with regard to these ‘statistical facts’ and the concepts behind them – not because they don’t matter (far from it) but because they are usually, as here in the case of ‘equality’, the start of the debate rather than the clincher.

  8. matthewtaylor on Mon, 2nd Mar 2009 9:20 am

    9. Thanks 4C. As someone who tends towards pragmatist philosophy (as well as theories of plural rationality) I tend to agree. However, my point was not that the ‘facts’ on inequality necessary lead to any particular conclusions, or even that there aren’t other facts to set against a measure like, for example, the Gini Coefficient, it was simply that in as much as we can define inequality in terms of income and assets and we define well-being in relation to measures such as levels of crime and mental health there appears to be a strong correlation in developed nations between relatively high inequality and relatively low well-being. There may be lots of arguments to set against this (we may choose different definitions of either inequality or well-being or say that neither thing matters) but in its own terms it is a coherent argument and not ‘ideological drivel’

  9. Inequality and the realignment of the right | Matthew Taylor's blog on Fri, 6th Mar 2009 2:53 pm

    10. [...] blog repeats an argument I made a couple of weeks ago, but, for once, the more I hear, the more sure I [...]

  10. Livy on Tue, 12th Jan 2010 9:46 am

    11. “But if the Conservatives wanted real definition, and at the same time, to place millions of traditional Labour supporters in a quandary, how about David Cameron committing to a concrete target (there are plenty to choose from) to reduce social inequality in the UK?”

    …So much for that, eh? Lovely performance at Demos the other day. Apparently the researcher who’s report he interpreted, or b*stardised, actually winced when he said his piece. Which included his belief that there was no need to reduce the Gini Coefficient.

    Interesting how little coverage that line got.

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