…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.

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.

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