Michael: Let's change gears for a minute and talk about income inequality.
Deirdre: Yeah.
Michael: Your view is that as long as the condition of the working class is improving,
we shouldn't care so much about income inequality.
Deirdre: Yes.
Equality is not a coherent, ethical program.
What?
We're all to be the same height?
We're all to be the same weight?
We're all to be the same IQ?
If you're smarter than me, as I think you are, we're to pound nails into your head to
make you stupider so that you'll be equal to me?
Michael: There are people who would like to do that.
Deirdre: I know.
Well, I don't know.
I'm surprised to hear that.
So equality is a silly program.
It doesn't have any ethical sense to it.
Whereas raising up the poorest in our society, which should be the conservative and libertarian
goal, that works.
That's something that you can express in public policy and can make work.
It doesn't involve foolish things like increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
It involves freeing up the economy.
And so that's where it came from.
It came from this amazing modern enrichment from an average in the world of, in modern
terms, $3 a day consumed and earned to in, say, the United States now, $130 a day.
That's the magnitude we're talking about, a factor of 30, a factor of 100 in some cases.
That's what we need to explain, and that's not to be explained by capital or institutions
or trade unions or government.
It's explained by human ingenuity unleashed.
Michael: Are you concerned at all if the gap between the rich and the poor gets large enough,
even if the material conditions of the working class are improving, that that in some way
makes the working class distrustful of the system, less apt to take risks?
Deirdre: The problem is that we mustn't encourage envy because envy is insatiable.
Shakespeare's famous sonnet on this one, he says in effect, when I think of how much brighter
this man is or how his face is more handsome than mine, that sonnet embodies envy as a
nasty and stupid way of going about life.
So we've got to work against envy.
But here's an important economic fact.
Real equality of real comfort has increased in the last 40 years and certainly in the
last 100.
If you focus on wealth, monetary wealth especially, equality is moved up and down... in three
countries, Thomas Piketty found that inequality has increased in the last 30 years, and those
were Britain, United States, and Canada, not his own country of France and most of the
other countries he studied.
It didn't increase, contrary to what people think he said.
He's worried about the future.
He says, "Oh, it's going to get worse.
It's going to get worse.
The sky is going to fall," not that it already has fallen.
So even if you study wealth, you find that it's not in all countries, inequality has
increased.
But the equality of real comfort, of proper or helpful medical care, of having a roof
over your head, of having enough to eat, of having adequate schools, these have gotten
better in the last 30 years, not worse.
This is true in Britain.
It's true in the United States.
It's true in these countries where the wealth inequality may have increased.
So I think it's ethically incoherent, it encourages envy, and in factual terms it's overblown.