INEQUALITY

Obscene Inequality is Killing People

DR PAUL READ

As almost half the world goes to the polls in 2024 to test the mettle of democracies worldwide, we find ourselves in a global crisis — the failure of both sides of politics in favour of a system serving the elite. Both Communism and Capitalism have failed - the number of billionaires in Beijing is 100, New York 60. 

Fifteen years ago, I was working in parallel to Oxfam to assess the degree to which corporate globalisation had managed to take over global domestic product from the world’s sovereign nations. Horrified, I found companies wealthier than many countries and the dawning realisation that many of these companies were majority owned by single individuals. Head over to Forbes Rich list and other sources and we found that 500 individuals owned the same as half the world’s population. That was obscene enough. Though only a footnote in my PhD on global wellbeing within planetary boundaries, Oxfam kept the fire burning, monitoring the trend in the publication, An economy for the 1%. Only five years on, they found that number had fallen to only 62 people. 

62 individual people. 

Owning the same as half the world’s population.

Let that sink in. 

Like all good scientists I sought other ways of testing this finding. If that was the trend globally it should also be happening within nations. As just one example, Australia in a comparable period has witnessed the same obscenity within its once comfortably wealthy borders.  The Australia Institute published its findings October last year. In the ten years to 2023, the amount of Australia’s economic pie suborned by the top 10% wealthiest Australians rose from 47% to 93%.

93%

Let that sink in too.

In May, we had an update under the auspices of the AFR Australian Rich List. The top 10 richest Australians have just been revealed as having a combined wealth of $220 billion, $40.6 billion of this owned by Gina Rinehart alone. To contextualise, the average wealth of Australia’s poorest 5.3 million people is $35,200 (that’s wealth, not income), many in deficit, which means the lowest Australian quintile has combined assets of around $186 billion. That 10 people should be almost 20% wealthier than our poorest 5.3 million citizens combined, our lowest 20%, is obscene. 

Which brings us to another important metric that has reversed under our watch for the first time in 250 years — life expectancy.  Hidden under the more obvious impacts of COVID, there is a rise in what researchers are starting to call ‘deaths of despair’ (Case and Deaton, 2020). These include suicide, overdoses and alcohol-related liver diseases and cirrhosis, which are also reflected in the historically unprecedented decline in life expectancies (ABS, 2023c; Adair et al., 2023). WA medical epidemiologist and former Australian of the Year (2003), Professor Fiona Stanley, was the first to suggest we were heading for an historic reversal of life expectancies, later predicted by my own work (Read, 2013), and now emerging in every country. Prior to this, The Spirit Level (2009) by Wilkinson and Pickett demonstrated inequality effectively kills people through 11 separate pathways: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, erosion of trust and community, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being.

As of 2020, research connecting increased deaths of despair among younger generations is emerging in USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Australia (AIHW, 2023c; Copeland et al., 2020; Remington, 2023). Deaths of despair have increased up to 60% above pre-pandemic levels from suicide, drug poisoning, reckless driving, accidents, and alcohol-related liver disease. As we saw in the last edition (Bligh & Read, 2024), suicide rates in children doubled in the decade to 2020 and reached 1 in 3 deaths for ages 15-24 years, making it the number one killer of young Australian adults. Gen Z rates are 3.7 times higher for men and 2.4 higher for women compared to Boomers at the same age.

Increases in deaths of despair within younger generations in Australia demonstrate the enormous levels of social and financial stress facing younger generations, and the widening gap in generational wealth. This, along with the housing crisis and falling birthrates are likely to see entrenched inequality and a vicious cycle of falling population putting ever greater pressure on dependency ratios well into coming decades, leading to the kinds of population collapses we have already seen in Japan. Meanwhile we have casualisation and wage theft across sectors (started in the 80s), a patchwork of falling union representation (started in the 90s), and the rise of techno-feudalism (started in the 2000s). Where I lecture in Sydney, the swelling ranks of homelessness in the CBD is testimony to a failed system — people sleeping among the rats and the rain.

As Fabians, we thought we could work within the system to achieve progressive policy, some say by stealth, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. But can we? The voracious system we’ve tried to work within has continued apace, scorched earth and broken spirits in its wake. As one indigenous elder apocryphally stated, the right wing and the left wing belong to the same bird. I’d go further. That bird is a vulture. Feeding on the carrion of dead dreams and struggling families, and a younger generation facing resource wars and neo-feudal slavery. The artificial binary of a failed left and a failed right, once they’re in government, compromise to appease big business and organised crime, the only difference between the two being a veil of sovereign laws enforced by an increasingly mercenary state-sanctioned militia, their powers bit by bit extended to smash the rising tide of protests against ecocide, protests against inequality, and protests against genocide. 

One alternative to despair is anger. The other is action.

Following the Met Gala, the world’s most prestigious fashion event in New York City, something shifted worldwide, and it challenges the very foundations of The Fabians. One of its 600 attendees, paying up to $300,000 for a seat, was Hayley Bailey, an influencer resplendently turned-out in the style of Marie Antoinette, who contemptuously said of the unwashed masses, knowing cake was once no more than the modern equivalent of a serviette, “Let them eat cake.” 

The response on social media was chilling, as one after another, incandescent with rage, began calling for revolution. Young people especially argued that older generations need to understand they have no fear, and nothing left to lose. In the USA, they said they’d lived through much worse than just the threat of nuclear war and learned, having grown up with mass school shootings, how to deal directly with police brutality. As the posts mounted, they began to liken the world to the Hunger Games, where the elite made sport of the starving masses. They cited the slogan ‘One Planet, Two Worlds’ and began using the secret three-fingered salute, the hand-signal for revolution, used by Katniss Everdeen. 

As Editor of the Fabians Review I’ve been frankly paralysed as the number of issues that needed exploration have mounted, each deserving of their own major investigative report — obscene inequality, war, species extinction, artificial intelligence, intergenerational cannibalism, financialisation, government funding of billionaires, bankers and fossil fuels, a taxation system that destroys families and rewards psychopaths, the housing crisis, insane immigration rorts serving a university sector, rising suicide and femicide, dominant narratives driving policy on the run, the suffering of many ignored. 

As half the world goes to the polls this year we need to be wary of the rising tide of anger and we need to focus more than ever on policies that make real change, unencumbered by the false binaries of political ideologies. It is inequality that has always been the main issue, and we need evidence-based policy to address it now. Inequality is the key metric upon which all policy must be judged because it has very real impacts on human outcomes. It is killing people.