Happy and Glorious?

The BBC's home editor Mark Easton has a fascinating post on his blog exploring the regional relationship between two sets of government data: the recent survey on levels of well-being around the country are compared with regional rates of prescribing of anti-depressants. He finds that there are significant regional variations in the rate of prescription of anti-depressants, as well as interesting relatonships with the self-stated happiness of local populations.

Easton writes that 'Blackpool is the place with the highest use of antidepressants in England - an astonishing 1,430 prescriptions signed for every thousand patients in the primary care trust. The PCT issued 221,000 items with 155,000 people on its books.Blackpool also emerged as England's unhappiest place in last week's well-being survey data, with 36% of adult residents giving a score of 6/10 or less when asked to rate how happy they were the day before.'

The top six places in the league of anti-depressant use are all in the North-East where some of the country's most unhappy people are also to be found. By contrast, as the map shows, rates of prescribing are much lower in London, in areas that also suffer high levels of deprivation. Such correlations are always difficult to interpret, but suggest that the message about the importance of talking therapies is influential, perhaps appropriate, where the chattering classes predominate.


As well as these relationships in the data, the absolute levels of prescriptions for these mind-altering drugs are truly disturbing. More than £270m was spent on anti-depressants last year, up 23% from the previous year. This is a trend that has continued for the past tend years, with numbers of prescriptions growing from 9 million in 2001 to 24.3 million in 2001 and 46.7 million last year. The information we do not have is about how many individuals are involved, since these are numbers of prescriptions, but given the the number of prescriptions written annually for anti-depressants is now about the same as the number of adults in the country, we can assume that a massive proportion of our fellow citizens are not in their right minds.

Once there was great concern amongst science fiction writers about the threat of mass medication: governments adding to water supplies large quantities of chemicals that made populations docile and passive. This would undermine citizens' ability to demonstrate political opposition, and also make them accept policies of injustice or oppression. To what extent can we suggest that the mass prescription of these drugs is already a form of such mass medication? Are levels of disempowerment, frustration and despair leading to a more voluntary version of the same threat? And why is there so little outcry from citizens in response to such blatant evidence of social failure?
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No Sustainability Without Equity

Things have gone very quiet on the finance front. My general conclusion is: no news is bad news. We can only hope to read between the news and try to work up what is being stitched up behind closed doors. Mandelsohn's recent visit to Russia is a case in point.

When the Realpolitik begins we are in a fairly well-protected position relative to our sisters and brothers in the South. Because we sit at the high table of corporate capitalism, we can expect an acceptable deal. It will include a lifetime of servitude to pay off recently acquired mega-debts but is unlikely to include starvation and war - at least in the immediate future.

This unjust and inequitable settlement has severe implications for the planet. While the world's powerful nations ensure for themselves a share that is far more than those in the South, it is also far more than the planet can sustain. The figure illustrates the differences in the size of ecological footprints in different countries. It is the rich of the world who are trashing the planet.

The table below illustrates the same information in a different way, giving rates of consumption of various items by region of the world (from Jules Pretty's latest book The Earth Only Endures). Rather than trying to maintain over-consumption we should be lobbying our politicians to steer the country towards the 'prosperous way down' to a low-carbon convivial economy that is our only hope for survival as a species.

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Can't Buy Me Equality

The news today is that we do not need to worry about the inequality in our society. A combination of poor people working more and stealthy redistribution of wealth has solved this problem, a new report from the OECD informs us. New Labour has been true to its roots and dealt with the problem of unequal distribution of wealth.

This seems a rather strange story to emerge from the OECD data when what it actually shows (see the figure) is that the UK is the seventh most unequal of the 31 countries that are members of the OECD and that, leaving aside the US, which is a self-referential scandal in equality terms, only Italy, Poland, Turkey, Portugal and Mexico are more unequal societies.



The data for trends in real household income by quintiles, i.e. dividing the population up into 5 strips according to how rich they are, is also interesting. It shows that for the UK, from the 1980s to the 1990s, those in the middle of the income distribution saw an increase of 2% in their incomes while the richest 20% saw their incomes rise by 4.3% and the lowest 20% saw their incomes rise by only 0.7% This was the time when Thatcherite inequality really bit into our social fabric. The fact that things have been reversed very slowly since then seems little comfort. The inequality that developed in our society then has not been reversed.

Leaving aside arguments over measurement and spin - we all know how assumptions and definitions can distort data findings - is it healthy for society and for the planet that the response to the inequality generated by capitalism is always and only through more work? The quality of this work is never questioned, nor its consequences for children being brought up without parents. And for a gaian economist, the question of the increased pressure on the planet that the extra work creates is the most important of all. Tweet

When do we want it? Now!

The Joseph Rowntree Trust have produced some new research to attempt to determine how much money we need to live in a way acceptable to ourselves and our society. The outcome of months of number-crunching and a large investment of dosh is £6.38. That is apparently what the minimum wage should be raised to in order to prevent lowly paid Smiths falling behind Joneses next door.

This is a simplistic and frankly disppointing conclusion from a Trust who can usually be expected to ask deeper questions. It's years now since I published my paper 'Sen and the Art of Market-Cycle Maintenance' and yet those with a properly placed concern for the psychological well-being of the less well-off segments of society are still following their relative definition pf poverty.

Where does this definition come from? Who decides that we are deprived if we don't have a DVD player today? How long will it be before we need an i-player or foreign holiday in order not to be deprived? Surely it doesn't take much nous to work out that the constant increase in our 'needs' is determined by marketeers who are driving the relentless economic growth that is rapidly eroding the planet we rely on just to survive.

How did this research fail to take note of Richard Layard's work showing that it is not more stuff that makes us happy but better quality relationships?
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Mending our Global Relationships

I was inspired by listening to Doreen Massey last week - especially by her approach to positive globalisation and her ability to make space and distance seem exciting rather than threatening.

One of her key themes was restitution. She raised the troubling issue of people's seeming need to apologise for things they had nothing to do with. An example is the apology by the contemporary citizens of Liverpool for the slave trade. Interesting, isn't it, how this phrase is so rarely used now - usually substituted for 'slavery'. Of course we wouldn't want to think of all trade as slavery would we?

But back to my theme of pointless apologies, I am left wondering what it is we think we are achieving by this. Is it any more than wearing a badge of postmodern right-on-ness, much as we used to wear lapel badges and as many still do where a rainbow of ribbons? How does it help that they tell us they know that breast cancer is a horrible disease?

But to action. Doreen drew my attention to an interesting piece of research from Medact which discusses the perverse subsidy that poor countries make to rich countries when health-care workers who have been trained at the public expense become the sorts of economic migrants we are happy to accept. Medact have designed a plan for genuine restitution: a reverse transfer to balance the subsidy.

This is similar to schemes proposed under the Contraction and Convergence framework for emissions trading and technology transfer. To balance the negative effects of our fossil greed, and the unfair share of the global climate commons we in the richer countries consume, the plan is that we should share sustainable technologies and expertise, as well as paying cash.

According to a letter to the BMJ from Robin Stott, vice-chair of Medact, 'Evidence from Mozambique suggests that this money will help trigger the latent entrepreneurial skills of the recipients. Given the likely market value of a tonne of carbon dioxide, it will more than provide the $110 dollars/person/year that the UN millennium project believes necessary to reach the millennium development goals in Africa.'


Doreen also mentioned a project to create a map of the Niger Delta-- in London, in other words raising awareness of the exploitation of people in this oil-rich African country that is necessary to feed our oil addiction. And also bringing this home to the City of London, which provides the finance for most of the world's trade-based enterprises.

Her final example was of the link being forged between Caracas, Venezuela and London--another form of local-to-local exchange and perhaps 'a form of alternative globalisation' cooked up by two ageing Marxists: Hugo Chavez and Ken Livingstone. Caracas is sending us cheap diesel, which fuels London's public transport and allows concessionary fares for the poor. Our contribution is more intangible-- sharing 'the capital's expertise in policing, tourism, transport, housing and waste disposal'--but it is a gesture in the right direction.


I wonder how long it took the Liberal Democrats in London to regret their comment that 'It makes us feel like a Third World country'! Tweet

The Lean Economy?

David Fleming, one of my many illustrious predecessors in the role of Green Party Economics Speaker and inventor of the Domestic Tradable Quota, likes to use this phrase to refer to a post-carbon world where we are more careful with things. I dislike the phrase and can't help thinking it displays his cultural origins in the 1950s and probably a mother who saved margarine tubs. I remember clearing out hundreds of these and similar junk when my grandmother moved into a home some years back. Ok they were, in relative terms, highly useful items, and had considerable embodied energy, but in the high-consumption world we live in today they were just pointless clutter.

Perhaps that is partly Fleming's point. In response to a similar concern with ever-increasing consumption that does nothing to add to human happiness I wrote an article called 'Sen and the Art of Market Cycle Maintenance'. It was published in the same issue of the FEASTA Review as Fleming's piece but an editorial decision was taken to retitle it 'The Freedom to be Frugal'. I was distressed by the taming of what I considered a swash-buckling title, but more so because I just don't think leanness or frugality will sell well. The convivial economy is far more appealing, suggesting better relationships, more music and dance and sharing of meals; in short, more fun; less stuff.

The point I was making in my article is a simple one: the relative definition of poverty is itself a contributor to the cycle of economic growth, as it colludes with the advertising industry to persuade us that we are deprived if we do not have the latest consumer gadget. Poverty is measured in terms of lists of consumer goods, ignoring the most important aspects of the deprivation we face as we see our natural world devastated and the quality of food and other essentials deteriorate.

In the Thatcher years leanness was considered a laudable quality of 'efficient' companies, by which was meant companies who had removed as many jobs as possible from their operation and exported the remainder overseas to countries where poverty wages and Dickensian employment conditions are still acceptable.

The private sector was keen to slim itself down; the public sector, where unions were stronger, less so. Modernisation was called in to do battle against flab, leading to the agencification of the civil service and more swingeing destruction of jobs. Even before the disastrous evidence of incompetence emerging from HMRC this week it was obvious that the ever-shrinking number of public employees, downskilled and demoralised, were simply not doing an adequate job. Complex phone-switching routines and elaborate computer systems can never substitute for personal interaction, especially where, as in the case of so many government services, intimate and sensitive issues need to be discussed.

So, while the population grows ever fatter our workplaces are becoming increasingly lean. Could we perhaps suggest a relationship between the two? Might the days spent in lean and fit working conditions lead to such despair that we can find no comfort until we reach the relative safety of our homes to slump onto our sofas with fatty meals and cream buns? Ideas merchant though I am, I don't expect to find myself selling 'frugality' with much enthusiasm. I think have more of an affection for a little bit of slack.

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Blessed are the Meek

I have to say that there are few things I find more depressing than working-class Tories. People voting for their own oppression; turkeys voting for Christmas.

When car stickers started appearing on fairly modest Fiestas calling for an end to Inheritance Tax and I noticed the Daily Mail campaign to the same effect my heart sank. How can it be that the relatively poor have been conned into campaigning against a tax designed to share the wealth of the rich when they die, to prevent them from continuing to exercise their power from beyond the grave?

This has now become the headline-grabber from the Tory Party conference: only millionaires will pay tax in future. It has been packaged as a victory for the little guy. In reality it is a liberation from the oppression of taxation for those whose estates are worth hundreds of thousands of pounds which should rightfully be redistributed to the dispossessed who inhabit the wildernesses of run-down housing estates.

Even the Telegraph admits that only 6% of estates pay inheritance tax (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/24/nwealth124.xml), so this policy will benefit the richest sector of our population and disadvantage all those Mail readers who are being hoodwinked into supporting it. Inheritance Tax is not a left-wing wheeze growing out of the politics of envy. J. S. Mill was in favour of all wealth reverting to the state on death, and right-wing economists regret the passing on of wealth through the generations, which saps younger generations' entrepreneurial zeal.

A few years ago I attended a seminar organised by the Fabian Society--a well meaning attempt to 'modernise' Inheritance Tax to prevent just this sort of campaign to abolish it. The conclusions were fair, simple and obvious. The most helpful, which is also Green Party policy--hence my invitation--was to make the amount of tax paid relate to the wealth of the inheritor rather than the inheritee. Thus people including more relatives and friends, and especially poorer ones, in their wills, could effect distribution according to their own choice of beneficiaries.

An old friend used to say that where there's a will there's a relative. The disheartening conclusion to the media discussion of Inheritance Tax is that where there's a Tory spindoctor there's an ill-informed toady willing to believe him.

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Defending the poor

Who will defend the rights of the poor within our political system? The yawning gap in terms of power within the economy represented by the increase in inequality is barely challenged by the three political parties that are granted access to the levers of political power in this country. Now that the Liberal Democrats are being taken more seriously they too have abandoned their policy of a minimal increase in the top rate of tax for the richest earners. This demand was always startlingly inadequate: the political demands of those who are pledged to represent the underprivileged are depressingly limited. Why the discussion over whether the top rate of tax should be 40%, 50% or 60% when the rich keep their advantage not through earning but through owning?

This inequality has damaging psychological consequences. There is understandable anxiety in the medical community surrounding the statistical evidence that those in professional occupations live considerably longer than those in manual occupations. Data from the Office for National Statistics indicate that men in social class I live 7.4 years longer than men in social class V; for women the difference is 5.7 years.[1] More surprisingly, US researchers have found that inequality is bad for life expectancy of all in a society, since the relationship they found between a measure of inequality across society as a whole (the Gini coefficient) and the life expectancy of that society remained after they had controlled for poverty. They called this finding the Robin Hood Index, suggesting that Robin Hood’s redistribution deserves the warmth it has always received. The authors conclude:

The paper suggests that that there is a relation between income distribution and life expectancy. It concluded that variations between states in the inequality of income were associated with increased mortality from several causes. Relative poverty, i.e. the size of the gap between the wealthy and less well off, seems to matter in its own right: the greater the gap between the rich and poor, the lower the average life expectancy. This association is independent of that between absolute income and life expectancy. Therefore it matters, not only how affluent a country is, but also how economic gains are distributed among its members.[2]

Jeremy Seabrook argues that what is so damaging about inequality under capitalism is that it is used to spur us to greater economic effort and to do this we must feel ashamed of our relative lack of affluence. Our desire to remove the shame of poverty is what generates our energy to engage in capitalism, to increase our monetary holdings, to ensure that we are on the winning side of the unequal distribution:

If at the earlier moment of industrialization the persistence of poverty could be explained by a productive capacity only rudimentarily established, such an excuse is no longer possible. It becomes clear, therefore, that the survival of poverty is essential for ideological and no material reasons. Indeed, the maintenance of a felt experience of insufficiency is essential to any capitalist version of development.[3]

[1] ONS (2002), Trends in Life Expectancy by Social Class 1972-1999 (London: SO), Tables 1-4.
[2] Kennedy, B.P., Ichiro, K., and Prothrow-Stith, D. (1996) ‘Income Distribution and Mortality: Cross Sectional Ecological Study of the Robin Hood Index in the United States’,. British Medical Journal, 312:1004-1007.
[3] Seabrook, J. (2001), Landscapes of Poverty, p. 4

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