'I never did anything for money. I never set money as a goal. It was a
result." So says Bob Diamond, formerly the chief executive of
Barclays. In doing so Diamond lays waste to the justification that his
bank and others (and their innumerable apologists in government and
the media) have advanced for surreal levels of remuneration – to
incentivise hard work and talent. Prestige, power, a sense of purpose:
for them, these are incentives enough.
Others of his class – Bernie Ecclestone and Jeroen van der Veer (the
former chief executive of Shell), for example – say the same. The
capture by the executive class of so much wealth performs no useful
function. What the very rich appear to value is relative income. If
executives were all paid 5% of current levels, the competition between
them (a questionable virtue anyway) would be no less fierce. As the
immensely rich HL Hunt commented several decades ago: "Money is just a
way of keeping score."
The desire for advancement along this scale appears to be insatiable.
In March Forbes magazine published an article about Prince Alwaleed,
who, like other Saudi princes, doubtless owes his fortune to nothing
more than hard work and enterprise. According to one of the prince's
former employees, the Forbes magazine global rich list "is how he
wants the world to judge his success or his stature".
The result is "a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling
and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing". In 2006, the
researcher responsible for calculating his wealth writes, "when Forbes
estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he
said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released,
sounding nearly in tears. 'What do you want?' he pleaded, offering up
his private banker in Switzerland. 'Tell me what you need.'"
Never mind that he has his own 747, in which he sits on a throne
during flights. Never mind that his "main palace" has 420 rooms. Never
mind that he possesses his own private amusement park and zoo – and,
he claims, $700m worth of jewels. Never mind that he's the richest man
in the Arab world, valued by Forbes at $20bn, and has watched his
wealth increase by $2bn in the past year. None of this is enough.
There is no place of arrival, no happy landing, even in a private
jumbo jet. The politics of envy are never keener than among the very
rich.
This pursuit can suck the life out of its adherents. In Lauren
Greenfield's magnificent documentary The Queen of Versailles, David
Siegel – "America's timeshare king" – appears to abandon all interest
in life as he faces the loss of his crown. He is still worth hundreds
of millions. He still has an adoring wife and children. He is still
building the biggest private home in America.
But as the sale of the skyscraper that bears his name and symbolises
his pre-eminence begins to look inevitable, he sinks into an
impenetrable depression. Dead-eyed, he sits alone in his private
cinema, obsessively rummaging through the same pieces of paper, as if
somewhere among them he can find the key to his restoration, refusing
to engage with his family, apparently prepared to ruin himself rather
than lose the stupid tower.
In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is
reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. Essential public
services are cut so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm
is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the
companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of
inequality are almost fetishised.
Politicians justify these changes, when not reciting bogus arguments
about the deficit, with the incentives for enterprise that they
create. Behind that lies the promise or the hint that we will all be
happier and more satisfied as a result. But this mindless, meaningless
accumulation cannot satisfy even its beneficiaries, except perhaps –
and temporarily – the man wobbling on the very top of the pile.
The same applies to collective growth. Governments today have no
vision but endless economic growth. They are judged not by the number
of people in employment – let alone by the number of people in
satisfying, pleasurable jobs – and not by the happiness of the
population or the protection of the natural world. Job-free,
world-eating growth is fine, as long as it's growth. There are no ends
any more, just means.
In their interesting but curiously incomplete book, How Much is
Enough?, Robert and Edward Skidelsky note that "Capitalism rests
precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its
success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure,
but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of
having enough ... The vanishing of all intrinsic ends leaves us with
only two options: to be ahead or to be behind. Positional struggle is
our fate."
They note that the nations with the longest working hours – the United
States, the United Kingdom and Italy, in the graph of OECD nations
they publish in the book – are those with the greatest inequality.
They might have added that they are also the three with the lowest
levels of social mobility.
Four possible conclusions could be drawn. The first is that inequality
does indeed encourage people to work harder, as the Skidelskys (and
various neoliberals) maintain: the bigger the gap, the more some
people will strive to try to close it. Or perhaps it's just that more
people, swamped by poverty and debt, are desperate. An alternative
explanation is that economic and political inequality sit together: in
more unequal nations, bosses are able to drive their workers harder.
The fourth possible observation is that the hard work inequality might
stimulate neither closes the gap nor enhances social mobility.
Nor, it seems, does it make us, collectively, any wealthier. The Dutch
earn an average of $42,000 per capita on 1,400 hours a year, the
British $36,000 on 1,650 hours. Inequality, competition and an
obsession with wealth and rank appear to be both self-perpetuating and
destined to sow despair.
Can we not rise above this? To seek satisfactions that don't cost the
earth and might be achievable? The principal aim of any wealthy nation
should now be to say: "Enough already".
guardian
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