Scarcely a day passes, it seems, without another book landing with a thud on my desk that bemoans the rise of inequality. On this side of the Atlantic we have The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Injustice by Daniel Dorling, while in America we have Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality.
I’m coming round to the view that these intellectual heavyweights have got it back to front and the really significant social trend of our era is the triumph of equality. So it was refreshing to dip into A Classless Society, the third volume of Alwyn Turner’s history of Britain since the 1970s. This time, his subject is the 1990s and his thesis is that the massive increase in income inequality that characterised that decade went hand-in-hand with a concurrent increase in social equality.
Take mass immigration.
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