Abstract
The causes of inequality that we can actually deal with include: the decline in demand for mid-level skills (discussed in Chapter 7), the increased importance of intellectual property, political decisions, and immorality in the business world. There is a strong case for changing copyright law, given automation, so that funds are diverted to pay a universal basic income. This will encourage people to work for four days rather than five days a week; social institutions can also help people value their leisure time and so choose to work less. Redistribution is also needed to pay for ever more expensive public services and to pay for climate change mitigation, and the chapter includes a discussion of the mechanisms that will make this politically acceptable. It ends with a summary of how the ideas about flourishing set out in Chapter 3 can guide the planning described in Chapter 7 and help provide legitimacy for the redistribution described in this chapter.
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- 1.
Once you have written the software, an extra copy costs nothing to make. The value of much software is greater the more people use it.
- 2.
The proposal made here is designed to make the average person as well off working a four-day week in the future as they are working a five-day week now. It could therefore replace benefits of up to £100 a week, but not tax allowances. It could do the latter if increased by £40 a week.
- 3.
In the UK an income of £371 per month for every working age adult and £261 per child, and keeping housing benefit, would cost a net £44 billion after savings on benefits and tax and NIC allowances (OECD).
- 4.
As long ago as the 1950s, management guru Peter Drucker reported on some J. P. Morgan Research showing that CEO salaries that were very high relative to those of other managers were negatively correlated with company performance.
- 5.
The remuneration consultants themselves were in some cases incentivised to recommend increased pay levels since some of them also ran headhunting practices which were paid a percentage of the recruit’s package.
- 6.
This is based on an on-going mitigation ‘bill’ to cover costs in the UK and a UK contribution to developing world costs of around 7% of GDP (‘on-going’ means GDP is 7% lower than it otherwise would have been), and a business as usual growth rate of 1.5% of GDP. The Potsdam Institute has suggested a smaller cost bill (around 4.5%) in an analysis, but I am envisaging a larger transfer to the developing world. To put this 7% in context, the government’s analysis of the on-going cost of Brexit with a free trade agreement is around 5% of GDP.
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Seaford, C. (2019). Redistribution. In: Why Capitalists Need Communists. Wellbeing in Politics and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98755-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98755-2_8
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