I haven't yet managed to read Thomas Piketty's improbably successful "Capital in the 21st century" -- it's languishing on my Kindle while I try to finish reading an equally weighty tome on the origins of the Great War*. However, I've been closely following the debate that Piketty has generated, and it's led me to think a little about the meaning of "class" in modern society.
When I were a lad growing up in England, there was a fairly well-agreed system for defining the classes in society. There was even an alphabetic code, from A to E, to summarize it. The classifications were partly based on how much money people had, but also took account of how they got that money, as well as education and heredity. I don't recall all the details, but "A" designated what you might call old money -- aristocrats and landed gentry. "B" was "new money" -- the top levels of business and the professions. Further down the scale, "Cs" were salaried workers, "Ds" manual workers, and "Es" the unemployed.
The media loved to use this scale as a useful shorthand to analyze just about everything: spending patterns, where people went on vacation, how they voted, what TV programs they watched, and so on. The whole system fell into disuse decades ago, but of course, class distinctions still exist, and still have to be taken into account by policymakers. The problem is, the way we look at class now is much simpler, but a lot less helpful, than the old ways were.
In North America there's one class that everyone loves to hate: the "one percent", the top income earners who are perceived to be getting ever wealthier even as the overall economy continues to struggle back from the impact of the financial crisis. And there's one class that almost everyone prefers to ignore -- the working poor and the unemployed. Everyone else, these days, seems to be regarded as "middle class".
In the old UK alphabetic system, that term would have been applied to the lower half of the "B" category and all of the "Cs". Here in Canada, and as best as I can tell, also in the US, it covers most of the "Bs" and all of the "Cs" and "Ds". That's a much larger group -- probably 80 percent of the population, surely too large to allow meaningful conclusions to be drawn about it.
Does this matter? I think so. Consider fiscal policy, for example. Some politicians would like to raise taxes on the "one percent", but there's a well-founded fear that soaking the rich could backfire, given that wealth is so internationally mobile nowadays. Higher taxes on the vast "middle class" are an option that no politician dares embrace today, thanks to the rhetoric of Republicans in the US and Conservatives in the UK and Canada. So the only people left to hit are the poor and unemployed, and if you look at how budget deficits are being narrowed in both Canada and the UK, that's exactly who's bearing the brunt.
Among the forty or more candidates(!) for mayor of Toronto, there's a lawyer who wants to increase property taxes in order to pay for the services that the city's residents demand but never want to pay for. (Toronto's property taxes are the lowest in Ontario). As he told the Toronto Star last week, he feels that people such as himself who own million-dollar properties and have healthy incomes -- the real "middle class", if I dare say so -- should be willing to pay up for a better city. I'd vote for him, except for the rather inconvenient fact that I don't live in Toronto. But the fact is, he doesn't have a prayer of success. And sadly, that's almost certainly equally true of Thomas Piketty's plan for an international tax on capital.
* "The War that ended Peace", by Margaret Macmillan.
No comments:
Post a Comment