The similar lives of the rich and the not so rich
These days, it's not so easy to tell who's raking it in from who isn't, says Merryn Somerset Webb.
More on inequality. In my last blog post, I mentioned a talk by John Lanchester at the Edinburgh book festival in which he discussed the subject. During the Q&A, there was a conversation about rage how it would soon grip the UK and force change. I doubt it.
That's first because income inequality isn't rising, its falling. But it is also because the lives of the not so rich are no longer that different to those of the rich.
Irwin Stelzer picked up this theme in The Sunday Times a few weeks ago. The gap he says between the "living standards of a Harrods shopper and a Harrods shop girl" is a million times narrower than it was in, say, the Victorian times the inequality fanatics like to harp back to.
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This is, as Stelzer says, partly a result of "the expanded availability of health care, education and an expanded range of public goods", and partly down to "rapid innovation".
Consider clothes. They are so cheap and of such good quality these days that they homogenisethe appearance of all save the very, very poor. Note Rachel Johnson posing in a Lidl jacket on her doorstep in Notting Hill for a newspaper article yesterday. If you don't look too closely, she says, it passes for Prada.Add cheap flights and technology into that.
Almost everyone has access to televisions, smart phones, music and video on demand and also has access to the odd flight to Ibiza.
Some people will be listening to Spotify-streamed music on their yachts in Ibiza and some will be listening to it on the terrace of a cheap hotel. But everyone has the ability to wear similar clothes, travel to similar places, talk for hours to family across continents using similar technology and use similar forms of entertainment.
You can argue about whether the financial gap between the rich and poor is widening or not (we would say the wealth gap is and the income gap is not), but on one thing we can agree with Irwin Stelzer: measure it in terms of the quality and quantity of services to all and "the gap in living standards is certainly narrowing."That doesn't leave as much to rage about as Lanchester might think.
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Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).
After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times
Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast - but still writes for Moneyweek monthly.
Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.
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