Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

The rich get richer and the poor get poorertheir standard of living at the dawn of the industrial revolution,means the workers must by now be existing in themost abysmal misery’ (Revel 1977: 154). It is unsurprisingthat repeated assertions of spiralling inequality and risingrates of relative poverty have given people the impressionthat the poor are getting poorer. As it happens, the claimthat inequality and relative poverty are on the rise is nottrue either, but that is beside the point since neither measuretells us whether the poor are better off in any meaningfulsense.To resolve that question, we need only look at the indisputableevidence of inflation-adjusted incomes andsalaries which show substantial rises across every groupin Britain. It is certainly true that the rich have got richerin the period of supposed neo-liberalism, but it is emphaticallynot true that the poor have got poorer. Most workersin the UK say that they are ‘well paid for the work they do’,according to a European survey, unlike workers in suchcountries as Sweden, France and Finland, where this is aminority view (Kasparova et al. 2010: 10). Although the disposableincomes of the poorest households have not risenas quickly as those of the median household, the rate ofgrowth has not been trivial. Official figures show that thedisposable income of the poorest fifth of households grewby an average of 93 per cent between 1977 and 2011/12(ONS 2013c: 10). To claim that the poor have got poorerwhen their incomes have nearly doubled is absurd. Revel’ssocialists were wrong in 1976, Marx was wrong in 1848and the doomsayers are wrong today.77