Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Inequality is rising in Britainuntrue to say that ‘inequality is rising’ and it is quite ludicrousto say that ‘inequality is rising more quickly than inthe 1980s’ (Merrick 2013).There is, however, one measure of inequality whichhas risen since the early 1990s and it might explain whyso much attention is devoted to the topic in political andmedia circles. Although less commonly used than the Ginicoefficient and the P90/P10 measure, figures showing theproportion of income earned by the top one per cent indicatethat the richest percentile has taken an increasinglylarge proportion of the nation’s pre-tax income, rising fromaround 10 per cent in 1990 to 15 per cent in 2010 (Pikettyand Saez 2012). Much of this change has been driven notjust by the top one per cent, but by the top 0.1 per cent. TheInstitute of Fiscal Studies notes that between 1990 and2010, ‘income inequality at the very top of income distribution(comparing the 99th to the 90th percentile) continuedto rise’ and that ‘within the top 1%, the incomes of the richesthad grown fastest, with income growth at the 99.9thpercentile even higher than at the 99th’ (Cribb 2013: 2).As we have seen, large rises in income among thissmall fraction of the population have not resulted in risinginequality in general. The gap between the relativelyrich (the 90th percentile) and the relatively poor (the 10thpercentile) actually declined between 1990 and 2010. To alarge extent, then, concerns about rising inequality reflectchanges in income distribution at the very top of the ladder.Indeed, as Richard Reeves (2013) notes, it is primarilyabout changes within the top one per cent:131