Nepotistic privilege should be a matter of social shame

Woke young millennials should start looking down upon friends who take the easy route of following up on their parents’ careers writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print 

We don’t know for sure the reason why Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, but the resulting debate on nepotism is a turning point in Indian society. Rajput was not only an outsider to the joint family called Bollywood, but an outsider from Patna. As a result, nepotism has now become a Hindi word found in Hindi papers.

Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.

This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.

A drain on the GDP

This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.

The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.

India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates. 

When an internship is a phone call away

In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.

The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.

We are all complicit

It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.

We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.

Copy-paste woke culture

To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.

In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.

If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.

And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.

Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?

Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.

It will be your turn next

Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?

If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.

You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.

‘An education arms race’: inside the ultra-competitive world of private tutoring

A growing number of parents and guardians are paying for children as young as four to receive additional tuition. What is fuelling this booming industry asks Sally Weale in The Guardian?

As dusk falls in the Girlington district of Bradford, a trickle of cars begin to arrive in front of a small parade of shops. Parents who have just collected their children at the end of the school day are dropping them off at the Explore Learning tuition centre for extra maths and English coaching. The children sit at a cluster of computer terminals, where they log in to begin their evening studies. The atmosphere is relaxed and lighthearted. The children stay for an hour to work through their lessons, helped where necessary by a member of staff, with 15 minutes’ playtime at the end.

Located next to a Domino’s and a Subway, the Bradford branch of Explore Learning is a tiny window into Britain’s booming private tuition sector, now worth an estimated £2bn. At one time, private tuition meant a weekly one-to-one session at home with a tutor, the preserve of the privileged few. It is still not cheap – Explore Learning’s standard membership costs £119 a month, plus a £50 registration fee – but it is now on offer on our high streets, in supermarkets and increasingly online, with tutors offering their services from as far afield as India and Sri Lanka. Tutees include children who are little older than toddlers, pupils at prestigious private schools and undergraduates struggling at university. All are caught up in an educational arms race, which experts say is exacerbating social inequality.

The success of Explore Learning reflects some of these changes. The business was founded in 2001 by Bill Mills, a Cambridge maths graduate, and now has 139 centres around the country (plus five in Texas run by a sister company). They are located mainly in shopping centres, so busy parents can get on with their weekly shop while their offspring perfect their times tables, punctuation and grammar. Most of the children, who are aged four to 14, come at least a couple of times a week – the membership allows for up to nine sessions a month. Saturday and Sunday afternoons are the busiest times in the Bradford branch, which has 290 children on its books. The tutor-tutee ratio is one to six, but the tutors are not usually qualified teachers; they may be students or mothers returning to the workplace. All are trained in the teaching materials and behaviour management.
The families who use the centre come from various walks of life. Some parents have their own businesses; others work at Bradford Royal Infirmary. There are families from Latvia, Poland and the Philippines. The parents talk about giving their children “an edge”, the “leg up” they never had. Among them are a shift worker, Malik Ijaz, and his wife, Ayesha, who have been bringing nine-year-old Abubakar and his seven-year-old sister, Amna, to the centre for nearly two years. It is a big expense for the family, but the children’s education is a priority. Ijaz works extra shifts to be able to afford it. A third child, four-year-old Ali, will come when he is older.

‘I’m trying to do something for him that I never got’ ... Geoff Clayton, Brooklyn’s grandfather. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Christopher Thomond/Guardian

“The world is very competitive and everybody is working very hard,” said Ijaz. “I know the school are doing very well, but there are 30 students in each class. It’s one teacher and support staff. They try their best to help, but I realise if I’m going to give my kids some extra help it’s going to be brilliant for their future. Anyone who does a bit extra always gets ahead.”

He is ambitious for his children. “I warn my kids they should be top – or among the top five at least – in class. They are doing well. I don’t mind paying extra. I’m investing in their future. I know the importance of education. My kids love it.”

Abubakar, a quiet, serious child, is planning to sit the 11-plus to win a place at grammar school. Sometimes he does not feel like starting work, “but when I’ve started I like to carry on”. Amna is a chatty livewire and wants to be a paleontologist. “I’m good at maths, but the thing I’m best at is history,” she chirps. “My brother does hard work. I’m doing the same now. I want to be the same as him.”

Geoff Clayton, a retired garage worker, has been bringing his 10-year-old grandson, Brooklyn, to Explore Learning for about nine months. Brooklyn lives with his grandparents and likes football, Minecraft and maths. “He’s done really well,” says Clayton. “His reading has got a lot better, everything’s got better.” The membership takes a significant chunk out of his pension, but he is happy to pay it to give Brooklyn “a bit of a leg up”.

“Nowadays, it’s all about exams and certificates and what you know,” he says. “When I left school, it was more: ‘Can you do the job?’ Brooklyn has done a heck of a lot better since coming here. Sometimes he moans, but he’s OK once he’s here. It does work if you’re prepared to put the time and effort in.”

The Sutton Trust, a charity that seeks to improve social mobility through education, has documented a huge rise in private tuition in recent years. Its annual survey of secondary students in England and Wales revealed in July that 27% have had home or private tuition, a figure that rises to 41% in London.

The Bradford outpost of Explore Learning, which now has 139 centres across the UK. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Christopher Thomond/Guardian

With tutoring commanding a fee of about £24 an hour, rising to £27 in London (although many tutors charge £60 or more), the trust is concerned that the private tuition market is putting children from poorer backgrounds at even greater disadvantage. To redress the balance, it would like to see the government introduce a means-tested voucher system, paid for through the pupil premium funding that schools receive to support disadvantaged pupils.
“We are in an education arms race,” says Peter Lampl, the founder of the trust. “Parents are looking to get an edge for their kids and having private tuition gives them that edge. But if we are serious about social mobility, we need to make sure that the academic playing field is levelled outside the school gate.”

Initiatives aimed at making tuition more accessible already exist: some agencies pledge a proportion of their tuition to poorer pupils for free, while non-profit programmes such as the Tutor Trust connect tutors with disadvantaged schools. Explore Learning offers “scholarships” that give a 50% discount to parents on income support or jobseeker’s allowance. Parents can also use childcare vouchers and tax-free childcare schemes to help pay for tuition.

Nevertheless, huge inequities in education persist. Nowhere is this more evident than in children’s battle to pass the 11-plus to get into grammar school. Research published earlier this year revealed that private tutoring means pupils from high-income families are much more likely to get into grammar schools than equally bright pupils from poorer families. John Jerrim and Sam Sims from the Institute of Education at University College London looked at more than 1,800 children in areas where the grammar school system is in operation. They found that those from families in the bottom quarter of household incomes in England have less than a 10% chance of attending a grammar school, compared with a 40% chance for children in the top quarter.


If we are serious about social mobility, we need to make sure the academic playing field is levelled outside school - Peter Lampl, the Sutton Trust

They also established that wealthier families are much more likely to use private tutors to prepare their children for the entrance exam. Fewer than 10% of children from families with below-average incomes received coaching, compared with about 30% from households in the top quarter. About 70% of those who received tutoring got into a grammar school, compared with 14% of those who did not.
Alexa Collins lives in Buckinghamshire, which operates a grammar school system. She could not afford tuition to prepare her daughter for the 11-plus; despite being a top performer at primary, she failed the test, but has since thrived at her comprehensive, gaining nine GCSEs.

Collins, who went to grammar school herself but received no coaching, says she is ideologically opposed to tutoring because it is unfair to those who cannot afford it. Although she can see the case for short-term tutoring on a specific subject when a child is struggling, she adds: “I think it’s awful, that idea of tutoring kids from seven to push them through this exam. How can you possibly put that pressure on them?”

Another parent, who wishes to remain anonymous but lives in Kent, which operates grammar schools, says her son tackled the 11-plus without a tutor. “It felt morally wrong to claim an advantage by paying cash. It’s so unfair.” As she tried to coach her son, she felt at huge disadvantage. “So much depends on a parent’s skills to teach. A tutor would know the best way to teach the 11-plus concepts. I was terrible at maths at school, so I was really stuck.”

“The government claims that expanding grammars will boost social mobility,” said Jerrim, a professor of education and social statistics at UCL, when the research was published. “But our research shows that private tuition used by high-income families gives them a big advantage in getting in.” One of the factors behind the increase in tuition, he says now, is the pressure exerted by school league tables and growing accountability measures. “Those schools might well be passing pressure on to parents,” he says. “It’s not a negative reflection on schools and the job that they are doing; it’s more a reflection of the pressure they are under to achieve results.”

A callout asking Guardian readers about their experiences of tuition drew hundreds of responses from tutors, parents and school teachers. One tutor told of being approached by parents of children as young as three or four; another had been hired to provide extra coaching for pupils whose parents were already paying for all of the privileges of private schools, including Marlborough and Eton. “We pay thousands of pounds a year on school fees,” said one parent. “If he needs a little help with certain subjects, why wouldn’t you help him?” There also appears to be a trend for university students to buy extra tuition. Most are already paying £9,250 a year in tuition fees, so why not spend a little more to ensure they get the best possible degree?

The Profs, which launched in 2014, specialises in degree-level and professional-qualification tutoring. According to its website, an undergraduate teacher with a master’s in the required subject costs upwards of £70 an hour (plus a £50 placement fee); tutors specialising in applications to Oxbridge and Ivy League universities start at £120 an hour, plus a £250 consultation fee. According to Leo Evans, one of the founders of The Profs, university lecturers can struggle to address individual learning difficulties. “Catching stragglers and helping them get on top of their studies is a useful social function. Also, for students with disabilities and impairments, it’s essential.”

 I don’t mind paying extra. I’m investing in their future’ ... Malik Ijaz and his wife, Ayesha, bring a son and a daughter to the Bradford classes. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Guardian

Other responses to our callout came from parents who were worried about schools’ increasingly limited resources due to budget cuts. Much of the additional support that was once available in classrooms is disappearing and some specialist teachers are in short supply. These parents see tutoring as a way of patching the gaps in their children’s education. “It’s only one hour a week, but the practice crammed into that time is like a full week of lessons at school,” said one parent, who is a teacher. “The ability to check every week how well the information is being retained is great. It also provides ‘real-time’ feedback that we don’t get from schools.”

Some parents buy extra tuition to support children with special educational needs such as dyslexia, which mainstream schools are increasingly unable to meet. The new, tougher GCSE exams are also a factor, with some parents hiring private tutors to help children who are struggling to secure the level 4 or above required in English and maths.

One mother from Nigeria said she sought extra support for her child as a practical response to racial discrimination: “Any child from a minority has to be many times better than their white counterparts to be able to get into the top schools and universities.” Another parent told of a daughter with cancer who missed a year of formal education, but got through with the help of a tutor. Another respondent claimed the shadow tutoring workforce “props up” some “outstanding” schools – private, grammar and state.

Not everyone was positive about the impact of tuition. “It can cause students to not work in lessons,” said one teacher. Another said: “The need for tutoring frightens me. Schools should be able to offer students the support they need in class sizes that are manageable.” While one parent said: “I resent it when having a tutor is seen as a class crime,” another acknowledged the unfairness at the heart of the system: “I feel uncomfortable that we can afford to pay for this privilege.”

The callout also revealed the appeal of private tuition for teachers, whose salaries have been depressed for years while the demands upon them have grown. Some said they did private tutoring to boost their income; others, tired of the one-size-fits-all approach in schools, have quit their jobs to do it full time.

Asked about the boom in private tuition, the Department for Education responded that standards are rising in schools and that the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils is shrinking. “While we believe families shouldn’t have to pay for private tuition, it has always been part of the system and parents have freedom to do this,” a spokesman said.

“Tutoring is huge, it’s getting bigger and it’s not going away,” says the Sutton Trust’s Lampl. “You can’t stop people from doing it. What we’ve got to do is make it more accessible for parents who currently can’t afford it.”

Clayton, the retired garage worker from Bradford, is not a rich man, but he wants to invest what he has in his grandson’s future. His hopes for Brooklyn are modest and honourable and shared by parents and grandparents everywhere. “I want Brooklyn to have a good start in life … Nobody gave me a leg up. I’m trying to do something for him that I never got. I hope he ends up being a decent person when he grows up and gets a decent job and doesn’t have to struggle.”

Can we really justify spending £5.5m per Olympic medal at Rio 2016

Janet Street Porter in The Independent


Winning medals in Rio certainly makes us feel good, and the sight of dedicated, super-fit young people celebrating years of hard work is absolutely inspiring and moving. But the big question must be this: are the Rio Olympics anything more than high grade TV entertainment?

Our national success has been at a large financial and, possibly, social cost. UK Sport, which decides how to allocate tax and lottery money, has a ruthless policy. Put bluntly, its remit is to focus on backing winners, to hunt out the rare people who can achieve the remarkable. This highly controversial strategy means that sports which didn’t deliver predicted results at the London Olympics in 2012 – table tennis, swimming and volleyball, for example – had their funding cut.

Two thirds of UK Sport’s money goes to specially selected 14-25 year olds – the winners of the next decade and the 2024 Olympics – and they also fund an elite group of “podium level athletes” with extra cash for living expenses and training.

This policy has brought massive success in Rio, where the UK stands second above China in the medals table, when we were ranked 36th in Atlanta just two decades ago. But the picture on the other side of the television set is far from encouraging.

Slumped on sofas all over the country, we sit glued to the screen with spreading bums and tums and atrophied leg muscles. One in four of us now resemble Neil the Sloth from the Sofaworks advert.

In spite of the government spending millions on public health campaigns, Brits do less than 30 minutes of any exercise (including walking at a normal pace) in a week. Worse, new research reveals that years spent hunched over laptops, tapping on smart phones and playing video games has resulted in a generation of young men having weaker hand grips than 30 years ago. Their muscles are starting to atrophy and shrink.

How to address this lack of motivation in our national psyche, and make exercise part of everyday life? That’s the way it is here in Sweden, where I’m on holiday (I’ve seen very few fat children).

Sport England launched a four-year strategy last May to encourage more grassroots participation in sport, but the task is daunting. The truth is that Olympic success simply doesn’t galvanise ordinary people to take a walk, go for a swim, play a game of tennis or learn to box.

We look on our gold medal winners as gorgeous pinups, who we revere and cherish, but who perform in a way we cannot relate to. They have nutritionists, wear aerodynamic clothing, and are 100 per cent driven. They are not normal shapes, their bodies have adapted to achieve maximum potential through specialised training. Laura Trott, Jason Kenny and their teammates are modern gods, not role models.

The discrepancy between the impressive achievements by Team GB and a lack of motivation in the population at large is increasing. The number of adults playing any sport has dropped since 2012. In the poorest areas like Yorkshire and Humber, 67,000 fewer people are involved in sport. In Doncaster the decline is over 13 per cent, whereas in well-heeled Oxford, it’s up 14 per cent.

Overall, more than 350,000 people have taken to their sofas and given up exercise of any kind in the four years since London 2012.

David Cameron might have given an extra £150m to fund sports in primary schools until 2020, but that sum is pitiful given the way sport has been systematically downgraded by the Department of Education over the last 10 years. Now, the amount of time children spend each week playing sports and participating in PE has dropped to one hour and 42 minutes a week – that’s 25 minutes less than 2010.

To make regular activity part of a normal mindset, you have to start in primary schools. All over the country, ageing swimming pools are being closed by councils anxious to save money on repairs. Most will be in the poorest areas. Local authority cuts have seen playing fields sold off and opening hours of existing facilities curtailed.

It’s been estimated that each medal in Rio has cost £5.5m of public funding. There are some tough questions to be asked about whether financial priorities should be re-aligned to focus on the many, rather than the few.

How much inequality is too much?

BBC Business

Image copyrightiStock

The richest 10% of Americans earn half of all of income. In Britain, the top 10% hold 40% of all the income.

Inequality isn't just an issue for rich countries: a billion people have been lifted out of poverty since 1990, but inequality has also been rising in many countries too.

Four experts talk to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme about the effect inequality has on growth and prosperity.

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Deirdre McCloskey: Capitalism is not the enemy

Deirdre McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The daughter of a Harvard Professor, her brother became a university cleaner.

"You can't force people to take advantages that are placed in front of their nose, and that's my brother's case. No amount of income redistribution or socialist schemes to give my brother more opportunities would have made any difference at all to his life.

Image copyrightGetty Images

Image captionOccupy protesters have highlighted the gap between the wealthiest 1% and the other 99%

"If people strive, some of them succeed and get rich, at least momentarily until other people strive and compete with them. This striving turns out to be good for all of us.

"The percentage of people in the world living on $2 (£1.30) a day - an appalling level of income - has halved in the last 30 years. That's not by foreign aid or redistribution. It's by letting the economy function in a more innovative way.

"The wrong way to cure inequality is to attack the people who are taller, or have better parents, or live in richer countries. The way to do it is to uplift the poor. I approve of being taxed to help the very poor. But I don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. Capitalism is not the problem, it's the solution.

"The growth in the last couple of centuries has been astounding. It's a factor of 30 - about 3,000% per head for the average English or American person. Explosive, unprecedented growth. Meanwhile, inequality has gone up and down a little bit.

"If you were to make a rule that the chief executive could only earn 50 times the shop floor employee, that would not reduce inequality substantially.

"I'm very relaxed about [inequality] as long as it's not force or fraud that caused it."

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Jared Bernstein: Inequality impedes growth

Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington DC, and a former economic advisor to President Obama.

"I was a member of the President's economics team during the worst recession we've had since the Great Depression. The responsibility to try to turn that around was huge.

"This wedge of inequality between growth and the income of working families undermines the basic incentive that hard work will be rewarded.

Image copyrightGetty Images

"I call it the shampoo cycle - bubble, bust, repeat. And because middle and low income families lack the income growth they used to see, they borrow to make the difference. That creates large leverage bubbles which explode and hurt growth.

"Once wage inequality gets too high, and you have lots of low income people stuck in tough neighbourhoods that are segregated by income and race, and they have fewer libraries and a more difficult learning environment, you begin to see this connection between high levels of inequality and barriers to opportunity.

"You don't necessarily see that in today's economy because that's a cumulative process, but it's very possible that we'll see that in economies 20 years from now when these children come into the job market.

"If you go back to the period where productivity and incomes for middle class families were growing together - in the US that would be back to the mid 1970s - you'll see that the top 1% held about 10% of all income.

"Now it's 20 times that. That's too much. I'm not saying we necessarily have to get back to the late 1970s level, but I do think that a good metric here would be that the income of middle income families would grow closer to the rate of productivity growth, and that's something that we haven't seen for a while."

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Jonathan Ostry: Opportunity more important than inequality

Jonathan Ostry is deputy director of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.

"We don't have a threshold level for how much inequality is too much. We don't have a magic number. Sometimes a rise in inequality is perfectly compatible with healthy growth and prosperity, and in other cases the rise has gone way too far.

"When China opened up, it not only took off in terms of economic growth, but there was a marked and quite significant increase in income inequality. I'd be prepared to venture that was a good increase in inequality. Sometimes you need to have a little bit more inequality in order to get growth going as part of deregulating of your economy.

Image copyrightGetty Images

Image captionThe Bolsa Familia programme to tackle poverty was a centrepiece of former Brazilian President Lula's social policy

"Think of the very high levels of inequality that prevailed in Brazil when President Lula came to office, and the steps he took with the Bolsa Familia conditional cash transfer programmes. His policies were successful without jeopardising economic growth.

"I would want to be sure that in a country with a lot of inequality those at the bottom still had opportunities to be well-educated, to have adequate nutrition, and were not shut out from credit and banks. Likewise if there was a fair degree of equality, but nevertheless those at the bottom didn't have adequate opportunities, I'd be concerned.

"So for me it would be more a question of whether there were adequate opportunities for the less well-off in society. Provided that was the case I wouldn't be overly concerned that a given level of inequality was causing great harm.

"[However] it turns out that income equality is an important factor in separating countries that have been successful at sustaining growth for long periods, versus those that have enjoyed spurts of growth which have fizzled out rather quickly. Too much inequality can undercut the ability to sustain growth.

"In more equal societies, those that are more socially cohesive, governments are able to take measures that have buy-in from the population at large. Therefore they can right their economies more quickly.

"In more unequal, less socially cohesive societies, people don't buy the notion that if the economic ship is righted, everyone will benefit. They're more likely to oppose the painful short-term measures that governments need to take to right the economic ship. And so righting that ship becomes much more difficult in less equal societies."

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Branko Milanovic: Beware rising inequality within countries

Professor Branko Milanovic has spent his career studying inequality, and is now a visiting professor at the City University of New York.

"We need inequality. Perfect equality, everybody having the same income, doesn't exist anywhere, nor has it. Obviously some countries - maybe China during the cultural revolution - came relatively close, but some inequality has always existed.

"Without inequality you lack incentives to do practically anything - to work, to invent new things or to invest. Nobody is going to do things for nothing and we know that monetary rewards are really crucial, so this is the good part of inequality. We should not forget that inequality is indispensible for the development of a society.

"Globalisation has been very good for the middle classes in the emerging markets - China in particular, parts of India, Thailand, Indonesia. They are still not level in terms of income with the middle class in the rich world, but it's improving, On the other hand, we have essentially a stagnation of middle class incomes in rich countries, a very interesting and a potentially politically destabilising development.

Image copyrightGetty Images

Image captionThe economic disparity between the wealthiest and poorest in China is stark

"If the gaps keep on increasing as they've increased in the last 20 years, you would end up with two types of societies within a single country. If there is no sufficient middle class and if the poor really are very far from the rich, then you really cannot speak of a single society.

"We could end up with a kind of a global plutocracy, this global one per cent or even half a per cent that are very similar among themselves, but really belong to different nations.

"We might have a situation that most of global inequality is due to inequalities within nations which was more or less the situation 200 years ago. So we may be really going back to the situation that existed before the industrial revolution."

The inequity of UK's election results 2015

By Girish Menon

Party	Seats	Gain	Loss	Net	Vote (%)	Change (points)	Total Votes
Conservative	331	38	10	28	36.9	0.5	11.3 ml
Labour	232	23	48	-25	30.4	1.5	9.3 ml
Scottish National Party	56	50	0	50	4.7	3.1	1.4 ml
Lib Dems	8	0	49	-49	7.9	-15.2	2.4 ml
DUP	8	1	1	0	0.6	0	.18 ml
Sinn Fein	4	0	1	-1	0.6	0	.17 ml
Plaid Cymru	3	0	0	0	0.6	0	.18 ml
SDLP	3	0	0	0	0.3	-0.1	.09 ml
UUP	2	2	0	2	0.4	n/a	.11 ml
UKIP	1	0	1	-1	12.6	9.6	3.9 ml
Green	1	0	0	0	3.8	2.8	1.1 ml

The Electoral Reform Society, a campaign group, has modelled what would have happened  under a proportional voting system that makes use of the D'Hondt method of converting votes to seats.