The Daily Mail has a shock-hold-the-front-page kind of diatribe about FTSE fat cats getting paid 145 times the average pay in their companies, and when you look at the slice of national income taken by the top 0.1% of earners the profile is quite remarkable.
It’s hard to get a handle on something like this. I postulate that what it shows is the gradual shift of post-war power away from capital towards labour and back again. There seems to have been a low-water mark round about 1978 in the slice of the national income taken by fat cats, followed by a gradual rise.
What would actually be more interesting to me is the distribution of wealth according to income slice. It isn’t your income that determines whether you have a yacht or own your house. It is your accumulated wealth. Obviously if you earn £1,000,000 p.a. then you can do in two months what it has taken me 20 years to do, ie buy my house outright. However, I did get there in the end, by accumulating wealth, even though I am unlikely to earn £1,000,000 in my entire working life.
Anyway, what’s the story here? FAT CATS ARE GETTING ALL THE MONEY, LYNCH THEM!!!. Or is it?
It certainly wasn’t in 1978, when the fat cats took about 2% of the national income. If you’re a fan of The Spirit Level, catchphrase “why equality is better for everyone” then you’re probably also a fan of whatever happened between 1956 and 1986, culminating in 1978, which seemed the spread the fat cats’ cream more widely amongst the mangy alley cats too.
Before we get all dewy-eyed about 1978, let’s remember what it was like then. It was the Winter of Discontent. Rubbish was piled high in Leicester Square. We had lowlife varmints like miners’ union boss Arthur Scargill running the country, whose hired goons “accidentally” dropped concrete blocks on taxi drivers from motorway bridges.
Be careful what you wish for – if you want income shared more equally, it means lending power to all sorts, including people like Art’. The optimum probably lies somewhere between what we had then and what we have now, but I will leave that to cleverer people than me to figure out.
So I then thought I’d run the query again, looking at the amount varying slices of the top take. Presumably in the top 10% is included the top 0.1%, but anywy the results puzzled me. From a cursory glance it would appear that it is the 10-1% slot which is running away with all the lolly, so the figures would indicate it is the medium sized cats that the jealous should string up. But there are a lot of them. And if anything they are doing rather well, well, they were in the mid 2000s.
Bearwatch has an interesting thought experiment into how things get this way. If he’s right, then perhaps if you want the outcomes that are approved of in the Spirit Level then probably Karl Marx was right, you have to go after the means of production and get it in the hands of the proletariat. Now where did we try that and how did it turn out?
This still doesn’t really deal with the wealth effect. It is one of those ironies in life that, provided you do not spend up to your income, you accumulate wealth. Poor people buy Stuff that they consume, rich people buy assets that produce an income. I used to buy Stuff, now I try and buy income. At the moment I wouldn’t go as far as to say I am rich, but then people rarely do view themselves as rich. In some ways I am – I own my house outright, and I have good health.
In many other ways you are probably richer than me. I drive a 1999 reg car with > 120,000 miles on the clock, I don’t own a mobile phone, I don’t have Sky TV. My computer is elderly, it was bought in 2005 under the Home Computer Initiative. I don’t have a video games console or a flat panel TV. I haven’t been on holiday for the last three years. Half the time I ride a bicycle to work. I could afford to change all of these to closer to the norm, but I choose not to, because buying an income is more important to me than any of these things.
It is far easier for me to save, now that I am about to see 50 summers, than it was when I had seen 40. The reason is that a lot of the costs in life are associated with a large capital purchases of Stuff, like your house, so once that is paid off you have more money left. Even if you haven’t paid it off, if you have savings you can take advantage of bulk deals, you don’t have to use expensive loans, you can get some income from investment, everything is working for you. Money attracts money.
In the last 12 months I have saved more than I saved in the 12 months before, which was more than in the 12 months before that. Some of this is through deliberately targeting costs and gaining skill and experience with that. Some of it is because investments are paying me a return. Double glazing reduces my power bill. So does my wood burning stove.
Of course, ostentatious consumption is a good part of being a Fat Cat, so I am disqualified as I have to take the frugal route. Lloyd Blankfein doesn’t need to worry about frugality while he’s doing God’s work at Goldman Sachs.
However, he probably accumulates wealth faster than I, because in the end there’s only so much clobber you can spend money on. Plus Lloyd Blankfein may be directly descended from the Bad Guy downstairs with the pointy tail and sulphurous breath, but he didn’t get to be head honcho at Goldman Sachs by spending more than he earned, unless it was to buy power and influence – assets again!
Looking at those graphs, I would say we are seeing a reversion to the mean in terms of wealth distribution. Old money owned all the stuff in the 19th century because they controlled the means of production, primarily land. Corporations will probably own everything in the 21st, once again because they control the means of production, and often the access to customers. At least while they can still pump oil out of the ground, they will, after that there may be a shift back to the power of labour in the ensuing bunfight. Or we will get indentured servitude, or slavery perhaps, but in an energy-challenged world it will probably be more local, up close and personal, rather than Apple, McDonald’s and Coca Cola owning the United States of Earth.
Corporations will try and favour machinery over human labour, both because for a lot of things it is more effective, and because it is cheaper. I still recall as a kid seeing huge phalanxes of men coming out of factories at the end of the day’s shift – I wouldn’t know where to go to see such a spectacle in the UK now.
The big question has to be what the heck happened in the middle years of the 20th century? My parents saw a gradual improvement in wealth distribution, but all through my own working life I have seen an continuous degradation in wealth distribution. What on earth was the countervailing force to the tendency for money to accrete to money?
Simple Living In Somerset 
Hi ermine
Another great though provoking post. Your shortest sentence in the whole post – “Money attracts money.” – or as I know it, it takes money to make money, I think almost sums it up.
Like you I don’t have Sky TV and I also don’t own a car. I choose to live frugally and save the excess. What I’m finding currently is that even though I am not working, that because my savings have built to a significant level, my assets are increasing at a faster rate (ignoring inflation effects) than I am drawing on them to live.
I guess once I can include economic downturns and inflation into that statement then “retirement” is possible. I for not even one instant want to be a “Fat Cat”.
Cheers
RIT
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Good post, though not so surprising. I think the graphs will roughly correlate with the changing Gini coefficient over the decades.
I like the succinct “buy stuff / buy income” contrast. That sums up my thinking too.
The answer to your last question is surely socialism in its widest sense, which in the UK gained traction in public life from the 1920s onwards, peaking in the 1970s.
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@RIT I have to ‘fess up, I wouldn’t mind the yacht, helicopter and island 🙂 Congrats on the assets rising faster than you are drawing them!!!
@SG I wonder if socialism wasn’t a symptom rather than a cause. Something shifted the power balance from capital to labour, possibly the technology of the time, which first leveraged manual skills before the common deployment of the stored program computers and automation.
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A thorny issue.
One way the proles can own more of the means of production is to save and invest more for the future, by putting some money into the stock market via pension funds or even ISAs, rather than spending it all NOW.
Yes, I know the proles don’t have as much money as the fat cats, they’ve got 3.7 kids to feed and a satellite dish, but once you’re out of the bottom 20% or so, saving and investing even £100 a month IS possible and will make a difference. (Much more is possible, too).
The fattest cats salaries are grotesque, but it’s non-trivial to adjust them as you say without breaking the machine.
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@ermine,
What a beauty, guv. The piece really flowed. More later.
@Salis,
Traditionally Indians had always subscribed to the “buy stuff / buy income” by and large. My father lived in rented accommodation all his life, and accumulated enough capital in the meanwhile to buy his home outright, soon after he retired (single-income, mother was housewife). But meanwhile a debt driven culture seems to have laid waste to entire ways of life in a matter of a decade! Actually, I am at a loss to explain where it all started to tank.
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@Monevator
c’mon, you and I both know you have to be doing a darned sight more than that for it to make a real difference, particulalry the way those fat cats are squeezing the wage slaves 😉 But yes, that is one way for the proles to get a hold of the means of production. So too is taking a share in a business, and to some extent in working for themselves rather than The Man.
I hadn’t actually thought of pension funds as a claim on the means of production till you mentioned it 😉
@Surio – that debt-fuelled expansion ain’t going to end well. Look at us in the UK, we’re about to get one hell of a stinking hangover!
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@Monevator,
>> by putting some money into the
>> stock market via pension funds
>> or even ISAs,
Perhaps I don’t understand you clearly, so please be gentle. The way I understand this: ‘money’, of itself has long ceased to be of any value (when we kicked Gold out of the equation). It has to be *exchanged* with something else that offers, or has the potential to offer an (ideally) equal or (at best) an equivalent value. There was some minor scuffle recently, when S&P recently downgraded US bonds. Why? Because in truth, the US no longer holds the same hegemony it once did. And you can probably see the analogy extending into stocks and similar “growth” trended vehicles, yes?
So, I am tending more and more and more towards a future as the 3rd paragraph from the last that ermine writes. Wealth will get fragmented and start concentrating locally rather than globally. Corporations will run the juggernaut until it breaks itself in the seam. The “Golden age of Humankind” is being lived out in its full, as we write.
Somewhere in the blog @Macs said, “Stone age ended because we found other things (Iron, Bronze, petrol…) to play with”. It is really a fantastic way to word an observation. Fact is, there are no more new ages to be found, for we are living in a fast depleting world.
All said and done, I am invested in the machinery myself (shares, etc..). But I am not really going to place my bets on that bailing me out in the long run as you seem to imply.
I (was?)am a Scientist/Engineer by profession, so while I followed and work with science very keenly, I am painfully aware of its limitations also. Which makes monetary economics very very dubious reading to me sometimes 😦
P.S: Please don’t go all Mt. Etna on me now. I really hate, (no, make it abolutely loathe) to be the idiot with the “End is nigh” board on my neck every time I interact with you on the Net. But, maybe, possibly, perhaps I am really missing something here?
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@Surio, not sure what fundamental value gold has, you can’t eat it. Its main advantage with money is as an independent arbiter that politicians can’t make more of at a whim. It also has to be exchanged with something else to be of value.
Be careful where you go with that now 😉
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@Guv,
I agree on the point about Gold completely. I suspect, I am more sold on that 3rd from last paragraph of yours in question more than the other readers. I tagged the point about Gold more with respect to Monevator’s point of “owning more of production by buying more into paper/money”.
No “precious” metals won’t be so “precccciiiooossssss” for the simple bare necessities, and I am more and more focussing on life-skills of being handy around the homefront than being dandy with Excel dashboards. 😉 🙂
Ha Ha ROFL. Uncanny. That nutcase hoardings were on Chennai on all prominent banners when I was there around 2-3 weeks ago. It was weird. They had also taken up radio ad space and the same Hollywood style doom intonation was ringing out ad nauseaum to “all ye sinners to fall on your knees and repent and beg to be saved”, “the stars will fall”, “the believers will rise”, “the non-believers will ‘know their place’ in hell”…. Even the visibly Christian passengers (cross around the neck) in the bus were getting uncomfortable with the OTT lines. :-D. I had forgotten about it completely afterwards, for it was such a waste of time. I remember saying to myself, “If our Father in Heaven is indeed all merciful, and since he made all creatures great and small, he will take one and all into Heaven, WTH” D’uh! Thanks for reminding it. What an egg on his face. 😀 😀 😀
……… ……… ……… Hey, wait a sec, what are you implying there? 😉
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>> Its main advantage with money is as
>> an independent arbiter that
>> politicians can’t make more of at a whim
Forgot to mention earlier. I should have used “credibility” instead of “value” perhaps? That was the whole point I wanted to make (your Weimar republic post does a stellar job of that). Our own currency carries “I promise to pay the bearer a sum of xxx Rupees” on each note. These days the coins are not even woth the metal they are being made out of. So, we don’t even have a currency. We have “Promissory Note”(s) circulating around. Oh, the irony can be sickening!
OK, I have to add this caveat in case the sedition act police come searching for me for the above remarks… Our great note has lot of credibility for sure! It has Gandhiji’s face printed on each one of it!
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