Economic inequality is a constant topic. No matter the cycle — boom or bust — somebody is making a lot of money, and the question of fairness is never far behind.
A recently published essay in the Journal of Economic Literature by Professor Guido Alfani adds an intriguing perspective to the discussion by showing the evolution of income inequality in Europe over the last several hundred years. As it turns out, we currently live in a comparatively egalitarian epoch.
Seven centuries of economic history
Figure 8 from Guido Alfani, Journal of Economic Literature, 2021.
This graph shows the amount of wealth controlled by the top ten percent in certain parts of Europe over the last seven hundred years. Archival documentation similar to — and often of a similar quality as — modern economic data allows researchers to get a glimpse of what economic conditions were like centuries ago. Sources like property tax records and documents listing the rental value of homes can be used to determine how much a person's estate was worth. (While these methods leave out those without property, the data is not particularly distorted.)
The first part of the line, shown in black, represents work by Prof. Alfani and represents the average inequality level of the Sabaudian State in Northern Italy, The Florentine State, The Kingdom of Naples, and the Republic of Venice. The latter part, in gray, is based on the work of French economist Thomas Piketty and represents an average of inequality in France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden during that time period.
Despite the shift in location, the level of inequality and rate of increase are very similar between the two data sets.
Apocalyptic events cause decreases in inequality
Note that there are two substantial declines in inequality. Both are tied to truly apocalyptic events. The first is the Black Death, the common name for the bubonic plague pandemic in the 14th century, which killed off anywhere between 30 and 50 percent of Europe. The second, at the dawn of the 20th century, was the result of World War I and the many major events in its aftermath.
The 20th century as a whole was a time of tremendous economic change, and the periods not featuring major wars are notable for having large experiments in distributive economic policies, particularly in the countries Piketty considers.
The slight stall in the rise of inequality during the 17th century is the result of the Thirty Years' War, a terrible religious conflict that ravaged Europe and left eight million people dead, and of major plagues that affected South Europe. However, the recurrent outbreaks of the plague after the Black Death no longer had much effect on inequality. This was due to a number of factors, not the least of which was the adaptation of European institutions to handle pandemics without causing such a shift in wealth.
In 2010, the last year covered by the essay, inequality levels were similar to those of 1340, with 66 percent of the wealth of society being held by the top ten percent. Also, inequality levels were continuing to rise, and the trends have not ended since. As Prof. Alfani explained in an email to BigThink:
"During the decade preceding the Covid pandemic, economic inequality has shown a slow tendency towards further inequality growth. The Great Recession that began in 2008 possibly contributed to slow down inequality growth, especially in Europe, but it did not stop it. However, the expectation is that Covid-19 will tend to increase inequality and poverty. This, because it tends to create a relatively greater economic damage to those having unstable occupations, or who need physical strength to work (think of the effects of the so-called "long-Covid," which can prove physically invalidating for a long time). Additionally, and thankfully, Covid is not lethal enough to force major leveling dynamics upon society."
Can only disasters change inequality?
That is the subject of some debate. While inequality can occur in any economy, even one that doesn't grow all that much, some things appear to make it more likely to rise or fall.
Thomas Piketty suggested that the cause of changes in inequality levels is the difference in the rate of return on capital and the overall growth rate of the economy. Since the return on capital is typically higher than the overall growth rate, this means that those who have capital to invest tend to get richer faster than everybody else.
While this does explain a great deal of the graph after 1800, his model fails to explain why inequality fell after the Black Death. Indeed, since the plague destroyed human capital and left material goods alone, we would expect the ratio of wealth over income to increase and for inequality to rise. His model can provide explanations for the decline in inequality in the decades after the pandemic, however- it is possible that the abundance of capital could have lowered returns over a longer time span.
The catastrophe theory put forth by Walter Scheidel suggests that the only force strong enough to wrest economic power from those who have it is a world-shattering event like the Black Death, the fall of the Roman Empire, or World War I. While each event changed the world in a different way, they all had a tremendous leveling effect on society.
But not even this explains everything in the above graph. Pandemics subsequent to the Black Death had little effect on inequality, and inequality continued to fall for decades after World War II ended. Prof. Alfani suggests that we remember the importance of human agency through institutional change. He attributes much of the post-WWII decline in inequality to "the redistributive policies and the development of the welfare states from the 1950s to the early 1970s."
What does this mean for us now?
As Professor Alfani put it in his email:
"[H]istory does not necessarily teach us whether we should consider the current trend toward growth in economic inequality as an undesirable outcome or a problem per se (although I personally believe that there is some ground to argue for that). Nor does it teach us that high inequality is destiny. What it does teach us, is that if we do not act, we have no reason whatsoever to expect that inequality will, one day, decline on its own. History also offers abundant evidence that past trends in inequality have been deeply influenced by our collective decisions, as they shaped the institutional framework across time. So, it is really up to us to decide whether we want to live in a more, or a less unequal society."
"Some of them are foreign-born and struggle with the language, and all of them are in distress! But I hardly have the time to explain the essentials to them. There's all the paperwork, and we're constantly understaffed.'
Such grievances have become sadly familiar – not only in medicine, but also in education and care-work. Even in more commercial environments, you're liable to hear similar objections: the engineer who wants to deliver quality but is told to focus on efficiency only; the gardener who wants to give the plants time to grow, but is told to focus on speed. The imperatives of productivity, profitability and the market rule.
Complaints come from the other side of the table as well. As patients and students, we want to be treated with care and responsibility, rather than as mere numbers. Wasn't there a time when professionals still knew how to serve us – a cosy, well-ordered world of responsible doctors, wise teachers and caring nurses? In this world, bakers still cared about the quality of their bread, and builders were proud of their constructions. One could trust these professionals; they knew what they were doing and were reliable guardians of their knowledge. Because people poured their souls into it, work was still meaningful – or was it?
In the grip of nostalgia, it's easy to overlook the dark sides of this old vocational model. On top of the fact that professional jobs were structured around hierarchies of gender and race, laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking questions. Deference to authority was the norm, and there were few ways of holding professionals to account. In Germany, for example, doctors were colloquially called 'demigods in white' because of their status vis-à-vis patients and other staff members. This is not exactly how we might think that citizens of democratic societies should relate to one other now.
Against this backdrop, the call for more autonomy, for more 'choice', seems hard to resist. This is precisely what happened with the rise of neoliberalism after the 1970s, when the advocates of 'New Public Management' promoted the idea that hard-nosed market thinking should be used to structure healthcare, education and other areas that typically belonged to the slow and complicated world of public red tape. In this way, neoliberalism undermined not only public institutions but the very idea of professionalism.
This attack was the culmination of two powerful agendas. The first was an economic argument about the alleged inefficiency of public services or the other non-market structures in which professional knowledge was hosted. Long queues, no choice, no competition, no exit options – that's the chorus that critics of public healthcare systems repeat to this day. The second was an argument about autonomy, about equal status, about liberation – 'Think for yourself!' instead of relying on experts. The advent of the internet seemed to offer perfect conditions for finding information and comparing offers: in short, for acting like a fully informed customer. These two imperatives – the economic and the individualistic – meshed extremely well under neoliberalism. The shift from addressing the needs of citizens to serving the demands of customers or consumers was complete.
We are all customers now; we are all supposed to be kings. But what if 'being a customer' is the wrong model for healthcare, education, and even highly specialised crafts and trades?
What the market-based model overlooks is hyperspecialisation, as the philosopher Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015). We depend on other people's knowledge and expertise, because we can learn and study only so many things in our lifetimes. Whenever specialist knowledge is at stake, we are the opposite of a well-informed customer. Often we don't want to have to do our own research, which would be patchy at best; sometimes, we are simply unable to do it, even if we tried. It's much more efficient (yes, efficient!) if we can trust those already in the know.
But it can be hard to trust professionals forced to work in neoliberal regimes. As the political scientist Wendy Brown argued in Undoing the Demos (2015), market logic turns everything, including one's own life, into a question of portfolio management: a series of projects in which you try to maximise the return on investment. By contrast, responsible professionalism imagines work-life as a series of relationships with individuals who are entrusted to you, along with the ethical standards and commitments you uphold as a member of a professional community. But marketisation threatens this collegiality, by introducing competitiveness among workers and undermining the trust that's needed to do a good job.
Is there a way out of this conundrum? Could professionalism be revived? If so, can we avoid its old problems of hierarchy while preserving space for equality and autonomy?
There are some promising proposals and real-life examples of such a revival. In his account of 'civic professionalism', Work and Integrity (2nd ed, 2004), the American education scholar William Sullivan argued that professionals need to be aware of the moral dimensions of their role. They need to be 'experts and citizens alike', and 'learn to think and act cooperatively with us', the non-experts. Similarly, the political theorist Albert Dzur argued in Democratic Professionalism (2008) for a revival of a more self-aware version of 'old' professionalism – one committed to democratic values, and an ongoing dialogue with laypeople. Dzur describes, for example, how experts in the field of bioethics have opened up their discussions to non-experts, reacting to public criticisms, and finding formats for bringing doctors, ethics consultants and laypeople into conversation.
Similar practices could be introduced in many other professions – as well as areas not traditionally understood as specialist vocations, but in which decisionmakers need to draw on highly specialised knowledge. Ideally, this could lead to trust in professionals being not blind, but justified: a trust based on a grasp of the institutional frameworks that hold them accountable, and on an awareness of mechanisms for double-checking and getting additional opinions within the profession.
But in many areas, the pressures of markets or quasi-markets prevail. This leaves our front-line professionals in a difficult spot, as Bernardo Zacka describes in When the State Meets the Street (2017): they are overworked, exhausted, pulled in different directions, and unsure about the whole point of their job. Highly motivated individuals, such as the young doctor I mentioned at the outset, are likely to leave the fields in which they could contribute most. Perhaps this is a price worth paying if it brings huge benefits elsewhere. But that doesn't seem to be happening, and it makes all of us non-experts vulnerable, too. We cannot be informed customers because we know too little – but we can't rely on being simply citizens any longer, either.
Up to a point, professionalisation is built on the persistence of ignorance: specialised knowledge is a form of power, and a form that's rather difficult to control. Yet it's clear that markets and quasi-markets are flawed strategies for dealing with this problem. By continuing to accept them as the only possible models, we forgo the opportunity to imagine and explore alternatives. We must be able to rely on other people's expertise. And for that, as the political philosopher Onora O'Neill argued in her 2002 Reith Lectures, we must be able to trust them.
The young doctor I interviewed had long considered leaving her job – so when the opportunity to get a research-based position came up, she jumped ship. 'The system was forcing me to act against my own best judgment, again and again,' she said. 'It was the opposite of what I thought being a doctor was all about.' Now is the time to help reimagine a system in which she can recover that sense of purpose, to everyone's benefit.
Lisa Herzog
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article.
In 2018 cOAlition S launched an ambitious program: to make all of the world's state-backed scientific papers open-access. Their agenda, Plan S—the S stands for "shock"—is backed by over a dozen European research agencies and funders.
While the group has fallen short of achieving their stated agenda by 2021, they're certainly making strides. Just this week, 160 Elsevier journals, including renowned publications by Cell Press, are registered as "Plan S aligned Transformative Journals." This could be a good move by Elsevier, which has been severely criticized in the past for price gouging practices—although critics cite increased researcher fees as a cause for alarm.
Unlike the 10-year-old Sci-Hub, which houses over 85 million research papers and regularly changes URLs to avoid the legal ramifications of providing access to paywalled studies, cOAlition S is changing the journal system from within. Their 10 principles call for greater autonomy for researchers conducting scientific studies and having publication fees covered by universities, not researchers. The latter could prove pivotal, as publication budgets are often no match for journal fees.
In just three years, cOAlition S has gained the support of the World Health Organization, the European Commission, and research institutions and agencies in China, Sweden, France, Jordan, and the United States, including the Gates Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. While many journals initially opposed this agenda, a few have come around. Bureaucratic red tape and inflated prices have hamstrung science for decades. Plan S is not a perfect solution, but it's the closest we've seen.
Science's associate news editor Jeffrey Brainard breaks down how open access works for authors. Publishing studies is an essential part of a researcher's career, bringing with it the potential for career advancement, tenure, peer respect, and, occasionally, popular renown. But it comes at a cost.
Golden open access is one model used by journals such as The Lancet Golden Health, which charges researchers up to $5,000 to make their studies open access. Nature publications now clock in at up to $11,600 and Cell charges $9,900, though the median fee for journals is $2,600.
Pay-to-play doesn't only exist in music. The more respect a journal carries, the higher the fee.
When Springer Nature, publisher of the reputable Nature journals, announced it was adopting a Plan S option last month, the editorial team announced the $11,600 fee was mandatory for anyone requesting their articles be made open-access, regardless of their financial status. These journals are notoriously expensive: submitting an article for consideration costs roughly $2,700 with no guarantee of publication. One journal, Nature Physics, rejects 90 percent of submissions.
cOAlition S executive director Johan Rooryck expressed happiness that Springer Nature is now offering an open-access model but stated "that doesn't mean we have signed a blank check and are willing to pay any price for the articles appearing in those journals."
Springer Nature has also adopted a model more in alignment with Spotify: universities and research institutions pay a single fee to publish their authors. Some publishers offer a hybrid approach: some articles are free while others live behind a paywall. There are also embargo models, where authors can offer their papers to the public free of charge after a six-month or year-long waiting period.
Chart: Science
The cost to publish remains prohibitive for some researchers, with certain journal prices for one article exceeding annual budgets. This has forced many researchers to confront an existential question: publish behind a paywall and wither in obscurity, or pay up and hope enough people read (and cite) your work.
While inflated journal prices have plagued the scientific community, Brainard notes that a purely open-access model could place even more of a burden on researchers.
"A complete shift to open access could lead publishers to boost publishing fees even further, to try to make up for lost subscription revenues[...] Although just over 30% of all papers published in 2019 were paid open access, subscriptions still accounted for more than 90% of publishers' revenues that year."
cOAlition S is advocating for increased transparency to push back on price gouging. Just as researchers must disclose funding and conflicts of interest, "Plan S requires publishers to disclose to funders the basis for their prices, including the cost of services such as proofreading, copy editing, and organizing peer review."
Although Brainard briefly mentions an increase in the number of non-researchers and institutions—laypeople—reading open-access journals, this topic is relevant to this conversation. America is suffering from a longstanding dearth of public science information, evidenced in the anti-vax fervor that's growing in volume (if not in numbers) since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines.
Access to scientific studies won't solve all of our woes. But lack of transparency is a major reason why so many citizens have grown suspicious of pharmaceutical companies and public health agencies. An ability to read studies without having to pay exorbitant prices (to the layperson) would be an important step in public health and science education.
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
