Poetic justice

Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists is a book-long inquiry into the attitudes that refuse to let injustice go away. In what is a very original, angry and at times self-indulgent expose from a lifelong UK Labour Party supporter, some stark truths are revealed about how the privileged carry on believing in the five notions that perpetuate injustice: Elitism is efficient; exclusion is necessary; prejudice is natural; greed is good; and despair is inevitable.

Injustice: Why Social Inequality
Persists; Daniel Dorling;
Policy Press,
Rs1,500; Pp 387

Author and social commentator Daniel Dorling identifies these as having replaced the five social evils—squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease—identified by British wartime economist and reformer William Beveridge. He also puts forward the fairly obvious idea that the privileged in unequal societies see inequality and the suffering which arises from it as self-perpetuating, and then conveniently become blind to it. However, what stands out about Dorling’s arguments is that he sees this lack of fully considered thought or action to be as much at fault as the lack of any real policy intervention.

Over the course of 320 pages, it is our laissez-faire attitudes that bear the brunt of Dorling’s criticism. He shows us how irresponsible our beliefs are: whether it is the belief that children who go to Britain’s public schools are brighter (elitism); that the poor are those who are unable or unwilling to try hard enough (exclusion); that it is right for the wealthy to hand material and social advantages down to their children because they deserve it more than poorer children (prejudice); that it is normal to live your life with debt and that riches are achieved by those who are somehow superior and possess extraordinary vigour, not an advanced lack of scruples (greed); that the human condition is such that we cannot be happy unless we consume more and more and then confuse these wants with needs (despair).

Full review here Mint