Inequality in a Context of Climate Crisis after COVID

A Complex Realist Approach

David Byrne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367464776
• eBook ISBN: 9781000398540
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Inequality in a Context of Climate Crisis after COVID uses a complex realist approach to examine the crisis of three interconnected problems: economic inequality, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Widely acknowledged as the key driver of political discontent and social instability, economic inequality across high and middle-income countries is profoundly interconnected with climate change. Both of these issues are now set within the particularly acute context of COVID-19 and its aftermath. Confronting the crisis of these inherently interwoven issues is now the major problem for all political and governance systems. This book uses a complex realist frame of reference to understand the character of social-cultural-economic-political-ecological systems. It gives us a vocabulary and modes of thinking to confront these societal challenges and inform future action.

Contributing to our thinking about dynamic social systems, this text deploys complex realism to understand our trajectory towards increasing inequality. It puts complexity to work in addressing fundamental social issues in a context of climate crisis after COVID-19. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences, in particular to those studying social inequality, climate change, heterodox economics, complex systems, and Master's students in prgrammes with an applied focus. It will be of use to policymakers and practitioners.

1

Inequality

An issue whose time has come

Inequality is a major social and political issue across the world in the twenty-first century. This is the case both in high-income countries – those with a per capita gross national income of more than $12,615 and 16 per cent of global population and in upper middle-income countries with a per capita gross national income between $4,086 and $12,615 and 35 per cent of global population. The focus in this book will be on countries in these two categories because high-income countries generate 38 per cent of global emissions of carbon dioxide and upper middle-income countries generate 48 per cent. The 49 per cent of the world population living in lower middle-income and low-income countries are responsible for just 14 per cent of global CO₂ emissions (Ritchie, 2018). Climate catastrophe is facing us because of what happens in the high and upper middle-income states.¹ High-income and upper middle-income states have political systems, which generally have to respond to public perceptions of inequality. Not all of them are democracies but rulers have to pay attention to how people perceive their relative status in the social order. What matters is not just the snapshot of inequality at any given point in time but the actual dynamic trend in changes in inequality through time. So the rapid increase in the share of income going to the most affluent in the English-speaking world up from the historic low levels of that share in the 1970s has very considerable political salience.

It is not just changes in or levels of income inequality which matter, whether we define income in market terms or as disposable income after the impact of tax and benefit systems. Changes in wealth are also crucially important. Wealth represents two different but related things. On the one hand wealth is a source of ontological security, particularly in high-income countries.² Wealth understood as the basis of security takes the form of pension assets and owner-occupied housing. To have a decent owned home and the reality or prospect of a decent income when you have ceased to work is a source of personal and household security. There is also generally a strong desire to have assets, which can be passed on to children to ensure their security. While pension assets can generally only be inherited by a spouse/partner, housing assets are inheritable. On the other wealth takes the form of the ownership of assets, which give command over the product of the labour power of others – the old and absolutely correct labour theory of value as developed originally by Adam Smith. There is of course an overlap between wealth as security and wealth as the basis of expropriation. Funded pension schemes invest in ways which give access to profits and rents. Even pay as you go schemes, including state social insurance schemes, involve an intergenerational transfer of income from workers to the retired, albeit on the basis of an implied contract that the workers themselves will benefit in the future. Funded pension wealth is an important element in wealth inequality. Intergenerational changes in wealth are affected to a very considerable degree by the impact of wealth accumulated as housing and how this wealth is distributed on inheritance. These things matter a great deal and trends in wealth inequality have the same salience for politics as trends in income inequality, although they have greater significance in high-income countries than in upper middle-income countries.

And then there is consumption – the source of CO₂ and the driver of climate change. Much CO₂ is produced in processes of production, in making steel, cement, chemicals, in energy generation, in transport of goods and in agriculture, rather than in direct personal consumption. But all production finally translates into consumption because the cost of production of CO₂ is embodied in consumption whether by individuals/households or on some collective basis. High-income countries are responsible for 46 per cent of CO₂ by consumption. High middle-income countries are responsible for 41 per cent by consumption. There is an inherent link between inequality and climate crisis. This is usually and quite properly addressed through discussions of inequality on a global scale but the politics of climate change, despite efforts at global agreement on emission control, derive from the domestic politics of nation-states. In the short to medium term a politics directed towards the development of governance, which confronts climate catastrophe has to engage also with inequality – towards a ‘just transition’. There will only be the political space for confronting climate catastrophe if inequality is confronted at the same time. This is not going to be easy because the conventional economic approach of using growth as the basis for both improving absolute living standards in material terms and reducing relative inequality is incompatible with confronting climate crisis.

Why complexity?

The title of this book includes the phrase: ‘a complex realist approach’. I will not here lay out what is meant by a complex realist approach in referenced detail. That has been done in the book I wrote with Gill Callaghan (Byrne and Callaghan, 2014) and readers are referred to that for elaboration. However, the essentials of complex realism do need to be specified. First, the complex ones: which here in comprise an ontological specification with epistemological and methodological implications. Ontology in broad summary describes the set of philosophical questions which are concerned with the nature of reality. The reality of significance for us when we look at inequality in a context of climate crisis is comprised of a set of what I now like to call ‘interwoven’ complex systems. Complex systems have emergent properties, that is, they have properties which cannot be derived from the analytical specification of the properties of their components. Second, although complex systems are generally robust and continue in a relatively stable form for periods of time, significant changes in them are not changes of degree but changes of kind. They become different and one form of difference is ceasing to exist. We cannot establish what causes changes of kind by reductionist analytical methods because the causes themselves are both complex and multiple. Climate regimes are complex systems and changes in them are radical indeed. They are non-linear. That is why the tools used to model them are simulations which deploy non-linear mathematical methods. The scientific descriptions of climate crisis are essentially non-linear in form.

All social systems are complex systems from the level of each individual person through households, institutions, places understood as social, all political levels and the global system itself. The complexity frame of reference gives us a way of understanding and engaging with the social and natural world in which we live. These are not separate. To see them as such has been a great error of both science and political action. The social is embedded in the natural and has crucial causal powers in determining what will happen to the natural just as the natural sets limits to the range of possibility for the social. To regard the natural as having no delimiting power over the social is a fundamental error. The climate crisis exists at the intersection of the natural and the social and is interwoven with all other aspects of crisis in the contemporary global system and social systems at every level.

Crisis itself is a very useful word. It comes from classical Greek medicine where it was used to describe the crucial period in the course of an infectious disease before the availability of magic bullet antibiotics.³ Either the immune system overwhelmed the infection and the patient recovered or the infection overwhelmed the immune system and the patient died. A crisis was necessarily of short duration, even for infections like tuberculosis which could be present and active for a long time. Crisis is when things cannot stay the same and change must happen. That is where we are now. It is very important to recognize that in any crisis where part of the causal process is down to the actions of human beings, down to human agency, then it is not a matter of what will happen but what will be made to happen. There are macro system events which are beyond the present ability of the most advanced human systems to do anything much about them. An asteroid strike or a tsunami on the scale of that caused by the Storegga slide⁴ would have catastrophic consequences for human civilization across an enormous area and possibly globally. There is very little we could do about either. In contrast we can possibly, if we act hard enough and quickly enough, do something to avert or at least ameliorate a climate catastrophe. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic globally illustrates the vulnerability of social systems to the natural world and the ability of governance systems when faced with a short-term and immediate crisis to respond by a radically different set of policies. Social contexts themselves influence the inter-relationships between public expectations of governance and what governments feel obliged to do. The ‘Russian flu’ of the mid-nineteenth century and the ‘Spanish flu’ after the First World War both were much more severe in terms of mortality than COVID-19, but they happened before the great majority of nation-states had undergone the health transformation. Before that transition most people died from infectious diseases particularly in infancy and childhood but across the life course. After it most deaths occurred in old age from causes other than infection. If people were used to dying from infections and there was no general and large-scale health system in place then the impact of pandemics, unless they like the Black Death of the fourteenth century in Europe fundamentally changed the demographic structure, was momentary and passing. Now things are different. Context matters.

The form of complexity theory/the complexity frame of reference that informs this book is what Morin (2008) called general complexity. There is a strong but completely erroneous belief held by many⁵ that complexity emerged from mathematical physics in the late twentieth century as a consequence of the development of techniques which can cope with non-linearity and emergence. Actually complexity thinking can be traced back to the philosophical response by George Lewes (1875) to Darwin’s scientific method in The Origin of Species⁶. Much of ‘scientistic’ complexity theory operates in the frame of what Morin called ‘restricted complexity’ – that it is possible to achieve some sort of understanding of complex systems solely on the basis of techniques of scientific inquiry and mathematical representation of the kind, which have informed what Dilthey called the nomothetic sciences since their emergence in the seventeenth century and formalization in the nineteenth. This is wrong. While mathematical formalism through non-linear modelling and the very different approach of agent based modelling do have real utility in addressing complex systems, in any system where human agency is significant they are not only never enough but also mostly not the best way to start. We have to engage through the human sciences to use Vico’s distinction. The human sciences are sciences – not simply humanities in the aesthetic sense. Science is defined not by a particular set of methods – in the sense of techniques – nor by the generation of accounts of reality in mathematical form. Rather science is as stated by the Gulbenkian Commission on the future of the social sciences – the production of: ‘… systematic secular knowledge about reality that is somehow validated empirically’ (1996: 2). When we deal with systems which are generated by and/or responsive to human agency qualitative understanding is generally our best starting point. Here narratives are essential and narratives can be both quantitative and qualitative.

It is inherent in the nature of complex systems that they have multiple possible future states depending on how the causal processes generating those states work out through time. The key aspects of climate catastrophe over which we have control are our pattern of consumption and the degree to which we generate greenhouse gases to fuel that consumption. Climate change is anthropo-generated in this era of the Anthropocene.

The inclusion of the word ‘realist’ in the title to qualify complex is important in two respects. First, it simply asserts that there is a world which is real and which can be known, however much our accounts of that reality are social constructions. They are surely social constructions but they are made from something in the world, not from our imaginations. Reality has a voice in science. Second, to talk about complex realism is to endorse the Bhaskerian account of three levels of reality – the real, which is the level of the complex generative mechanisms, which are the source of all causation; the actual which is what the world in all its aspects looks like given the way the generative mechanisms of the real have been expressed in context – both spatial and temporal; and the empirical which comprises the descriptions of the actual and the real, which we have constructed through investigation and theorizing as science. The assertion of complex realism has particular importance in discussing inequality in a context of climate crisis because to endorse that frame of reference leads to the necessary dismissal of the relevance of the neo-classical/posited⁷ school of economics as having any role in our understanding. That school is an ideological assertion of material interests masquerading as social science and needs to be eliminated from our discussions in its entirety.

The interwoven set of systems which constitute the human world of the twenty-first century are first all aspects of social systems – political, economic and cultural – together with subsystems including fiscal systems (tax, spending and social distribution); planning systems incorporating land use planning, transport planning and environmental regulation; production systems including ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Series editors’ preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Inequality: An issue whose time has come
• 2 Conceptualizing inequality
• 3 Describing inequality
• 4 Income, wealth, and inequality
• 5 Inequality and capitalism(s) in the twenty-first century
• 6 The role of the state in relation to inequality in a context of climate crisis – how this works out for incomes and wealth
• 7 The role of the state in relation to inequality in a context of climate crisis – the ‘social wage’ and spatial planning
• 8 The formal politics of inequality: What kind of governance systems do we need to confront inequality in a context of climate change and after COVID?
• 9 The new politics of equality
• 10 The futures that are possible for us
• Index