Amazingly, the opening presentation on the Mirrlees review this morning suggested that the fundamental cause of inequality in the UK is different opportunities for access to work.
Well, there’s no doubt that’s a factor. But this represents an extraordinary — and I suggest deliberate — blindness inherent in this review. Not once was it mentioned that one of the most obvious cause of inequality is the massive imbalance in the ownership of capital in the UK — and the impact that this has on opportunities to access work.
Is this simply the consequence of assuming that there is equal access to capital in some form of blind faith in the neoclassical model of economics — which are a pre-requisite for the findings in this review?
Or is it a deliberate attempt to avoid the issue of the inequality of ownership of capital — which it seems throughout this review that they wish to ignore?
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Surely inequalities of wealth – property ownership and inherited wealth in particular – are hugely important? I didn’t know that Mirrlees was launching today otherwise I’d have come along – there doesn’t seem to have been that much publicity in advance.