In the light of the recent Productivity Commission report on inequality in Australia, I thought I would repost this piece from 2016. It’s not radically dissimilar in terms of its conclusions, but is, I think, more balanced than the “nothing to see here, move on” spin that’s characterized much of the coverage of the PC report.
Over the past forty years, leading developed economies, most notably the United States have experienced an upsurge in inequality of income and wealth. Most of the benefits of economic growth have accrued to those in the top 1 per cent of the income distribution. Meanwhile, living standards for those in the bottom half of the income distribution have stagnated or even declined.
Piketty’s work, published in reports and academic journals, has documented these trends. His book, Capital, not only brought the issues to the attention of a broader public, but presented an analysis suggesting that worse is to come. Piketty argues that we are in the process of returning to a ‘patrimonial’ society, in which income from inherited wealth is the predominant source of inequality.
Piketty’s work has previously focused mainly on the United States, but the research presented in Capital points to similar trends in the United Kingdom. Although inequality has grown much less in France, the third country on which he has detailed data, Piketty argues that the same trend will emerge unless there is a substantial change in political conditions.
To the extent that there is a general trend of the kind described by Piketty, we would expect it to emerge first in the English speaking world, where the shift to market liberalism and financialised capitalism was earlier and more complete. And, indeed, a sharp increase in inequality may be observed in other English speaking countries including Canada and New Zealand
Australia, on the other hand, looks like a counterexample. On most measures of inequality Australia looks more like France than like the rest of the English speaking world. Although Australians have experienced an increase in inequality on most measures, the general picture is one of broadly distributed improvements in living standards, as illustrated by Peter Whiteford’s contribution to a recent seminar on Piketty published by the Australian Economic Review (AER). As Whiteford notes:
Income growth was highest for the richest 20 per cent of the population, at close to 60 per cent in real terms, but even for the poorest 20 per cent, real incomes grew by more than 40 per cent between 1996 and 2007.
Other measures such as the Gini coefficient and the ratio of median to mean income tell a similar story. Inequality has increased over the period since the 1980s, but only modestly and with frequent reversals.
Turning to the top 1 per cent of the income distribution, evidence from tax data, presented by Roger Wilkins in the AER volume suggests that the share of income accruing to this group has risen, but not to the same extent as in other English speaking countries This is consistent with the observations of Piketty himself, who notes:
?the upper centile’s [top 1 per cent] share is nearly 20 percent in the United States, compared with 14–15 percent in Britain and Canada and barely 9–10 percent in Australia
Much of the credit for this comparatively benign outcome must go to the Labor government that held office from 1983 to 1997 and implemented a relatively progressive version of the market liberal reform agenda. Labor managed a reform of the Australian tax and welfare system that shielded low income Australians from the worst effects of the market liberal revolution that swept the English speaking world in the 1970s and 1980s.
In most countries, policies of financial deregulation, privatisation and microeconomic reform were accompanied by regressive changes to the tax and welfare systems. By contrast, Labor introduced broadly progressive tax reforms including a capital gains tax and a crackdown on tax avoidance.
Rather than treating welfare payments and tax policy as separate, the restructuring sought to integrate the two, taking account of the combined impact of means tests and tax policies to optimise the balance between efficiency and redistribution.
These changes weren’t sufficient to prevent growing inequality of income and wealth, and some of them were eroded over time. Nevertheless, in broad terms, a redistributive tax–welfare system was maintained under the succeeding conservative government, even as it was being eroded in other English-speaking countries.
Labor returned to office in 2007, just in time to make its next big contribution: the fiscal stimulus that allowed Australia to avoid the recession generated by the Global Financial Crisis in nearly every other country. In combination with previous successful pieces of macroeconomic management, such as the Reserve Bank’s handling of the Asian Financial Crisis in the 1990s, the result has been an economic expansion lasting nearly 25 years, unparalleled in Australia’s economic history, and scarcely equalled anywhere in the world. The strength of the labour market has encouraged a broad spread of prosperity not seen elsewhere.
Together these factors explain why Australia has avoided the drastic increases in inequality seen in other English speaking countries. On the other hand, although Australia’s a long way from the plutocracy that already characterises the United States, there is no room for complacency.
Australia’s relatively equal distribution of income and wealth depends on a history of strong employment growth and a redistributive tax–welfare system. Neither can be taken for granted. The end of the mining boom has inevitably resulted in slower growth which bears hardest on those at the bottom of the income distribution. And, as elsewhere, the political pressure to take burdens from the rich and shift them to the poor is never-ending.
Moreover, Australia has not proved itself immune to the political dynamic, noted by Piketty, by which increasing personal wealth allows the wealthy to dominate politics, then enact policies that protect their own wealth. The archetypal example is Silvio Berlusconi in Italy but the situation in the United States is arguably worse. The majority of members of the US Congress are millionaires, with not much difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Given the pattern of highly unequal incomes, and social immobility observed in the US today, we can expect inheritance to play a much bigger role in explaining inequality for the generations now entering adulthood than for the current recipients of high incomes and owners of large fortunes. Inherited advantages in the patrimonial society predicted by Piketty will include direct transfers of wealth as well as the effects of increasingly unequal access to education, early job opportunities and home ownership.
The move towards a patrimonial society already happening in the US is evident at the very top of the Australian income distribution. As in the US, the claim that the rich are mostly self-made is already dubious, and will soon be clearly false. Of the top 10 people on the Business Review Weekly (BRW) rich list, four inherited their wealth, including the top three. Two more are in their 80s, part of the talented generation of Jewish refugees who came to Australia and prospered in the years after World War II. When these two pass on, the rich list will be dominated by heirs, not founders.
The same point is even clearer with the BRW list of rich families. As recently as 20 years ago, all but one of these clans were still headed by the entrepreneurs who had made the family fortune in the first place. Now, all but one of the families are rich by inheritance.
So, Australians have no room for complacency. In an economy dominated by capital, and in the absence of estate taxation, there is little to stop the current drift towards a more unequal society from continuing and even accelerating.
On the other hand, Australia’s relative success in using the tax and welfare systems to spread the benefits of economic growth provides grounds for optimism elsewhere in the world. Australia’s experience belies the claim that any attempt to offset the growth of inequality must cripple economic growth. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that there is plenty of scope for progressive changes to tax policy that would partly or wholly offset the trends towards greater inequality documented by Piketty.
John Quiggin 
It’s a strange thing. The LNP have been in power for 17 out of the past 22 years and yet inequality hasn’t worsened in that time.
Isn’t the historic mission of the LNP to take ftom the poor and give to the rich? If that’s what they’ve been trying to do they don’t seem to be very good at it.
It gets stranger. According to Picketty the dynamics of capitalism make society more unequal. But Australian society hasn’t become more unequal. It hasn’t become equal either; nothing much has changed. The LNP policies of the past two decades must have undone and reversed the unequalising forces of capitalism.
This surely can’t be right. Or can it?
Both the Liberal and Labor parties are social democratic so it is unsurprising that they provide similar equality outcomes.
Don’t believe what the after dark shocks jocks on Sky News tell ya, Harry. The Liberal Party is not social democratic. If the Liberals had their way, we would now have Work Choices, massive tax cuts for the wealthy and big business, no exposé of their bank and finance sector mates and a much more degrading and punitive welfare system.
The electorate has forced the Liberal vampire to retract its fangs and deny its true self.
Angus Taylor, the new energy minister, who is on the right of his party, was all over the media today saying that energy companies like banks have lost their social licence and they should expect large dollops of regulation and intervention. The new Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was all over the media today excoriating Westpac for putting up its lending interest rates, after its funding costs have gone up.
Maybe the Liberal Party is becoming social democratic. As far as I can tell, there is not a single minister who is prepared to stand in public as a friend of business, or at least not big business. How times have changed.
The Liberals are not social democrats by conviction, but by the force of compulsory voting and preferential voting.
My only caveat on John’s observations is that radical change is not kind to inherited wealth (or indeed to the top of the social pyramid). Another generation or so will see climate change hitting so hard they will be lucky to keep their lives.
I would think that higher voter turnout is correlated with greater economic equality in final outcomes, after all income distributions and welfare transfers.
One study I scanned briefly stated this in reverse order.
“Through panel data analysis the study finds support in favour of a negative relationship in that as economic inequality rises, voting participation in parliamentary elections decreases.” – Economic Inequality and Voting Participation – Olle Krönby & Nils Brandsma
I am not sure why the authors imply that causality runs only from inequality to participation. One would think it would run as much or more in the other direction. One would think circular, iterative feedbacks or causation cycles would apply.
From Australia’s point of view, thank goodness we have compulsory voting, which nets us over 90% federal election voter turnout and, as a consequence, less inequality in our society.
The Scandinavian countries have voluntary voting and much less inequality than we do.
Smith9
Which part of
did you not understand?
Also
I don’t want to shock you too severely, but it is not completely unknown for people to be less than perfectly candid in their statements (and especially their public statements). You need to observe what they’re doing, not just what they’re saying. The voice may be the voice of Jacob, but the hands may still be the hands of Esau.
J-D
it’s a very small increase in inequality, much smaller than in other countries, especially the US, which was the point of John’s piece. Which part of that did you not understand?
Taking up your allusions from the Book of Genesis, the Liberal Party is starting to resemble Lot and his wife, fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah (read: the neoliberal zeitgeist of the past 35 years). Whether any of them look back and are turned to salt remains to be seen.
The PC report a shoddy document. As arises in such cases, it’s difficult to tell how much is deliberate deception and how much is simply due to incompetence.
For nations with voluntary voting, the Scandinavian countries have a high turnout. For example, “In their most recent elections—2014 and 2015 respectively—Swedish turnout was at roughly 82% of the voting age population and 86% of registered voters…”
The point stands. There is a significant positive correlation between voting turnout and equality. Logically, one would expect that. One would expect that a large majority would vote in favour of the interests of the large majority, at least in the presence of adequate information. Most people benefit from equality; especially from social wages, social welfare and social insurance.
You might be right, Iko, though the Swedes, especially working class Swedes, driven by anti-refugee sentiment, are about to vote in very large numbers for a far right white nationalist party, mostly at the expense of the social democrats.
The LNP as social democrats now? More a rentier reactionary one percenter boosting tool posing as it suits them as decent churchy types.
https://braveneweurope.com/richard-murphy-democratic-socialism-is-the-best-thing-that-could-ever-happen-for-the-market-economy
Smith9
John Quiggin asserts that it was policies of Labor governments, not policies of Coalition governments, which have partly (but not completely) offset the trend to greater inequality in Australia; and he identifies which Labor policies he considers responsible.
If you think Coalition governments as well as (or rather than) Labor governments have been responsible, you have not identified the Coalition policies you’re giving the credit to.
On another topic
I know where anybody who is interested can find an English-language source for information about opinion polling for Swedish elections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_Swedish_general_election,_2018
If these polls are to be believed (and of course polls like this aren’t always right; but they’re right more than they’re wrong), then the election next month will see the Sweden Democrats (as they choose uninformatively to name themselves) do substantially better at the election next month than they did at the last election in 2014. But are their gains ‘mostly’ at the expense of the SAP (the Social Democrats)? The polls do show the SAP losing support, but they also show the MSP (the principal opponents of the SAP) losing support to a roughly similar extent, and how many of the voters of either might be switching to the Sweden Democrats is unclear with the polls also showing gains both for the Centre Party and for the Left Party.
As for the supposition that any of these movements reflect, as you allege, especially the opinions of working-class Swedes, that’s not measured by the opinion polls reported by Wikipedia; I suppose you may have an adequate basis for it, but I also consider the possibility that you’re just making it up.
J-D
The Labor Party has been in power for 5 years out of the last 20. It is fanciful to suggest that they alone have been responsible for policies to offset the trend to greater inequality.
If you want specific LNP policies, you can start with the increase in family payments under John Howard and the increase in income tax rates for the highest incomes under Tony Abbott (45% to 47% for incomes over $180,000, in the 2014 Budget).
On the Sweden election, there’s plenty of analysis in the Swedish newspapers.
Smith,
The Liberal Party’s Work Choices would have increased inequality compared to the Labor Party replacement, the Fair Work Act 2009, as it stripped away much of the safety net that workers with no or little bargaining power rely on.
The Liberal Party would love to take us back to Work Choices but they can’t because Labor, the Unions and ultimately the electorate will not allow it. The fact that Labor has had only 5 years in power over the last 20 is irrelevant in that regard. What’s more, the Liberals have rarely controlled the senate.
Tony Abbott had to face down a party room revolt to get the temporary 2% deficit levy put on the top rate of tax. The levy has already expired. Liberal Party elders like, Peter Costello, opposed the levy.
Still, you have half a point. I seem to recall John Howard being labelled a conservative social democrat because of the family payments he supported.
Hugo
I agree. We’ve seen a lot of different policies, some progressive and some not, put through the blender of politics, set against a background where the economy and social relations in themselves would have worsened inequality, with the result that inequality hasn’t changed much.
blender of politics?
hells bells.
it looked like a discussion on angels and heads of pins then
blood everywhere.
as for inequality, what comes to mind is the tv show of those rich kids playing poor for ten days.
(oh the trauma!, how entertaining)
and when they finally got back to a hot shower and a safe place to sleep said
“oh well. what can be done?”
they are well off, connected, supposedly highly intelligent and
“oh well.what can be done.”
i won’t propose public monies for shower facilities etc.
(especially as the baited line over hay transport didn’t get a bite and the farmers in the west did it anyway.)
oh, and
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-01/illegal-ipswich-crisis-housing-for-addicts-facing-closure-threat/10184336?WT.ac=statenews_qld
Smith9
You write that the Labor Party has been in power for only five of the last twenty years. The correct figure is six, but that error of no great significance. The significant error is to suppose that what has happened over the last twenty years is to be explained in terms of what governments have done over the last twenty years, excluding earlier government actions as if they could have no continuing effect. John Quiggin asserts that the largest part in offsetting the trend to greater inequality is to be credited to the decisions of Labor governments from 1983 to 1996 (actually, he writes 1997, but that’s another error of no great significance). I don’t know to what extent this is true, but it is at least possible that government decisions between 1983 and 1996 have had a continuing effect from 1996 until now, whereas it is obviously impossible that any decision in the 2014 budget can have had an effect over all of that same period.
I’m sure it’s true that there’s lots of information in Swedish newspapers about Swedish politics, but I don’t know Swedish, so I’m no better informed than before about the sources for your assertion about working-class Swedes than I was before and have no better reason than before to discount the possibility that you’re making it up.
J-D
You can read about the Swedish election in the English language versions of Swedish newspapers, as well as other European newspapers. Instead of accusing me of bad faith, you could do some research.
Smith9, I think I remember reading it had more to do with region (the right-leaning south?) and age (older people who grew up in a more homogenous society). Not so much income levels, or being part of the ‘working class’. Though I could be wrong.
Smith9
Yes, I could do some research. In fact, between my previous comment and this one I did do some research. I found an English-language website for a Swedish newspaper, [i]Aftonbladet[/i], and as a result I learned that a superstar Swedish DJ has died, that there’s been an ABBA reunion, and that the Swedish Academy has been hit by scandal and as a result has decided not to award the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Interesting enough, but not what we’re looking for, is it? How much time and effort do you think I would have to invest to track down the specific sources you’re relying on, and how much time and effort do you think it would take for you just to identify them?
J-D
Here is a helpful hint. Use the words Sweden and election in your google search.
You’re welcome.
Find the new format (suppose it’s not that new now but I haven’t commented much lately) bit hard to follow on phone so apols if this has already been said but:
Ikon – inequality can lead to lower voting because as people become more marginalised they have less faith in the system. Eg in America, Democratic Party has to make big efforts to ‘get out the vote’.
Smith9 – don’t think anyone has said this yet, but in addition to the period of Labor govt JQ mentions, the LNC may have formed government, but most of the time did not control both Houses of Parliament. Therefore they have not been able to get their whole legislative program through, which has protected us from some of the measures that would have increased inequality.
Val
Yes, that is true. But the LNP also implemented policies like bigger family payments that decreased inequality.
Those payments typically were merely to provide some spin covering the greater amounts paid out by the LNP in various ways to those already well off. This during a good luck period coinciding with a lengthy global boom and Australian mining boom instead of investing in any infrastructure and/or a sovereign wealth fund.
Smith9
So, I did a search for ‘Sweden election newspaper’. I got The Guardian, The Express, SBS, The Economis, Ha’aretz, the BBC, and The Financial Times, but no Swedish newspapers!
I did, however, get a couple of non-newspaper Swedish news websites: The Local (Sweden), and Radio Sweden.
In The Local I discover a report of a recent opinion poll showing decreased support (compared to the last election) for the SAP and the MSP, with increased support for the Sweden Democrats. I already knew about multiple polls like that, from Wikipedia, as I mentioned before. But does the story include polling figures specifically for working-class Swedes? No, no it does not. There are a lot of other election stories there on The Local, too, but none that look like the ones you were talking about.
Radio Sweden’s website has a polling story too, about a poll in which respondents were asked to name their first preference and second preference among the parties running. Out of those respondents who gave the MSP as their first choice, the breakdown of second preferences was Liberals 27%, Sweden Democrats 26%, Centre 22%, Christian Democrats 16%. Maybe interesting but, again, not the story you were talking about.
I could read dozens of news stories about the Swedish election and not find the ones you’re referring to; or you could just tell me which ones you’re referring to–if, in fact, you actually know of any.
JD, it is obvious that much of the Swedish white working class has deserted the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats used to get 40% to 50% of the vote; now they are down to less than 25%. This isn’t because reindeer herdsmen have deserted the party.
The New Statesmen acknowledges it in this article but it produces no figures:
“For most of the 20th century, the country was considered a social democratic “one-party state”. But the latest round of polls put the Social Democrats on an averagely European 24 per cent, roughly on par with the conservative Moderates and not far ahead of the far-right Sweden Democrats. This is particularly unsettling for the ruling left-wing coalition of Social Democrats and Greens.
On the face of it, the Social Democrats’ downward spiral follows the same pattern as in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and France. The traditional alliance between working-class voters and well-educated urbanites, which has sustained the left for over a century, has fractured. While the party has further strengthened its appeal to young urban professionals, many traditional working-class voters, and particularly men, have deserted the party towards the Sweden Democrats.”
***www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/06/lesson-swedish-social-democrats-not-one-you-think
The Swedish Social Democrats punched themselves in the eye when they allowed the biggest per capita influx of immigrants in recent European history to occur.
The ALP would be a broken mess, just like the Swedish Social Democrats, if it adopted a soft line on border security and we had hundreds of thousands of boat arrivals. The public doesn’t want it. The public has no reason to want it. From my experience, many newly arrived immigrants themselves don’t want it.
Ironically, the ALP is only electable today because the Right stopped the boats.
Hugo
No figures! That’s my point. The New Statesman (or Itay Lotem, writing for it), like Smith9 and like you, thinks that the explanation for the trend apparent in the opinion polls is that young urban professionals have stuck with the SAP while working-class men have moved from the SAP to the Sweden Democrats, and that’s certainly one possible explanation, but what’s the basis for excluding the alternative explanation that it’s young urban professionals who have moved to the Sweden Democrats while working-class men have stuck with the SAP? or the other alternative explanation that both groups have shifted from the SAP to the Sweden Democrats in equal proportions? or the other other alternative explanation that the largest number of the voters leaving the SAP have moved to the Left Party, while the largest part of the increase in support for the Sweden Democrats has come from voters leaving the MSP? or the other other other alternative explanation …. I don’t think I need to go on. Itay Lotem does state that there has been a surge in support for the Sweden Democrats in Stockholm’s richest neighbourhood; why is that supposed to be happening, then?
Itay Lotem also states that the SAP experienced its sharpest drop in support when it started talking about more restrictive immigration policy, which also doesn’t obviously and immediately fit with the story you want to tell.
I can find dozens of articles that say that the Swedish working class has largely deserted the social democrats. What I can’t find is actual poll numbers.
“It is wrong to believe the SD recruits from conservative circles. This happens, of course, but it’s not the dominating factor. On the contrary, there are many studies that show the SD gets most of its recruits from the working class.”
***www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/24/sweden-democrats-far-right-election
“The Sweden Democrats enjoy higher electoral support than ever before, according to a new poll by Sifo on behalf of newspaper SvD. The poll aslso shows that the anti-immigration party has greater support among working class voters than the Social Democrats.
On Thursday, the Sweden Democrats received 25.2 percent in a web panel survey by YouGov, which put them ahead of the governing Social Democrats on 23.4 per cent. But YouGov’s polling method has been criticised by other polling institutes and by analysts.
However, a new poll on Saturday by Sifo, on behalf of the newspapers SvD and Göteborgs-Posten, also underlined the growth in voter support for the third biggest party in parliament. At 17.8 percent, a 2.6 percent rise on June, the Sifo survey represents the largest support that the party has ever received.”
***sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&artikel=6238243
“How is it that the Swedish populist nationalist party the Sweden Democrats receives its strongest support from the established working class, in spite of the high degree of class voting and left–right mobilization which is known to characterize Swedish politics? Based on surveys from the SOM (Society, Opinion, Media) Institute as well as the Swedish National Elections Studies, this article shows that this is not a result of increasing anti-immigrant attitudes in the working class or of decreasing left–right polarization among voters. Rather, we present the argument that the weakening alignment between the working class and the Social Democratic Party and the weakened left–right polarization between the main parties have created a structure which has left room for a realignment between large parts of the working class and the Sweden Democrats along the alternative underlying ideological dimension of authoritarianism/libertarianism.”
***www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/article/room-for-realignment-the-working-class-sympathy-for-sweden-democrats/5F7EC10B46A3BF706B9AD2B975D9729B
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-joins-the-club-far-right-democrats-jimmie-akesson-stefan-lofven-general-election/
That article has a link to a report of the poll, but that’s in Swedish, which I don’t know.
However, a couple of observations are possible.
One is that 25% is a far higher figure than the Sweden Democrats have achieved in any election until now, so that poll is showing much higher support for the party from LO members than the baseline represented by past election results (although 25% is not a majority; if 25% of LO members support the Sweden Democrats, that also means that 75% do not support the Sweden Democrats)..
Another is that recent opinion polls have generally been showing increased support across the board for the Sweden Democrats. So, does the 25% of LO members reported by this one poll represent a higher level of support for the Sweden Democrats among LO members than among the rest of the population, or does it simply reflect a general national increase of support? There’s not enough information to tell, one way or the other. A figure of 25% is at the high end of the range of results for the Sweden Democrats in individual polls over recent months, but it’s not outside the range.
Incidentally, although Smith9 insisted this information is available from Swedish newspapers, none of the three sources you have cited is a Swedish newspaper.
JD: “Another is that recent opinion polls have generally been showing increased support across the board for the Sweden Democrats. So, does the 25% of LO members reported by this one poll represent a higher level of support for the Sweden Democrats among LO members than among the rest of the population, or does it simply reflect a general national increase of support? There’s not enough information to tell, one way or the other.”
Actually all you had to do was follow the first link in the article you cite, which has an opinion poll showing the Sweden Democrats are in third place with about 20% support while the Social Democrats are on 25%. That accords with the other opinion polls I have seen yesterday and today.
If the members of the main organised labor outfit, that has traditionally cleaved to the Social Democrats, intend voting for the Sweden Democrats at a greater rate than the rest of the population, one doesn’t need to consult Captain Obvious to surmise that non-organised labor is even more likely to vote for the Sweden Democrats.
The Social Democrats are now a shadow of their former selves and they have themselves to blame.
The Swedish SDP saw its greatest decline between 2005-2010, when it lost two federal elections in a row to the centre right alliance. Which then did everything it could to ensure the SDP would lose more support.
Click to access 2064087.pdf
Claiming refugees are the core reason for its decline over the last 20-25 years is the essence of shooting yourself in the foot.
Here is the Wikipedia page I mentioned before, which gives more reliable information about more polls than one person’s memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_Swedish_general_election,_2018
There are polls, including some in the last week or two, that show aggregate support for the Sweden Democrats at 24 or 25 percent. On the other hand, most of the polls show their support as lower, some significantly lower. It’s possible–it’s even probable–that out of so many polls there are one or two that are just plain wrong and showing aggregate support for the Sweden Democrats higher than it ever really was. But then, it’s also possible that the poll which found 25% of LO members supporting the Sweden Democrats was one of the individual polls which was just plain wrong. And it was taken in May, when the indication of all the polls taken together is that aggregate support for the Sweden Democrats was higher than it is now.
After saying all that, I agree that the reported figure from one poll, even in May, of 25% of LO members supporting the Sweden Democrats does tend to suggest that support for the Sweden Democrats among LO members is higher than among the rest of the population. But statistically the indication is not strong. If every poll did a breakdown showing results for LO members and for the rest of the population, and reported it, then we’d have a strong basis for drawing conclusions. But it seems that’s not done.
The more general observation that the SAP has suffered a serious long-term decline is obviously true; we can tell that from election results, which are necessarily a more reliable source of information than opinion polls can ever be. The causes of this long-term decline, however, are something we can’t read off directly either from election results or from opinion polls.
Nick: “Claiming refugees are the core reason for its decline over the last 20-25 years is the essence of shooting yourself in the foot.”
Such a claim would be overreach, so it is a good thing no one said that. The refugee crisis is a core reason, not the core reason for the decline of the Social Democrats.
Did the Inequality Report mention that the wealth of the richest 20% of Australian households is now 70-80 times that of the poorest 20% of Australian households, as compared to 30-40 times back in 2003?
Did it note that every quintile now owns more wealth than every poorer quintile put together. ie. the second richest quintile owns more in total than the third, fourth, and fifth put together. The third, more than the fourth and fifth etc.
Or did it not bother to make those kind of obvious comparisons at all, and instead just showed that the ‘Wealth Gini’ moved from .5 to .6?
You have to wonder when a thread on inequality gets glossed over and turned into a thread about race and border control. It’s almost like what the Liberal party does on a daily basis.
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In the context of a distribution where the mean is far above the median, redistribution has the potential to make an overwhelming majority better off, and that’s without taking into account suggestions that there’s evidence that reduced inequality produces general benefits across society for nearly everybody.
So, if it seems to be the case that the possibility of a reduction in inequality is not motivating the votes of the majority, it’s reasonable to discuss what else might be motivating their votes.
Having said that, here are some quotes from articles Hugo has cited:
I don’t know that these arguments are valid (how could I?), but these are sources Hugo has chosen to cite, and according to them the problems the SAP are experiencing are a result of not putting enough emphasis on reducing inequality and what the party needs to do to recover support is return to that emphasis; so in this respect Hugo’s own chosen sources appear to contradict Hugo’s position.