Growing inequality in the West seems to be unstoppable

It seems inevitable that the rich will get richer and the poor, poorer.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama tried to mobilise America to address inequality, which is destroying social cohesion and holding back economic growth. He noted that a few years ago, a US chief executive might make 20 to 30 times the wage of the average worker. Now the figure is 273 times.

He promised to make the fight for equality the focus of the rest of his presidency. But without control of Congress, his options seem to be limited to shaming big companies into paying a wage that workers can live on without having to depend on support from the government.

Mr Obama can at least count on the support of Pope Francis, who is shaking up the Roman Catholic world with his focus on the poor.

On November 26, the Pope issued a challenge to global capitalism in the guise of an “apostolic exhortation” named Joy of the Gospels. As is to be expected from the Vatican, the title undersells the content. In it, he denounces the “economy of exclusion and exploitation” that he says kills human life.

Everything in the world today, he writes, comes under the law of survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless: “Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.”

In case anyone thought he was talking about bad people rather than bad economics, he dismissed the “trickle-down” theories that assume that the wealth of the rich will spread to the poor. They were based on “a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power”.

The Pope’s views have caused outrage in some quarters, especially in America where socialism is a minority creed. But they are hardly a flash of lightning from a blue sky. Having been a conservative priest in his native Argentina at the time of the right-wing military juntas, he had a spiritual conversion that turned him into a champion of the downtrodden. Hence his emergence as the Pope of the poor, living in a hostel, carrying his own suitcase and apparently stepping out at night to comfort the homeless.

Not many politicians in austerity-gripped Europe are ready to stand up for inequality, but there is one who is happy to play the role of anti-Pope. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, hides his ambition to be prime minister of Britain behind a provocative wit and a haystack of blond hair, apparently coiffed with the kitchen scissors.

Speaking two days after Pope Francis’s anti-capitalist blast, he delivered a lecture in honour of Margaret Thatcher, trumpeting what some politicians on the right may think but dare not say in these days of budget cuts. He crowed over the failure of the European left to seize their chance in the ruins of the 2008 financial crash and referred approvingly to Gordon Gekko, the character in the movie Wall Street who declares “greed is good”.

Greed and envy, Mr Johnson declared, were a “valuable spur to economic activity”.

He has already proposed that Britain’s top 10 tax payers should automatically receive knighthoods. When Thatcher came to power in 1979, he said, the top one per cent of earners contributed 11 per cent of the government’s revenues from income tax. These days, the top one per cent of earners contributes almost 30 per cent. These “tax heroes” and “hedge fund kings” should be applauded, not vilified.

In the globalised world of fierce economic competition world, it was inevitable that the brightest would rise to the top, while those of “the human species” with the lower IQs would sink to the bottom.

Not surprisingly, his speech was met with outrage. His comments on the lack of achievement of those with lower IQs smelled of the effortless elitism that Eton College, his old school, instils in its pupils. When he was later asked in a phone-in three questions typical of an IQ test, he failed them all, suggesting to listeners that he owes more to his family and elite schooling than any measure of IQ.

The other problem is that his “tax heroes” reveal a rather grimmer tale than the mayor wanted to tell. More and more people are too poorly remunerated to pay much or any tax, or indeed afford to live in London. So the tax heroes are the beneficiaries of a disturbing trend, rather than top altruists.

What is striking about the argument over inequality is the lack of policy proposals to deal with it. With his fine sentiments, President Obama sounds more like a rousing campaigner rather than the chief executive with responsibility to do something. There is a movement in the US to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 (Dh26.6) to $10.10 per hour. But workers in lower-paid jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots or algorithms if they are paid too much. The same processes are eating away at middle class employment.

Stripped of his provocative needling of the left, Mr Johnson’s message is one of recognising that global competition leaves no room for a comfortable life. The Global Times, a Chinese newspaper, greeted Prime Minister David Cameron (like Mr Johnson, an old Etonian) on arrival in China this week by dismissing Britain as “merely a country of old Europe suitable for tourism and overseas study, with a few decent football teams”.

Mr Johnson does not see any need for change, but rather wants the super-rich to give more of their money and for state schools to improve so that those who cannot afford the fees of Eton have a chance to find stable employment. In political terms, the message is even simpler: I’m the mayor of the city that creates financial wealth. Let me get my hands on more of it, and the rest of the country can go hang.

What Mr Obama calls the “relentless, decades-long trend” of growing inequality seems unstoppable. The choices seem to be hand-wringing in Washington and the Vatican City, and rolling out the red carpet for the super-rich in London.

On Twitter: @aphilps