Being Open About Pay

In Norway, it is possible to find out how much anyone else is paid, and it rarely causes problems.

From 2001, the government published the details (income, assets and the tax they paid) in a book which could be found on a shelf in the public library. Today the information is held online.

Transparency is important, partly because Norwegians pay high levels of income tax (an average of 40.2%, compared to 33.3% in the UK; the European average is 30.1%). People therefore want to know that everyone else is paying, and know that it is being spent appropriately. They need to have trust and confidence in both the tax and social security systems.

Because wages in many sectors are set through collective agreements, and pay gaps are relatively narrow, in most workplaces people already have a fairly good idea how much colleagues are earning. The gender pay gap is also narrow, by international standards, ranking 3rd out of 144 countries by the World Economic Forum.

While initially there were no limitations, since 2014, people have to log in to the website using their national ID number to access the data, which means it is possible to find out who has been doing searches on your information. The change saw a significant drop in search numbers, as it took out the 'Peeping Tom' searches. A recent survey indicated that 92% of people do not look up friends, family or acquaintances.

The tax lists give net income, net assets and tax paid. However, property portfolios may well understate the value, as the taxable property value is often far less than the current market value.

But the 2014 restrictions have not stopped whistleblowing, and people still report possible cases of tax evasion.

Source: Norway: the country where no salaries are secret, by Lars Bevanger. BBC News website, 22 July 2017

Population Trends

UN Survey

• World population will break through 8bn in 2023.
• There are more men than women globally (102 men for every 100 women).
• In 2018, the number of over-60s will top 1bn for the first time.
• Children make up one quarter of the world's population.

• More than half the global population growth by 2050 will come from just nine countries: India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the US, Uganda and Indonesia, where fertility rates persist at levels far higher than the rest of the world.
• The world population will reach 9.8bn in 2050: 2bn of these will be over 60.

• By contrast, all European countries have fertility rates below replacement level, so populations will decline without large scale immigration.
• Eastern Europe likely to be worst affected with drops of 15% in Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine.

Source: Article in The Guardian, 21 June 2017. Read in full.

UK Population Trends

• The Office for National Statistics said that the UK population was expected to increase by 4.4 million in the next ten years (roughly the size of the Irish Republic) , reaching 70 million in 2027.
• The population is projected to grow by 9.7 million over the next 25 years, reaching 74.3 million.
• Statistics predict an ageing population, with some 29.5% of people aged over 60 by 2039 (23.2% in 2015).
• In 2039 more than 1 in 12 UK people are expected to be aged 80 or over.

• These projections assume that more people will come to live in the UK than emigrate, accounting for about half of the increase. The remainder is attributed to births outnumbering deaths.
• In many European countries, the trend is for a decreasing population.
• Decreasing populations have a shrinking working-age population, with an increased ageing population which is not productive.
• Where migration contributes to population growth, the challenge is to ensure that immigrants pay more in taxes than they cost in public services.

Source: Article on BBC website, 29 Oct. 2015. Read in full.

Divisions in UK Society 2017

The Social Mobility Commission report (2017) says 20 years of government efforts to improve social mobility have failed to reduce divisions in Britain's 'us-and-them' society. This has left a sour public mood and the divides are unsustainable socially, economically and politically.

A traffic light system was used to assess progress in improving social mobility; findings show failings at every key stage in people's lives.

• Early years - amber
• School - amber
• Training, further education or university - red
• Work - red

Other findings are:

• Economic growth in London and other cities has left parts of England behind, with people leaving in search of opportunities.
• The income & wealth divide has increased; between 1997 and 2017, the bottom fifth of households saw incomes increase by just over £10 per week, compared with £300 per week for the top fifth.
• There is growing inequality between the old and the young, who are more reliant on parents for help to buy homes.
• At current rates of progress, it will take 15 years before all children are school-ready by the age of five, and 40 years before the attainment gap between rich and poor at that age is closed.
• Currently no prospect of the gap between poorer and wealthier children being eliminated at either GCSE or A-level.
• It will take about 80 years to close the participation gap between students from rich and poor areas.
• Young people's wages have fallen 16%, taking pay to below 1997 levels.
• One in five people are on low pay, a consistently higher proportion than in similar nations.

The Commission recommendations included:

• Establishing a national ambition to ensure the attainment gap between poorer five-year olds and their peers has been halved within a decade.
• Abandon plans to extend grammar schools. Focus on developing collaborative approaches to turning around failing schools.
• Ensure higher education is available through further education colleges in social mobility 'cold spots'.
• Aim to make the UK the country with the lowest level of low pay in the OECD by 2030.

Source: Divisions in society leading to 'sour mood', Katherine Sellgren, BBC News website, 28 June 2017.

Which Poppy? Red, White, Purple or Black?

The poppy as a symbol of remembrance was started by the American humanitarian Moina Michael, who was inspired by Lt Colonel John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields, describing the small red flowered plants growing on the graves of soldiers buried in northern France and Belgium during World War I. She began wearing a poppy and others soon followed.

While most people in the UK are likely to wear a red poppy for Remembrance Day, there are other poppies too, each associated with a charity. You can wear more than one if you want to.

Red Poppy
A lasting memorial to those who died in World War I and later conflicts. It was adopted by the Royal British Legion in 1921.

After the first poppy appeal in 1921, demand could not be fulfilled in Scotland, so a poppy-making factory was opened in Edinburgh. The Scottish poppy is also red, but whereas the RBL poppy has two petals and a green leaf, the Scottish version has four lobed petals and no leaf. It was adopted by PoppyScotland.

White Poppy
Remembers those who have died in conflict, while emphasising the lasting commitment to peace. Adopted by the Peace Pledge Union.

Purple Poppy
Worn by those wanting to remember animal victims of war. Adopted by the Animal Aid Charity.

Black Poppy
Remembering the African, Black and Caribbean communities who contributed in any way to the War effort. Adopted by Black Poppy Rose.

Source: various.

Why are Poor People Poor?

Why do we think poor people are poor because of their own bad choices? Maia Szalavitz

The Guardian, 5 July 2017

The psychological concept of “fundamental attribution error” is a natural tendency to see the behaviour of others as being determined by their character – while excusing our own behaviour based on circumstances. “If an unexpected medical emergency bankrupts you, you view yourself as a victim of bad fortune [but see] other bankruptcy court clients as spendthrifts who carelessly had too many lattes. If you’re unemployed, you recognize the hard effort you put into seeking work, but view others in the same situation as useless slackers. Their history and circumstances are invisible from your perspective.”

Hard work and a good education used to help upward mobility in the US. Americans born in the 1940s had a 90% chance of doing better than their parents, but those born in the 1980s have only 50/50 odds of doing so.

But elements of normal psychology combine to keep many convinced that the rich and the poor deserve what they get – with exceptions made, of course, mainly for oneself.

As a teen cashier, watching people commit food stamp fraud with food stamps and using cellphones that he could only “dream about”, writer JD Vance saw the food-stamp recipients as lazy and supporting addictions rather than working honestly. But the reality was often using illicitly purchased alcohol to soothe grief, pain and trauma; buying something special to celebrate a child’s birthday; without supportive family members, as he had had.

A retired Pennsylvanian factory worker in a Washington Post article about immigrants: “They’re not paying taxes like Americans are. They’re getting stuff handed to them. Free rent, and they’re driving better vehicles than I’m driving and everything else.” The truth is that immigrants do pay taxes (as do millions of undocumented immigrants) and they don’t typically get free rent either.

In “actor-observer bias”, when we watch others, we tend to see them as being driven by intrinsic personality traits, but not that for us it is circumstance that constrains our choices: we acted angrily because we’d just been fired, not because we’re naturally angry people. In other words, other people are poor because they make bad choices – but if I’m poor, it’s because of an unfair system. As a result of this phenomenon, poor people tend to be hardest on each other.

Among the wealthy, these biases allow society’s winners to believe that they got where they are by hard work alone and so they deserve what they have – while seeing those who didn’t make it as having failed due to lack of grit and merit.

Rising inequality increases physical and geographical segregation by class, which then reduces cross-class contact and decreases the ability to interact and empathize. Less empathy then fosters greater political polarization and justification of inequality, which in turn causes the cycle to repeat.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/05/us-inequality-poor-people-bad-choices-wealthy-bias