Uncomfortably Off: Why Addressing Inequalities Matters, Even for High Earners made a massive media splash when it was first published in May 2023.
“In Uncomfortably Off for the first time we documented the lived experience of those people in the top 10% earning bracket in the UK and across Europe,” says Gerry Mitchell.
“Our findings revealed that reducing income inequality would benefit everyone, even those quite near the top. By understanding the anxieties of high earners we can better understand their politics. Their interests are ultimately not that dissimilar from those of the median earner. Respecting, rather than ridiculing, that sense of similarity may hold the key to future change,” says Marcos González Hernando.
The book’s authors Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell have been interviewed by and written articles for all the mainstream UK news agencies including The Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent, and the New Stateman. They’ve been guests on several podcasts and YouTube shows, featured on blogs, attended conferences, and spoken on panels on the subject of socio-economic inequality and the top 10% of earners.
Gerry Mitchell has also spoken to the parliamentary briefing on the book on the subject and promoted the book at Labour’s 2023 conference. The book was featured in the Publishers Association Summer Reading List for Parliamentarians 2023 with Richard Burgon MP calling it “A brilliant book that clearly sets out why it’s in all of our interests to care about inequality in society.”
And the invites to talk, write and speak on the issue keep coming in. This is hardly surprising. That high-earners don’t consider themselves rich is a tantalising notion and makes for sensational headlines (Why are Brits on £180k so sad? Britain’s richest 10% don’t think they’re wealthy; Why a six-figure salary no longer means you’re rich; Why £125,000 does not make you rich in Britain today).
However, more interesting and more impactful is the key question the book asks – “If the economy isn’t working for these people, what does that mean for the rest of us?” This question launches the rocket of a seismic shift in thinking for those on the left and the right of the spectrum.
“As material interests are shifting for all of us, even those within the 10%, there is a greater sense of the book’s resonance,” says Marcos.
“From the LSE book launch to a more recent conference I attended in Brazil, the responses to the themes of the book are increasingly positive.”
This is important because the people working within professions such as academia, media, and politics, are precisely the audience that the book is writing about – and some initial reactions have been and continue to be defensive.
“As one woman at the All Party Parliamentary Group said to me. ‘I am a high earner. Just hearing your presentation makes me feel very defensive’”, says Gerry.
“It was difficult in writing the book,” says Marcos. “Although we are not part of the group, we are close to it. Many of the people we work with, report to or socialise with fall into it. It was important that in our representation of high-earners, we were neither overly sympathetic nor antagonistic.”
Equally, some on the left have struggled with the book’s focus on the top 10%. Traditionally their attention has been on the low earners, dismissing high earners as irrelevant to the conversation and unlikely to be convinced by an egalitarian message. However, as Uncomfortably Off demonstrates, this group influences politics, economics and society – and therefore are the people with significant potential to enable change.
Increasingly, however, campaign groups such as Neon are recognising that to affect socio-economic change, they need to understand high earners, to know how and what they think, to engage with them effectively.
“High earners routinely consider that politics is something that happens to other people,” says Gerry, “so although they are most likely to vote and therefore influence the direction of the country, they don’t recognise that politics happens to all of us all of the time. It happens to us when we shop when we choose what nursery to send our children to.”
The lack of civic places and spaces where high earners can meet with people from other areas of society, as highlighted within the book, is partially to blame for their narrowed vision.
“As the majority of the people they work and socialise with are from the same backgrounds and professions it inflates their perception of what percentage of the overall population they are part of,” says Marcos. “What they see day in day out are people like them who earn the same, or more, than they do. In effect, they see up mostly and assume therefore that they are lower down in the economic pecking order than they truly are.”
However, as economic conditions continue to worsen in the UK and around the world, the top 10% are and will continue to live in a way that feels closer to the median: struggling to get to the end of the month, maxing out the credit card and never feeling as though they have enough.
The book highlights cultural differences in understanding how positionality affects personal wealth, between the UK and other countries. On the continent, there is a greater recognition of the part played by luck and a greater acceptance of fatalism.
“The way we are brought up in the UK, we’re pumped and primed to believe in our autonomy – it’s all about your CV, the meritocracy; if you are working you’ll be successful. There’s an overemphasis on agency,” says Gerry. “We’re stuck in that way of thinking of ourselves and our own self-worth.”
“We found that view reflected in our respondents,” says Marcos, “’Work is everything’, one said.”
The fallacy of this approach is increasingly having international resonance – from Australia to South America where leading academics are uncovering similar findings in their work on elites in developing countries.
There is however a generational difference also emerging. Gen Z can see that the emperor is not wearing any clothes and that eventually, the financial chill felt by those lower down the financial ladder will rise faster than their economic prospects.
“We were interviewed by Felix van der Geest for his Politics Relaxed YouTube channel and podcast,” says Marcos. “The conversation went well – he just got it. He’s young, smart and can see the writing on the wall. Generation Z understand that the story our parents told us isn’t true anymore. We believed it. They don’t.”
Uncomfortably Off is a book that will run and run in value and ongoing impact as the economic discomfort of high earners becomes increasingly acknowledged, normalised and acted on. This will happen because of the truth the book elicits, that we are operating in an economic structure that doesn’t even serve the people at the organisational end of society, is becoming increasingly apparent month on month. The cost of high earners remaining willingly blinded to the situation faced by the 90% however will be a high price – and one this book urges them to avoid.
Rebecca Megson-Smith is a writer and writing coach, founder of Ridley Writes.
Marcos González Hernando is Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Social Research Institute, Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad Diego Portales and Adjunct Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Conflict and Social Cohesion.
Gerry Mitchell is a freelance policy researcher, working most recently for the Think-tank for Action on Social Change (Dublin), Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Stockholm and London) and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (Brussels).
Uncomfortably Off edited by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell is available here on Bristol University Press for £12.99.
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