So. They say.
I think there's something quite nice about giving somebody a fancy job and then
requiring that they wear something very silly to give a lecture like this.
It kind of brings us down a little bit in case your eyesight isn't brilliant.
I've put up the names of the people who are pictured around you just to put you in your place and make you feel small.
And when I was looking at these pictures earlier, I did wonder whether if you were just a prince,
you kind of felt a bit inadequate compared to as an emperor and so on.
Thank you very much for coming. I've got a few people just to say thank you.
Two in particular, the children from Cheney School.
I hope this doesn't put you off the university, but thank you very much for coming.
And also Edward House, who is the son of John House, the first book in the chair and was at John's inaugural.
So I'm very glad that Edward can be here. And if any of my kids managed to last that and the 40 years, that'll be very impressive as well.
I wasn't sure how to start this lecture off until today.
And then today. Luckily, Matt Ridley and the alumni of this university wrote an op ed piece in The Times,
which I read, which made me think I now know why I'm giving this lecture.
What Matt. What Matt valued. Part of what Matt took Matt vote was that he was trying and I quote,
to understand why it is that people mind so much today when in many ways inequality
is so much less acute and absolute poverty is so much less prevalent than it was,
say, in 1900 or 1950. Now that starvation and squalor are mostly avoidable.
So what if somebody else has a yacht?
What I'm going to try and do in the next 47 minutes is try to give you the say what if somebody else has a yacht?
Why does it matter? Why are we annoyed compared to 1919 50?
I promise there'll be no of a slide with as much text on this. This.
Wind in the Willows wasn't anything about Oxford, although it's all four went to school in Oxford as far as I could see.
Nobody is quite sure which particular attributed the times it was about,
but to me in many ways it sums up part of growing up in Oxford and the divisions in this city,
which are part of what I want to talk about this evening. It's about the squirrels.
Everybody forgets the squirrels and the rabbits. The it's being a mixed lot.
Some of them okay. Some of them are not okay. The Steve old badger who you can read about there.
But then there's the weasels and the stoats and the foxes. And I love this face in the book.
I'm good friends with some of them. We've all we've all got a friend who's a stout, aren't we nice?
And then at the end, I'm not reading out for you, Mona, but it really was against animal etiquette to kind of dwell on these kind of things.
So he dropped the subject. And I've been watching, I think,
in the last few years how often we drop the subject because the subject of inequality and difference is a bit painful.
But also in the last few years, how we're beginning to drop the subject a little bit less than we used to.
In case I forget what it is. I was trying to get over to you. These are the the main points I want to make.
I want to try to explain to you why I think geography matters very much today and also why it matters to me
and why I think it matters in particular to Oxford and the many different kinds of Oxford that we have.
Geography is increasingly useful for revealing inequalities,
inequalities that of otherwise often hidden, particularly in wealth, but also as I show, in health.
Social inequalities of many kinds have been rising for much of the last 30 years.
But the mean rising acutely in the last five years.
And I want to talk. Quite a bit about the importance of that, about what's happened most recently, that it would have been very hard, I think,
to have predicted five years ago and has repercussions, which I think we're only just beginning to realise at last.
Of course the half of Oxford, the University side of Oxford is associated with the 1% with what they've always called the top cornflakes.
My claim, though, is that what's happened, particularly in the last five years,
means that society in Britain is changing to such an extent that for the majority even of
Oxford and Oxbridge undergraduates and for the majority of the staff of the university,
things are getting worse in a way which is not in their interests.
I want you to think about your own personal position and how that's changed,
how you're sitting economically compared to the past or compared to your parents.
And I'll show you a graph. The white line here.
It's the average income. Of the top 1% of the 1%, the best off people in the country.
When The Wind in the Willows was written. Top 1% of the 1% has an income over 400 times the average income.
That is when we had an Overstock AC that we like to produce films about nowadays.
Evidently. That came down. And I think it's very important for Britain to realise that the inequality, when it came down,
when equality increased, most of it actually happened before the Second World War.
I'm going to show you in a minute a picture of the cuts, the slow walls. Many of you will have heard them, but the cuts are slow.
Walls were built at a time when we are becoming more equal. Possibly very much because we were becoming more equal.
And then when we get down to 1959, when the walls were demolished.
We have this period of incredible equality in our history by income.
But we've had a rise since the late 1970s. A small blip in 2008 that some of us felt was incredibly hopeful.
Something changing. We've reached a peak, and although the data is still only just being collected since then, we're fairly sure it's gone up again.
So the question is what's going to happen now? The cuts are slow wars.
These are two walls built a couple of miles north of here to separate the council houses from the private development because the people
making money out of the private development thought that they weren't going to make as much money if they didn't have the ball there.
Here's a picture of the wall. It's a pretty serious wall.
And if you've got good eyesight, you can see on top it was covered in spikes that were actually deadly.
It really was a very serious undertaking.
And it shows how divided society was at that time.
But in many ways we've become, at least statistically, as divided again as we were in 1934 when they built those walls.
It's just that now you don't have to build physical walls to keep people out, to separate them.
We do it economically in different ways. I've turned the graph around, now the aristocracy, and now at the bottom it's the same white line.
But instead I'm showing you the share of total income in the country.
The red line is the best of 10% of people. And way back in the 1920s, the best of 10% had about half of all income in the country.
But then they saw this rapid fall in their share of income down to just over a third of all income.
And it was at this point in Oxford that they built those walls. Then we have equality increasing.
The top 10% say now income coming down to 30%, still an enormous amount of money.
And the walls were demolished finally in 1959. These are the 18 years I spent as a child in Oxford.
And they were very strange 18 years. They were the 18 years where the country was most equal.
And I think in many ways the city was most equal. And in my late teens, we knew things were getting worse.
And that was the point I left the city. Coming back now, 30 years later is very strange in many, many ways.
It's very interesting to visit somewhere where you've been away for so long.
Little bit more about me when I was growing up. To give you an idea about why I'm going to get to where I'm going to get to.
Here's where the wolves were. This map is a map of deprivation, the government's official measure of deprivation produced by all the O'Brien.
And there's still a difference between one side and the other side where the walls were.
The M40 was built after I left. And I think if you're looking at reasons why Oxford changed, the fact you can get to London much easier.
This is one of the major differences between my childhood and now that I started off life down here.
But I wasn't particularly poor. My dad was one of the GP for this area and he wanted me to point out that this
part wasn't dark green then because the caravan park was there and that.
He is a shy looking me at the back and my brothers.
I was never meant to do this job for many reasons. I really shouldn't be standing in front of you now and talking about it.
I'll show you where we moved to when I was six out of Cowley in a minute, but it was a very divided part of the city,
and I suspect that because it was so divided, it made me think about where people grow up and that it matters perhaps more than it really does matter.
Years later, I came back to that roundabout I grew up in and I'd just been writing some research papers about area effects and so on,
and I went onto the subway, which connects the various sides of the roundabout.
I'll show you in a minute. And I saw somebody had simply graffitied good puppies this way about puppies this way.
And I thought, why aren't why are academics having to explain what is patently obvious to most people living in the city?
Here's a roundabout to Greenbelt Roundabout, which I lived on for the ages of 6 to 18.
It's now much more divided than it was.
It has all the colours of the index of deprivation rainbow around it now, but the social gaps between different parts of that roundabout,
the house prices, what happens to children when they go to school has widened in the city.
I'm going to show you some evidence for this, but I don't think it's.
Is that hard to say that this has occurred and to show that what's happened in Oxford
reflects the general increase in inequality that's occurred in the country as a whole.
Oh, by the way, they do make mistakes with the index of deprivation.
We are not currently sitting in one of the poorest parts of the country.
It's just that there are some 14th century hovels here.
Have a nice hovels, but they don't look that good statistically in terms of quality of housing.
Sometimes it gets maybe a slightly depressing when some of your first research work this is done with maybe show a Nick Brimble come over here.
You can look back at some of the first research you did early on and now use it as a historical benchmark to see how things have changed over time.
This table is showing in the average amount of equity in housing in the 1980s.
In what were then the different wards of Oxford, Blackburn at Leeds had negative equity on average.
At the Top End wool overcoat, the average positive equity was £65,000.
The Gulf now is much, much, much bigger than that, as anybody from Oxford will be aware.
But the more important point I wanted to make by showing you this is that this set of figures.
Which are mortality rates for the wards of Oxford don't correlate that well with the well for these different parts of the city.
[INAUDIBLE] didn't back then, but at least you were 6% more likely to die than average back then.
There really was a very weak correlation. My dad likes to claim the credit, but I don't think it's just my dad.
People were in a better position. The incomes were higher, relatively.
Back then, the car factory was still the major employer and so on.
And the highest rate back then. Of 130.
I think was due to a homes hostel being sited in that particular area and the deaths in the homeless hostel.
I'm going to show you one of my greatest regrets so far in my career. I love these faces.
And so far, I failed to get anybody else to copy the idea of producing these particular faces.
So if I'm going to set myself some task of what am I going to do at Oxford?
I'm going to try to get people to take on this technique, which is an old technique in statistics, but seems to have gone out of fashion.
I drew this picture. I think you've got a postcard showing it way back in 1990, just after revived at Newcastle University.
And looking back at it,
I think it partly says a lot about what I felt about the world as much as it reflected the statistics that it was all based upon.
Each of these circles is a parliamentary constituency.
The whip for the cheeks depends on how high the house prices were there, smiling when people had jobs.
The eyes go small when the industry is old because it was manufacturing then in these talks with the small.
Here this is West Oxford with the knowledge based industries.
It's described as a useful industry, even though the buildings and the place is very, very old.
The nose is whichever people voted,
and you can produce a whole set of information and the colour of the face is by who they voted for, not whether they voted.
And it shows the mix of votes.
And that's you know, you may well know Oxford East has been a Labour constituency for a long time in a sea of blue and growing up in Oxford East.
If you get involved in politics, that's often how it can feel.
When we say outs, it begins to get a bit more varied.
Still a sea of blue. But certainly you've got those parts of Birmingham where Channel four recently went to film Benefit Straight.
The place was poor, long, long before any of the families that they've shown recently were were living there.
If we zoom out again, you can begin to see that the country varies.
Even more. I was actually growing up in a pretty boring uniform place,
even though we felt it really mattered that there were these differences in the city and across the city.
It was a great deal more variety. And this is in the 1980s.
There was also the 87 election then in my little patch.
And then in 1986, I headed north.
I've just spotted Martin. I think he's the man there.
Stan Openshaw, my brilliant, eccentric pastry supervisor, who let me do what I liked, is largely to blame for a lot of what I've called on to do.
And I clearly was a very mixed up 21 year old who they were very tolerant of.
I'd go into another university and learning about things and doing a paste teaches you a lot.
But as much as that teaches you a lot,
simply going from a part of the country which is like this part of the country where that is the experience of most people around it.
Newcastle For the entire ten years I lived there, majority of households had no income coming into the household.
That teaches you a huge amount about life and about geography and about difference which books and learning really can't teach you about.
When I look at this map now, I think in many ways it was important of what was to come in Britain,
and it divides where to grow in differences that were to get worse.
Except that many of these happy, smiling faces in the South are no longer quite so happy that they had a house price boom then.
So they now have house prices to to her face and so exponentially since.
For anybody who hasn't yet got here, because I really am determined to try to spread the technique of doing these faces.
This shows how they're how they're mixed up. We are very good at looking at faces in the crowds.
We're good at spotting it. We're good at seeing differences. You're good at seeing strangers.
You're good at seeing outliers. And you're also good at seeing similarities in the faces.
That's come forward a bit. This cartoon was published in 1931 in the Plebs Journal.
You could really produce it today.
You just have to add two notes on to the salaries to get the same kind of idea of all taking a step down in hard times.
In many ways, you can see repeats in the past, in the 1950s or the 1980s and again now they're all different.
But there are similarities. We've polarised in the last 30 or 40 years.
When I was at Leeds University, we fell ways. We took the censuses and worked out how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people you'd have to
move home if we were to get Britain back to the level of inequality it had in 1971 or 1981 or 1991.
And each time we did this, we found that the country had become a little bit more polarised in the time before.
We have Beth and Thomas who is here up in Sheffield, which use lots of maps like this, which I've made fairly small here.
The blue areas on the map are places where children growing up have all the advantages in life.
Where your parents are most likely to have two cars, not one car, but they probably own their home.
Where your odds on to go to university?
The dark red areas are the opposite, but so likely to have parents in work where you're very unlikely to go to university.
And we produced a graph like this, Marius, which has all the advantages to areas which have all the disadvantages.
And the thing which interests me is we began to get this despairing in the 1980s, in the 1990s.
You could say the country was splitting into two kinds of neighbourhoods with less neighbourhoods necessarily in the middle.
And that's surprising because you expect suburbia to be ubiquitous.
You expect that to be a big middle.
And you're mainly talking about a few people at the bottom, not about the society that's hollowing out in the centre.
But now if you look at London as people with incomes in the centre who can no longer afford to live in London.
London is full of people who are very poor and people who are very rich, many of whom feel they're very poor, even though they're very rich.
As the divides have become starker. As we no longer have to look at relative differences between people as absolute
poverty has increased as we begin to get actual falls in life expectancy,
which we've got for the first time for many years for the over 85.
You can produce simpler figures, I think,
and you may claim or think that we've produced figures that have been too complicated really for years and we really need to make it easier.
This little map of the UK is copying a famous map that the Occupy movement produced for the USA.
It's looking at people's wealth, their liquid wealth.
Once you take away the house that you have to live in and half the wealth, the liquid wealth in Britain is owned or held by the 1%.
If you just put the 1% to give with the next best or 4%,
you get the equivalent to the whole of England and Wales in terms of portion of land area and that on the rest of the top half and
you've got the whole of Britain and half of Britain's wealth is the size of Northern Ireland and these differences are getting wider.
And in a way, this is obvious after 30 years of growing income inequality, year after year after year.
Of course, you're going to get growing wealth inequalities showing up later.
But who do we blame? You can read the last words of Ian Banks there when he angrily talked about who who's blamed for these kind of things.
And the blame gets shoved on to all kinds of groups of people, people at least power to do anything about it.
I put this up because I just wanted to show you a couple of world map maps that we've a series of five colleagues we produced.
This top map is looking at everybody alive about eight years ago and classifying them as an immigrant.
If they were born in a different country to the country in which they're living,
the largest destination for immigrants in the world is the United States and Canada.
The next largest well in the Middle East comes quite close, but is Europe.
But if you look in Europe, you can see it's France and Germany.
At least you can see that if you use these maps showing up and we're pretty small,
we're not much bigger than Japan and we never think of Japan as an area which actually does have immigrants.
But this is net immigration. Not many people leave Japan, right?
If you look down here, that's Portugal and that's Ireland. And this is Ireland before the recent exodus, and that's Mexico and that's Eastern Europe.
But most of those Eastern Europeans went to countries nearer to Eastern Europe.
I like producing pictures. I think pictures are an easier way of getting over the relative magnitude of things
and forcing you to concentrate on what really matters and what matters less.
So some more pictures. Things really are changing very, very rapidly.
This orange graph here was produced in Alan Miliband's report, his annual report for the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.
And it shows the change in the proportion of all children in England who are now living in families who are renting from a private landlord.
It's about a year out of date, so I suspect it's now over quarter to quarter of all children living in a house with a private landlord.
That wasn't what the plan of increasing private renting was supposed to do.
Having more private renting was supposed to allow young professionals to move around more, to give more space to students, to have more choice.
But we've ended up with families, with kids living in accommodation that's incredibly insecure.
In London, the average family who are renting privately in recent years has apparently been being forced to move once a year because as events go up,
they went up 9% in London last year. The landlords want to make more money, but the family that's in the house can't pay the rent.
If you have children who are moving home and moving school,
you have children who are losing all their friends and can lose all their friends again and again and again.
This has been so recent, but we really are only just getting used to what's going on.
People often think it's inevitable. They say it's what you have to do to win the global race.
It's hard luck, but we have to do this kind of thing.
And what I like to point to is the Netherlands and Switzerland, which are hardly socialist utopias,
but two countries which progressively over the course of the last century have
reduced the amount of income taken by the top 1% of people in that country.
And I would argue largely because of that, managed to avoid many of the problems that we have in Britain, and that problems have been getting worse.
And if the Netherlands and Switzerland can do it and the Swiss have bankers,
but they manage to keep their bankers despite paying them on average, half as much as our bankers.
Now they've got mountains as well and they've got skiing. But I honestly don't think that's the reason that they can do it and get away with it.
Is it just because they're clever? It's very interesting to look down the list of countries at the top of this list.
I'm afraid Switzerland is missing, I think, from here.
This is the average level of numeracy of 16 to 24 year olds, according to the latest PISA report.
And we're down with the dunces of the class just above 2/10 of all, which is the United States of America.
And if you're trying to tell people that if only they work hard enough,
if they all just strive enough, if they all have enough aspiration, they can all be in the 1%.
You can only really convince people that that's possible in a country where people don't understand that only 1% can all be in the 1%.
Yes. And there are correlations between the average level of numeracy and how much more
able people get to work things out and the level of equality in their country.
It becomes harder to fool people once they get used to having a bit more equality.
It becomes easier to fool people. There's been work done recently showing people actually become more stupid as they become poorer,
partly because of the effort of what you have to do to survive gives you less chance
to think about the kind of things you need to think about to be more numerate.
And again, touching on something that's quite topical in the last two weeks.
This is the distribution according to the IFRS about a year ago of the effects of cuts in
benefits and changes in taxation on the population of Britain divided into different payments.
If you follow these debates, you'll have heard in the last two weeks that apparently the top 10%.
Those up there are also taking a hit.
What they don't tell you when they look at those figures is that it's nine out of ten of the top 10% taking a hit.
The top 1%, the best off temp for the top 1% have not become poor.
That. But I think this really is interesting.
Um, I do not think you can carry on for long in a country where you're even saying the living standards of
nine out of ten people in the best time reduce while a small group appear to get richer and richer.
I could easily be wrong, but that's the state I think we're getting to.
The Children's Commissioner tried to explain this to produce a series of posters for children, for classrooms about who had lost out.
And on top of that, distribution is people with kids who have lost out more than people without kids, and in particular, people with only one parent.
And kids have lost out even more.
So when you see these documents saying that everybody is stepping down together and all taking a hit together when it's all equal together,
ask what about the difference between people who are children and not children?
And ask about what is the difference within the top 10%? Not simply are they all sharing an equal amount of grief with everybody else?
Les Graff. I think it's worth concentrating on, but I really do think when I look at this,
it kind of sums up about half that you need to know about why we are where we are today.
On the x axis of this graph. You've got to have the top rate of marginal taxation has changed since 1960 in different countries.
So this is a geographical comparison. In some countries, they still have the top rate of maximal of taxation that they had in 1960.
Most importantly in Switzerland.
But there is an evidence that Finland has Germany and on the Y axis does the increased income and take of the best of 1% in these societies.
And what this graph suggests, this graph was produced by researchers in the United States.
If you adjust top taxation, the richest 1% get richer and richer and richer.
And then there's countries which haven't done this. They've kept their countries more cohesive.
And part of the reason is that when you have relatively high marginal taxation at a high level, it stops people asking for more money.
Because what's the point of asking for more money if most of it is going to go in taxation?
And that's one of the main reasons you need high rates of marginal taxation is not actually to raise money for the Exchequer,
it's to deter people from being greedy by making it somewhat pointless to ask for too much at the top to lighten it up a bit.
I've got some thanks that I need to do. And these thank you really are quite, quite heartfelt because if any of you have got an email for me,
you'll know that I am not particularly good at spelling or writing or grammar or anything else really involved in the production of a book.
So to be able to write books and to write paper for life and a lot of help for a lot of people.
One, everything about doing this, these are some of my earlier collaborators as of course they all look old now.
Everybody first work with 20 or 30 years ago looks old.
They're getting a bit younger here, but I really am grateful.
I think almost everybody here is actually in the room.
So this is my way of saying thank you very much and I'm very sorry about the spelling, but working in collaboration with people really is fun.
It changes what you think, it changes your mind, and you have to think, how can I contribute in different ways?
The thing I used to be old, the thing I could do is I could do the maths, but I hate the appointment.
I couldn't do the maths anymore and so I'm very grateful in particular to Martin Newman,
who isn't here in the States, to help him work out the maths, to draw these kind of maps.
That particular map is a map of the global profits made by the financial industries of every country in the world in 2005.
If you want to see why we've got a problem, we really were living off that and that will have changed dramatically once we update it.
And thanks also to Anna, who's here for her patience.
When I decided I wanted to do one mapping a day for every day of the year, and could she please help do it?
And lastly, now you can see them looking younger. Well, I think this is an older picture of George Davis Smith.
But anyway, I'm very grateful for the help and the thinking and for moving things forward.
And you also notice that the covers get more colourful in time. Graphic design changes.
And the last set of Banks publishes these and in particular proof readers are the ones who really have to put
up with with some of the difficulty is having somebody who is dyslexic decide that they want to be an author.
So I'm very grateful for them and for asking me a second time having gone for the experience once already.
Right. And lastly, in the thanks in part, the reason why I've managed to get away with this for so long,
my mum and dad all the way from my pasty faces from correcting every first manuscript before I even got to the publisher,
who then said, How come your English is so absolutely awful?
With that, I'm very grateful. But that's the trick. If you find things hard, if you find writing things hard, ask people to help you.
It's also only helps you yourself do things, but you also get to see much more about other people's views.
I have to speed on because I'm determined we're going to end on time so you can get a drink.
But I need to say something about Oxford. This Oxford, the Oxford University, The Guardian, Paul Longley sent me this slide and very grateful.
The Guardian did a quite a tangential analysis and I think it's very interesting to look.
This is first times the most common 51st names of boys at the university and the most common 51st names of footballers.
I'll let you have a look down. I clearly was never going to be a footballer and I didn't go to this university.
I don't think it was just because of my name. But it is interesting that there are these social differences.
But there is an overlap as well, of course. Oxford gets a lot of steak for being snobby in many ways.
This is what Marshall Berman said I think died last year about the experience of being here,
about it being intellectually exciting, but being socially isolating.
Being with the wannabe warning class to wannabe people who are going to do very well.
And if you look at Marshall Berman's cohorts, he was a 1960s student.
Most of them by the 1980s were doing pretty well. They were into the 10%.
They were in a group whose average income was from two and a half to back to three times what most people were getting.
But I think those times are changing numerically, unless you exclude undergraduates from every other university,
and then that would allow no immigration of any finances into the country and decide that every single undergraduate here,
no matter what they study, it, needs to go to work for a bank.
Unless that happens, there is no way the students of this university can all fit in that top 1% anymore.
Rising inequality is no longer in the interests of the majority of the undergraduates of a place like this.
And I'm quite interested in trying to find ways to demonstrate that because people are enthusiastic,
they're optimistic, they think everything will be okay. But if you look forward, it won't necessarily be that way.
The girls the interesting thing here is they didn't take footballers,
wives or girlfriends because girls name is actually very far more than boys names.
So it's just a comparison to the 50 most popular names for young women in Oxford and the 50 most popular names for young women in general.
And you get a wider variation. I have a pet fairy partly from going to school in Oxford, in China, that when you pick a boy's name,
you're a bit more careful about the idea they might be bullied in the playground than not.
So I don't think I'll have to explain to my oldest son why he's called Bobby.
But it was the most common name of fathers in China at that time.
And interestingly, if you're looking at the slide, the parents of girls who were going to become later Oxford undergraduates pick Kate
and Catherine at around about the same time as the parents of our future king.
Queen did the same thing. Those names are part of revealing much darker statistics and stark inequalities
about who comes here and from how few schools such a large proportion come,
and so on. And there's often the criticism that says, why is there a national obsession with who gets into just these two universities?
We ought to worry more widely about it. But these two universities really matter.
The 1% of people who have enough money to be able to afford to pay the fees to get into those schools, that might affect their chances of getting in.
The proportion of children who go to private schools is actually falling.
It fell for four out of the last five years, so actually 1% become richer.
This kind of thing becomes more acute.
The most amazing statistics are when you compare just five schools with 2000 schools and see the differences you've got.
But the point I want to make is that I don't think this is about the schools.
It's not about the schools, it's about the society we've become.
The increasingly divided society that we've become have made that parents try harder not to live in certain school catchment areas.
Some parents try harder to pay for their children's education, the action that those parents devise of the children, which then changes the schools.
So the fault is not with the schools, it's with the society. And then you have to say, well, who is most influence the society?
And no longer can your top university stand back and say, it's not our fault, because where did the politicians mostly go to?
And I think diversity's have a circular responsibility in that way.
And it's about money.
The complicated little graphic here is drawing children in Britain, making them the size of the amount of money spent on their secondary education.
Before that, 7% of children who go private three times as much is spent on each of them.
As for the 93% of children who go to state schools in many more normal OECD countries,
they spend more money on children who do worse at school to help them do better.
I get the sense this almost happens partly in colleges here where a lot of work is done on undergraduates who are having a hard time.
And it's kind of like a little model of equality once you're in, but you really want to be in the society that does that in general.
And part of the reason our society doesn't do that in general is because the inequalities in our society have become so wide.
The student debt bubble, that's the debt bubble warm for the USA.
The UK would be even more dramatic because it's grown so much wider so recently and because I'm going to end on time,
I won't say anything else about it, except there's no way they're all going to pay the money back like that.
Right. Which does does push me onto why 99% of us have reason to worry.
The direction in which things are going really is not in the direct, personal, selfish interest of 99% of people.
The effects about six months ago did an analysis which showed that if you exclude the top 1%, we have all become more equal.
The income inequality coefficients in the country have dropped down, I think, to levels last seen when John Major was prime minister.
So we are all in it together. It's just it all of us is 99%, not 1%.
And before you think I'm having too much of a go at the 1% to be in the 1%, you need to be earning at least 160,000 without kids.
But there's more inequality within the 1% than there is within the 99%,
which is partly why people in the 1% don't want to give up what they've managed to get a little bit more about Oxford.
I'm guessing the majority of you know Oxford quite well, or at least parts of Oxford quite well.
I have to admit, I did a talk the other day at part of Oxford Books as in Botley, and suddenly realised I'd never been to Botley in my life before.
So if you, if you grow up in this city, you stay in your quarter, you go into the middle to MacDonalds, you come out again.
North Oxford posh as you know bits of the apple them very posh they're posh and
increasingly around the hospitals posh less posh involves Helen Blackwood,
Liz and the interests leap off.
And it's not green, which I think is because it's near the tube to London, but it's the other area that's relatively poor.
What happens when you have a very unequal society? You may have noticed the oxytocin housing problem.
Well, you may be less aware of is that there are parts of Oxfordshire,
5% of homes are second homes and these are in the most expensive parts of the city.
You use your housing less inefficiently. They're sufficiently the more unequal you get.
Becky Tunstall.
I'm very grateful for having done all the hard work proving this, which I've used in the book, which I'll tell you about lies at the end.
But other strange things happen as inequality rises. This is the latest to use.
An Oxford to Mark Foundation for the City Council very kindly produces maps for me.
I don't know where he got this data from, but it's brilliant and it's in some areas,
in some neighbourhoods of Oxford, people are using twice as much electricity than in others.
And it's not because they've got twice as many people in their homes,
it's because compared to the other costs in life, the electricity bill really doesn't matter very much.
As you get a more unequal country or more unequal city, you end up wasting things more.
Here's the gas bills for Oxford. And if you look down towards Black Blackburn, at least down towards Rice Hill,
you can see where people are going cold because they're keeping the gas off and keeping the bills low.
And if you look up into Norfolk said, well, I'm now renting from the university and watching the thermostat, maybe not as bad as I could be doing.
People are often using twice as much to heat their homes because the bell isn't as important as the greenhouse gases.
It makes us less environmentally aware. If you look at the centre of London now,
the centre of London has blackouts and its substations fail because the electricity use is so high in Kensington and Westminster,
because people who can afford million pound houses in Kensington, Westminster are not going to worry about electricity bills.
So you actually have a problem with the substations.
I may be reiterating this story too much for you, but I do think that the way we're going, if you simply project forward,
if you try and say who will be able to live in this city in the future,
who will be able to get the few jobs in London that make it possible to have a family in London?
You can see a problem that's increasing for society as a whole that it's now moved up and become an issue for the top 10%.
What's happened, I think over the last 30 or 40 years is a tipping out.
If, first of all, began with the very poorest in this city, the very poor,
with some pushed out of Jericho estates were built over the edge of the city, tipped out and often out of sight.
Later on that happened in Westminster, with homes of votes tipping out, pushing out.
It's now happening in London in general, with people being pushed out because of housing benefit rules changing.
First of all, it happens to the poorest and it happens more widely.
And then you find that half the people working in your university can no longer live in your city anymore.
More and more and wider and wider groups are affected. The GCSE result differences for the school.
The educational inequality in this city is wider than ever.
The bottom school is now further down the league tables, lower than it was when I was a child here.
Four times as many children in Oxford go to private schools than is the national average.
And the cost of those schools is far higher than I was here. The gaps inside the city are widening, and that increases people's fear and their worry.
We didn't experiment with inequality.
The experiment was to let the top move off, take away, make money, create that financial sector that was so successful that in 2005,
half of all the profits made by finance in the world came to the UK.
It looked maybe plausible then, but it hasn't worked.
And on top of it, not working. We haven't learned from it not working.
And we've actually seen those inequalities getting wider, even though we had the crash in 2008.
And if you remember that table I showed you at the start about mortality rates in Oxford, not correlating with the wealth of certain areas.
And now look at this difference in life expectancy between different areas in Oxford.
You'll see the mortality pattern is beginning to correlate with the wealth again.
It's not as wise as many cities because it's actually quite hard work to build to stay in the poorest areas of the city.
And so people that do worse end up having to leave the city entirely.
Some good news just to cheer you up. Before you get a drink.
A lot has got better on the National Front.
Nowhere in sight any more. My childhood.
There were swastikas everywhere. I can remember that. And it's well worth counting your blessings and the things that got better.
Getting the buses. And I'm old enough. Even the cars now to cool markets is incredible.
And I do work with tenses plenty with road peace. Oxford, as you may know, is one of the first cities that went to 20 mile an hour.
All these areas shown green are now 20 mile an hour cities.
I think the best change in Oxford has been the way that cars have been kept out and slowed down apart from those buses on the London road,
the tube that needs to be tackled. But other than that, it's got a lot better.
I'm going to draw you a strange map now.
This is a strange map, a population cardiogram, and then we'll put those areas on again and it looks even more hopeful.
I'm grateful to what king of 2020. On to Ben Henry Hennig, who helped me to all this map.
Even the corporation of the City of London now has a blanket 20 mile an hour speed limit for all the bankers.
I think it's worth saying at that point, yeah, we really ought to all be getting 20 mile an hour in our local streets, in our local homes.
And if you're worrying about the student at this university or any young people
vowed to remain the most likely thing that's going to kill them or change them,
at least up until they're 25 years old. Even in the city, that's become as safe as Oxford.
Other things have got worse. This is what the country looks like if you shape it by housing equity.
And I think this picture alone tells you why we have a housing market like we have and why the chancellor spent most of the effort of his last budget,
his March 2013 budget, on policies designed to try and hold the housing market up as high as you could, at least until May 2015.
And Oxford. It's too small to be shown here. Even though the houses cost a fortune, a city is too small to appear as a circle.
Sitting between Birmingham and London without any other major conurbation in the way really is
squeezed in this and the problem and this is going to have to be tackled at some point soon.
Because you can win millions and millions of pounds of European funding for your excellent research.
But if you can't get the researchers into the lab to do it, well, they don't stay for very long because they'd like to settle down with somebody.
You're going to have a problem, as you can tell.
Coming to Oxford has helped me become a bit more acutely aware about problems in housing than I was when I was in Sheffield.
And what I'm going to do now the last two slides before I wind up is save you the trouble of reading my next book.
Because all you really need to do is to read the first paragraph, which is they're saying what a problem this has become.
And if it's not a problem for you, it's a problem for your children, it's a problem for other people.
You know, increasing numbers of people are homeless, increasing numbers of people.
I want to vent, but I don't want to vent. And on top of that, and this brings me back to this argument about what's happening in the top 10%.
The Financial Times published an analysis on the 18th of January quite recently, and I took some evidence from Savills.
Savills, the estate agent, had the complete record of almost all mortgage lending but postcode level.
So this was geography. So using geography to do this, and they worked out that in the last five years, landlords in Britain,
landlords were only 2% of the population have increased and that 12 then that equity by 245 billion.
In a time of austerity because they take the high rents that they're charging and buy another house,
another house, another house, mainly in the south of England, largely in London and Oxford.
The same time as that was happening, the average mortgage holder, partly because prices fell,
but also because people were taking out larger mortgages to build to buy a house so their equity fall.
So people way up in the top of society are doing worse than before.
Isn't just about the poor anymore. Only two more slides to go.
We're not all moles. We don't have to be quite as polite as we've become about all of this.
You shouldn't think that it's your fault if you're finding it hard to get by.
If the electricity bill is a bit too much, the gas bill is a bit too much.
Or you're living in fear of a half a percent rise in interest rates.
Or you're wondering just how long you're going to carry on renting.
People do need, I think, to get a bit more angry about the situation they find themselves in and not blame themselves about it.
Geography can be used to avail these differences. Geographical data shows you that we have wars between areas that they're rising up.
And of course, he's been rising in many ways for a third of a century.
But in the last five years, those increases have been acute.
We're waiting for a series of data to be published to confirm this.
There's a worry that often the datasets being cut before we can actually get them to show much of this.
And lastly, these things affect Oxford in particular. They affect the staff of the university in particular,
and they will affect the students who are walking out into a environment where their chances of being seen as a success are much,
much lower than Marshall Berman's cohort in the 1960s.
But things can get better. This is what I want to end on.
If you had told somebody in 1934, five years after the 1929 crash,
that what was going to happen in the next 25 years would be the kind of social revolution that Britain soul
food to the point that although they put a policeman there to make sure that the children were allowed food,
the children were allowed food because low wall so they could go to school to short way of having to walk around a long way.
If you told people in the thirties that all this was going to occur and all this was changed not just because of a war,
but partly because a country had become so bankrupt. It could no longer afford to do things the way it had done them before.
People wouldn't have believed you. I think it's possible.
You can see that things could carry on getting worse. But I think you can also step back and say there really isn't enough money.
There won't be enough money. We we're not going to create that bubble again where we make half the world profit from finance anymore.
The rest of the world is not that stupid. We're going to have to live and survive on less.
And once you begin to see that, we're going to have to live and survive on less.
The idea of trying to strive to the top of a shrinking bubble becomes less and less attractive.
And that's why I would like to see us going well and see evidence towards saying,
at what point will it become evident that we really could do with becoming a slightly more equal country,
a slightly more equal city, and seeing these divides for ages.
Thank you ever so much for your patience. Thank you.