• The Richer, The Poorer
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The Richer, The Poorer

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The Richer, The Poorer charts the rollercoaster history of both rich and poor and the mechanisms that link wealth and impoverishment. This landmark book shows how, for 200 years, Britain’s most pow...
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  • 06 January 2022
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The Richer, The Poorer charts the rollercoaster history of both rich and poor and the mechanisms that link wealth and impoverishment. This landmark book shows how, for 200 years, Britain’s most powerful elites have enriched themselves at the expense of surging inequality, mass poverty and weakened social resilience.

Stewart Lansley reveals how Britain’s model of ‘extractive capitalism’ – with a small elite securing an excessive slice of the economic cake – has created a two-century-long ‘high-inequality, high-poverty’ cycle, one broken for only a brief period after the Second World War. Why, he asks, are rich and poor citizens judged by very different standards? Why has social progress been so narrowly shared? With growing calls for a fairer post-COVID-19 society, what needs to be done to break Britain’s destructive poverty/inequality cycle?

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Price: $127.95
Pages: 318
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Imprint: Policy Press
Publication Date: 06 January 2022
ISBN: 9781447363200
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Poverty and precarity, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Social Theory, Labour / income economics, Social classes, Welfare economics
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“A resource that can help us make up our own minds about extremes of wealth and poverty, privilege and want, instead of being encouraged to ‘other’ welfare claimants and kid ourselves we share the interests of the profiteering one per cent. We should arm ourselves with it in all our anti-poverty struggles.” Cost of Living
Stewart Lansley is a visiting fellow in the School of Policy Studies, the University of Bristol, a Council member of the Progressive Economy Forum and a Research Associate at the Compass think-tank. He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and has written widely on poverty, wealth and inequality. His recent books include A Sharing Economy (2016), Breadline Britain, The Rise of Mass Poverty (with Joanna Mack, 2015) and The Cost of Inequality (2011).

Introduction: Knighthoods for the rich, penalties for the poor

Part 1: 1800-1939

1. Hierarchical discipline

2. Britain’s gilded age

3. Public penury and private ostentation

4. A roller-coaster ride

Part 2: 1940-59

5. The future belongs to us

6. Britain’s ‘New Deal'

7. Brave new world

8. A shallow consensus

Part 3: 1960-79

9. The rediscovery of poverty

10. Poorer under Labour

11. Consolidation or advance?

12. Peak equality

Part 4: 1980-96

13. Don’t mention the 'p' word

14. Zapping Labour

15. The dark shadow of the Poor Law

16. The great widening

17. Money worship

Part 5: 1997-2010

18. The elephant in the room

19. Still born to rule

20. I'm not Mother Teresa

21. The house of cards

22. The good, the bad and the ugly

Part 6: 2011-20

23. Divide and rule: playing politics with poverty

24. A leaner state

25. Burning injustice

26. Growing rich in their sleep

27. The high-inequality, high-poverty cycle

Afterword: COVID-19 and 'the polo season'