TRICKLE DOWN

How the other half doesn't live

Photo by Dynamic Wang on Unsplash

Wish me Happy Anniversary! It’s four weeks since I began posting on Substack. So here, by way of celebration, is a piece that originated as a talk for BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View. It has not previously appeared as a written text. That it does so now is the consequence of my first ever paid subscriber to Substack saying that, having heard it, he would love to read it, and you don’t disappoint your first ever paid subscriber. Trickle-down economics maintains that making the rich richer will make the poor richer too. The fact that it has hasn’t worked yet doesn’t stop the trickledowners believing that, so long as they fulfil their part of the bargain and go on getting richer, it will

Let’s imagine there is a village in leafy Surrey called Trickle Down where only politicians who espouse the horse-and-sparrow theory of economics live because only they can afford to buy a house there.  The house and sparrow theory of economics, first dreamed up in America in the 1890s, holds that if one feeds horses enough oats they will eventually deposit a small sufficiency for the sparrows.  Now, having imagined such a village let us leave it.  Apart from anything else, the smell of horse manure is too appalling to bear.  As are the piteous cries of starving sparrows.  That’s the problem with horse-and-sparrow economics, otherwise known - in honour of the village - as trickle down.  It doesn’t work.   No matter how many oats the horses eat, they never leave enough for the sparrows.

I recently grew excited, speaking of ‘enough’ by a headline I came across in the Times.  It read ‘You’re rich enough, court tells widow in cash battle.’  Rich enough.  Imagine that.  It was like going back a couple of thousand years before bankers’ bonuses to a time when woolly mammoths and moralists roamed the earth.  Rich enough.  Not an exhortation against wealth altogether, which has never gone down well with any but a few ragged eccentrics, but an endorsement of the concept of sufficiency.  For me this is the first law of human decency.  Take no more than your share.  Better still, take less than your share.  Not by what you grab shall you be adored.  And if this world should think differently and shower you with honours, prepare for a far harder time when you enter the next.  What the world to come promises is the sight of you turning on a spit over a low flame crying ‘Enough!’

It’s not entirely clear from the report in the Times whether the judge actually said ‘You’re rich enough’.  But in adjudicating between the widow and her daughter he did say that the dead man, who had been something in lobsters, had treated the widow well in his will and that she was not in financial need.  She could have retorted with Lear’s angry protest, ‘O reason not the need!  Our basest beggars/ Are in the poorest thing superfluous,’ which is a good argument against those who think the British welfare system of Universal Credit makes adequate provision for the needy.  But it was probably wise of her to say nothing.  Quoting Shakespeare can get people’s goats and you never know when a judge who thinks you’re rich enough might think you’re too rich as well as too clever and reduce your entitlement still further.

So let me quote, instead, from a Parsha, or portion of the Torah, which the officiating rabbi read recently by the graveside of an old friend.  Several of us were gathered in the cemetery for the unveiling of the headstone, a rather lovely ceremony that marks the grave one year on from the burial and allows us to remember the dead once more.  The text for the week was Deuteronomy 17.15 to 17.20.  ‘Thou shalt set a King over thee . . . But he shall not multiply horses to himself…. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself. . . neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.’      

Among the reasons the book of Deuteronomy gives for restricting the king’s horses and wives and silver and gold, other than God’s wish that it be so, is ‘that his heart be not lifted above his brethren.’  We don’t require the Old Testament to remind us of the divisiveness of wealth - we have only to look upon the high gilded gates guarding the village of Trickle Down from intruders - but it is thrilling to hear the orotund words of the Deuteronomist,  inveighing, with a wisdom and a humanity that haven’t aged, against the greed of kings.

What strikes me as particularly wise about the idea that a King has power, wealth, wives and horses enough, is not only that it takes consideration of those who have too little or too few, but that it takes consideration of the king as well.  We are, I think, to understand that it is better for his heart not to be lifted above those of his brethren.  If I may be allowed to put it in my own words - too much gold and silver, too many horses, too many wives, will make you unhappy whoever you are, but if you happen to be a king, your unhappiness, like your cupidity, will know no limit.  For when you have devoured everything around you, all that is left for you to devour is yourself.

There was a happy coincidence in this being the portion of the Torah that was read as I stood remembering my friend.  For he would have approved every word of it.  He was a man who loved what the world had to offer without wanting to own it all.  He was a writer who took pleasure in words rather than in any riches his employment of them might have brought him.  He ate only half a salt-beef sandwich for lunch.  He had, I think, no use for horses.  And he loved only one woman all his life.  When he talked about her he made a monogamous marriage sound the greatest adventure a man and woman could ever embark upon.

We talked, too, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings and, when we got to kings, agreed that should high office ever have fallen to either of us - as it was unlikely to now - we would not for a moment have considered it a stepping-stone to wealth.  Whether there was any truth in the rumours that a particular Prime Minister couldn’t wait to fill his boots once the burden of Prime Ministerial penuriousness was lifted we didn’t know; but it told us something about our culture that every newspaper had a journalist eager to compute to the nearest million how much that Prime Minister could expect to command when he returned to civvy-street.  Why the burning curiosity?  Why all these rich-lists of the mind? 

Proponents of the horse and sparrow, or trickle down, theory of economics hold that society as a whole benefits when wealth leaks from the bags of the wealthy on to the uncovered heads of the poor.  ‘Trickle down’.  Is it really possible for someone to employ that phrase and not hear the meagreness of the ambition it expresses, not to say the ugliness of the process it enacts?  Trickle down.  How much more demeaning can relations between the rich and poor get?  Stand here submissively, my man, bow your head, and let my immense good fortune dribble down upon you, like . . . but we know what it’s like.

The second argument for removing all limits to riches is that it will winkle out those we call ‘the brightest and the best’ who have been skulking in insalubrious parts waiting only for the clink of loose change before they come running back.  I am not going to be rude about them, whoever they are.  The sirens of the silver bonus sing and the only-too-susceptible pack their bags and follow.  Can we say for sure what we would do were Leucosia and Ligeia to rise from the waters, shake the seaweed from their hair, and crook their pearly fingers at us?  But permit me, at least, to offer a less cynical version of the brightest and the best.

Are not the best among us those who would do good where they can, exercise virtue and understanding, be sure that disinterestedness guides their actions, set example of selflessness, and believe that if a job is worth doing it is because of its intrinsic value, not the spondulicks it brings in.

As for brightest, do we mean brighter than philosophers, poets, teachers, scientists, whom our society is content to remunerate modestly in the main because it assumes that knowledge, like virtue, is its own reward and what they do they do for the love of it?

And there we have it.  Love.  Not bonuses.   Thus, the argument for attracting the brightest and best by dazzling them with baubles fails its own test, since it concedes that those who really are the brightest and the best don’t have to be bribed to do what they love, as recalcitrant children are bribed to behave.

I stand outside the gated village of Trickle Down with a megaphone and, like the Deuteronomist, warn against multiplying what it would be better to leave unmultiplied.  But they don’t listen.  They are too busy stuffing the horses with oats.

In the coming days I will be offering paid subscribers more such pieces. as a way of saying thank you to the paid subscriber who suggested I publish this one.

There are further advantages to be being a paid subscriber. Not only will you have access to other articles in the vein of ‘Trickle Down’, you will also get lectures such as one I delivered recently on the Necessity of Offence, talks, audio-essays, and, if I can summon the courage, fiction in progress. I say ‘summon the courage’ because I am a writer who normally won’t let his work be seen until it’s polished, published and in the bookshops. But I am down on the street now, where we all must make a living, and everything is different. The novel I am just starting will, I fervently hope, be funny. By which, of course, I don’t mean unserious. Comedy is the friend of the serious and is never more devastatingly funny than when it shares the human heart with tragedy. All my seventeen novels* have, to some degree been funny, and if they aren’t I feel I’ve failed. As of this moment I’m the only person to have won the prestigious Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing twice - twice, dear reader - so I’m well-positioned to offer thoughts and even advice on how to do it. I say that the novel I am going to start writing here will be funny, but of course no novelist knows for certain how a novel is going to turn out. The not knowing is part of the exhilaration and the finding out is what we mean by art. It feels funny in anticipation, anyway. Pass me on the street and you wouldn’t know, from my sombre expression, that Aristophanes and Rabelais and Dickens are urging me on. Hard to hear when they all talk at once but I am listening and taking notice. We who read, who love reading and who fear the anxious spirit in which novels are presently being written, need the liberation of laughter.

*

Coming from Behind

Peeping Tom

Redback

The Very Model of a Mam

No More Mister Nice Guy

The Mighty Walzer

Who’s Sorry Now

The Making of Henry

Kalooki Nights

The Act of Love

The Finkler Question

ZooTime

‘J’

Shylock Is My Name

Pussy

Live a Little

What Will Survive of Us… is love. (Scheduled Feb 1, 2024)