Any administration may decide that, for everyone’s sake, certain areas or groups —whatever their nature— deserve a special treatment and may, therefore, choose to favour them in a number of ways, including positive discrimination. Among other things, politics is about that. It is for this reason that governments choose to offer special deals to farmers, shopkeepers, large families and so forth.
We can read in the mayoress’ official blog that the Barcelona city council has put together “a long-term city plan to empower the neighbourhoods that the city left behind and ensure that there is a single Barcelona instead of two: the wealthy one and the poor”. The way that the text puts it, you would think that this problem is peculiar to Barcelona and that cities such as Paris, New York, Rome or London are impervious to it. And yet it turns out that there has never been a large city in the modern world where there were no income differences. Even during egalitarian dictatorships there were individuals whose life was much more pleasant than others: the life of the old Soviet nomenklatura was not on a par with their anonymous comrades who were subjected to that social experiment. Sadly, then, what is happening in Barcelona is far from an exception but an unfortunate norm. So why are they in such a rush to implement a €150m plan?
Obviously, whenever people suffer from extreme or unusual inequality, the situation must be addressed and rectified immediately for everyone’s sake and for the sake of their dignity. You can go about it in many ways: from progressive taxation to an ad hoc distribution of public spending on essential services (transport, schools, health care, and so on). But how can you establish that the existing differences are so worrying and grave that require an urgent intervention by the authorities? Cue in the magic of mathematics.
Let us take a family of five with a net monthly income of €4,000. I guess some might say: “that’s pretty good”. Now let’s look at it in a different way: a single individual earning €800 a month. Naturally, you might say: “that’s a low income”. But, as it turns out, we might be talking about the very same family. In fact, this is a well-known real example taken from Spain’s PER (which is now called PFEA (1)) and there is absolutely nothing fraudulent about it. So we must conclude that working out the “differences” is much more subjective than it would appear at first.
The city map on the council’s web page shows calculations based on “a family’s disposable income per capita in 2014”. That is absolutely fine, but a different method would be equally acceptable, yet the results would be extremely different. At any rate, the underlying problem is not arithmetical, but political. The text penned by mayoress Ada Colau includes a far-fetched claim: “An unequal city is not only unfair and ethically reprehensible: it is an unsafe city for everyone, a city that might split, one that will struggle to attract investors and talent”. Is she referring to New York, perhaps?
Earlier on I kept mentioning income differences which are undeniably real, no matter how you calculate them. But difference and inequality are not synonymous in this context. In a city where inequality ruled, some would be entitled to medical care and education, whereas others would not, for instance. Some would be allowed to do things as different as using public transport or setting up a business, while others would not. And so long and so forth. Luckily, that is not the situation in Barcelona city (as opposed to many large conurbations in the third world, where this is very much the norm). Such an apocalyptic depiction of Barcelona as an ethically reprehensible city —as if it were the worst Kinshasa slum— is frivolous and a lack of respect to everyone, but I guess it should hardly come as a surprise. Still, while on the subject of attracting investors, the current difficulty stems from local policies which do not allow investment to be attractive or safe, and certainly not from the inequality between Barcelona’s neighbourhoods. Before thinking about how wealth should be spread, perhaps the council should consider how to create it. Public spending comes from taxpayers’ pockets, not for urban veggie patches or barter markets, as some responsible adults already know.
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(1) N.T. In Spain’s less developed regions, farm labourers may apply for a special unemployment benefit, provided that they have worked a relatively small number of days that year. The old scheme was called PER (Plan de Empleo Rural or Rural Employment Scheme) while the current one is known as PFEA. Both have been slammed for allegedly encouraging long-term unemployment in those regions.
