Tony Blair is reported to receive up to £200,000 for a single spech. I don’t know if this is accurate, but I am certain that per minute of ‘work’, Mr Blair’s pay rate is hundreds of times more than that of a care worker, a cleaner or a childminder. In fact, probably approaching 1,000 times more. I reckon this is an excellent example of social justice, 21st century style, from the UK’s first ‘New Labour’ prime minister. After all, Peter Mandelson was ‘intensely relaxed’ about people becoming ‘filthy rich’, and we might view huge income disparities as equality of opportunity in action: everybody has the chance, but only a few make it to the top of the pyramid.

Unlike Mr Mandelson, I am intensely unhappy about colossal income differentials, because of their future as well as their current impact. Large proportions of big incomes can be saved or invested to generate more wealth, but people earning the national minimum wage can barely scrape by. The unbridgeable gap between the toilers and the superstars grows ever wider, threatening social cohesion.

The current government’s response has been to focus on tax credits and means-tested benefits, but these are redistribution mechanisms between bottom and middle, leaving the super-rich bankers, lawyers and tax accountants largely alone. The excuses trotted out are that they are job creators, wealth creators, vital to the UK’s (ailing) economy. Yet a new report from the New Economics Foundation demolishes the myths linking high rewards with high social utility. The report, A Bit Rich: calculating the real value to society of different professions, published in December 2009, points out that:

“Early theories of value neglected the extent to which the production and trade of goods and services may have a wider impact on society that is not reflected in the cost of producing them. These ‘externalities’ are often remote or hard to see but that does not mean that they are not real or that they do not affect real people — either now or in the future.”

The ‘externalities’ arising from the activities of investment bankers are such that these mega-earners destroy £7 of social value for each £1 that they generate, the report calculates. Childcare workers, in contrast, generate between £7 and £9.50 of benefits to society for each £1 they are paid.

The A Bit Rich report has not received as much media coverage as I think it deserves.

I wonder why not.