Inclusion: An Introduction and Agenda for Action

Abstract

We may agree in wanting inclusion, but not always on what it means. Should it mean a fundamental social good, the end-purpose of more practical concerns with poverty, unemployment, health, and education and so on? Or should inclusion be understood as one item among many, like national and class culture, religious belief, ethnicity, the distribution of wealth and income which together determine the quality of a society and its people's experience of it? Or should we understand inclusion as if exclusion is an independent disease like racial prejudice which we should cure by preaching a change of heart and founding community centres, without necessarily doing much about poverty, unemployment, the housing shortage, ghetto segregation, or any other fact of economic life? Leaving those issues in those better hands I want to talk in this Introduction about some historical changes in process in Western societies which are reshaping our political and economic problems and our options in responding to them. I may seem to have strayed in from a conference on motherhood or the river Murray but the plot arrives at inclusion in the end, in both a straight and an ironic meaning of 'in the end'. I begin with five strands of current history: * Because we learn for longer before we start to earn, and live longer after we stop earning, and are about to trade a bigger working generation for a smaller one, and a smaller retired generation for a bigger one, we will need to transfer a much higher proportion of income than ever before from our earning to our non-earning years. * We have an unfinished revolution in women's rights and children's chances that is causing stress and overwork for many women, and some bad upbringing, that needs fixing. * Through most of human history, economic growth and the reduction of poverty have depended on--among other things--freeing a creative minority from hunger and hard labor to give their time to arts and sciences, and economic and political management and leadership. That has entailed paying them more in money and kind than most of the people earn. But in the course of the twentieth century the rich countries' productivity crossed a threshold. We could now give everyone the material conditions for as much happiness as we are humanly capable of. * Partly because of that possibility, a mass of research is currently exposing the diminishing marginal utility of income, and the personal and social sources of human happiness and unhappiness. A flatter scale of inequality, ridding us of a lot of unhappy poverty and unnecessary affluence, looks more promising than ever before. * But of course that is unworldly nonsense. Its politics are plainly impossible. Or they might be, if we were not at the same time spoiling and exhausting our natural resources. The rich may not survive much longer than the poor do if they do not somehow attract mass support and dependable parliamentary majorities for fair rationing of the restrained output and incomes that effective environmental reform may well entail. It is with this last question in mind that I want to talk briefly about each of these historical changes. Income transfers over time and between people We currently have four earners for each retired person, six or seven for each public age pensioner, and the public pensions currently take three per cent of national income. Add the old people's health and other public costs, and they are still an easy burden on the earners. It is not too hard for those at work both to transfer the necessary income, and to produce the goods and services that the non-earners want to spend it on. But that must change as the baby-boomers retire, leaving fewer earners to replace them. ABS estimates that there may be two earners for each one retired 50 years from now. The Treasury estimates that to maintain current public services to the aged 20 years from now would cost 5 per cent of national income, which would have to come from additional tax or the degradation of other services. …