A Civilised Wage

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 279, 27 October 1944, Page 7

A Civilised Wage

B. SHAW, who is now (5 88, asks in an article in ® a recent Observer how much money "everyone ought to have to keep civilisation safe and steady." Theoretically, he says, the basic income should be the same for everybody, since equality is the only theory that will "prevent the ruptures and compound fractures, the internal _ strains, conflicts and civil wars caused by the division of society into financial classes." In practice, however, that would mean (in Great Britain) about four shillings per head per week, and only about 0.001 per cent of people on that financial level would break out of it and equip themselves for jobs of direction and control. Four shillings per head per week, he argues, would "mean cultural sterilisation, ending in a relapse into primitive tribalism," and the problem is to fix, and provide, an income for everybody large enough to "produce prime ministers, higher mathematicians, historians and philosophers, authors and artists, in addition to ploughmen and dairy-maids." In Britain to-day he thinks that the amount necessary to provide an "intellectual proletariat" might be about £800 a year, and since this is far beyond the national quotient it could be paid to, at most, about 10 per cent of the -population. In other words the road to equality starts from inequality, since the remaining 90 per cent of the population can approach the favoured 10 per cent only by increasing the amount available for division, and security, by which he means social stability, will be reached only when’ we reach intermarriageability. Though a person with £50 a year cannot marry a person with £5000 — it would be "downright miscegenation since the two figures produce two different human species"there is a cultural (i.e. financial ) point at which marriage with anybody is possible. So the struggle is between the progressive Levellersup and the catastrophic Levellers-. down, and the Progressives (Shaw says) will win when they learn their political business.