Introducing Fairness in Business and Investment

This is a version of my speech from the (very enjoyable) London launch event of my book, on October 29th 2026. A version, because as I spoke without notes so these aren’t the exact words that I actually said!

When I first worked in the City, I wasn’t actually working in the City. Before we moved to Portsoken Street, Hermes’ offices were just along from here, on the east side of Mansell Street, and the official bounds of the City ran straight down the middle of that street. It’s less stark now, but there are still streets in this area where you can see one one side of the street the steel, glass and concrete and the wealth of the City, and on this side the bricks and mortar and the poverty of Tower Hamlets, where we are now. I know of no better symbol of the unfairness of our world, and how it gets oddly fixed and ossified than that the arbitrary choices of the Romans in choosing the boundaries of their settlement 2000 years ago are still reflected in a divide between wealth and poverty today. And this place, and the organisation it hosts, Toynbee Hall, works with the poor of this poor borough, and they often use the language of fairness talk about themselves.

That’s why we’re here.

Why we are here, though, is of course this little book, Fairness in Business and Investment. We all feel unfairness viscerally, and it’s not just that we here are a self-selected bunch. Rather, fairness is core to the human condition, it’s been a foundation of our social success as a species, it has been shown to be hard-wired in our brains, and been demonstrated to be present in children of ages all the way down to 15 months. And the thesis of my book is that when we as business-people and investors fail to be fair, we are not just denying something core to our humanity, we are worse at business and investment. For being fair delivers better business and investment, and delivers more prosperity for the long-term.

The book is in 3 parts, introductory, then fairness in business and fairness in investment.

As part of the introduction, I look at how consistent fairness is across cultures around the world. The ultimatum game shows this. I give XX £20 that she must share as she chooses it with YY – and they will get to keep their chosen shares if YY accepts what she’s offered. Economists argue that XX should make a low offer, and YY accept any money that is offered, because it’s free money (at least for you!). But of course that’s not how it works. Almost everywhere in almost all conditions, the most frequent offer, the mode, is 50%; the mean is often a bit lower, but still usually in the low 40s%; and offers below around 20% or 25% are almost always rejected. Fairness is shown to be – almost – universal. There is a key exception to the fairness shown by the ultimatum game, which I’ll come back to later.

Also in the introductory section, I discuss fairness of process, including the crucial issue of the Rule of Law. And I discuss fairness of outcomes, including the question of meritocracy. We all so love fairness that we want to believe that we live in meritocracies, and we’re often willing to believe that those who are suffering somehow deserve their misfortune, even when we happen to know for sure that’s not really true, and even when we doubt the genuine existence of meritocracy. I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and someone asserted that ‘no one believes in meritocracy any more’, in the sense that no one believes that we do live in meritocracies any more. But sadly that’s not true. Exactly the wrong people believe in meritocracy: those who succeed tend to, they believe they merit their success, think it is based on their skill and hard work alone, and are willing to ignore advantages they had or the role of just plain luck. And if they fall into that myth of meritocracy trap, it turns them into the most awful people. They drive aggressively, cutting up other traffic. They cheat in tests. They literally steal sweets from children. Successful people really can be awful human beings in their personal lives; who knows how they might act in their working lives?

The core of the book is the section on fairness in business. Here I look at each of the main stakeholder relationships, as set out in s172 of the Companies Act – employees, customers, suppliers, communities and so on. For each of them I consider what fairness looks like in relation to that stakeholder, what the benefits of fairness are, and something about the current state of play (usually not as good as it could be). I use the s172 list because I think it’s a useful articulation, not because I want to be narrowly British in the analysis – in fact when I share that ‘enlightened shareholder value’ approach with directors as part of the training I do, directors from around the world recognise it as a clear articulation of their duties, what they think the job of boards is, and what they think companies are there to do. And I show that even in the supposedly narrowly shareholder-focused US, actually the law properly understood is much closer to that articulation of enlightened shareholder value.

Of the s172 stakeholders, there’s probably least evidence for fairness making a valuable difference in the case of the environment. I think that’s because that relationship isn’t mediated through humans, and so isn’t subject to the push and pull between people that is often the source of fairness. But even there I find evidence of the need to strike a fair balance. And I go all the way down the list of s172 stakeholders, including corporate governance and good business conduct, and fair dealing with shareholders. I cover dual class shares, and the accounting and reporting wonks among you will be particularly pleased to know that I cover true and fair, as well as fair, balanced and understandable and Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) in that section. It’s striking how central fairness is to the language we use when we talk about the corporate relationship with its investors.

But it’s odd that we use fairness rather less in our expectations of investors themselves. So, to move to the final section of the book, fairness in investment. This section is rather less evidence-based and rather more aspirational than the fairness in business section. And the reason for this is that there is simply much less experience of fairness operating in the investment world, on which such evidence might be founded. Someone here’s employer has just launched an advertising campaign based on their being the fair pension and investment provider. While normally I love to see fairness in marketing, seeing it being applied as a core differentiator in the investment world depresses me a little.

And it’s here also that the outlier in the ultimatum game comes in: when researchers merely briefly called it a ‘Wall Street game’ when introducing the rules, the outcomes were very different, with initial offers much less generous and much greater acceptance of lowball offers. We fundamentally believe and accept that Wall Street, that the investment world, is less fair than the real world.

And that’s ironic because the foundation of all investment is the concept of fiduciary duties, that we’re looking after other people’s money and therefore must care for their interests above all. People in investment proudly talk about themselves as fiduciaries, as they should. And here’s the thing: fiduciary duties arise from that branch of the legal system known as Equity, which as the name suggests seeks to deliver fair outcomes whatever a strict interpretation of the law might be. So it is odd that investment, which is based on fiduciary duty, and so founded in equity, is not actually expected to be fair.

Fairness proves a valuable way to illuminate other key challenges in the investment world too, including stewardship, systemic risk and short-termism. The final nugget I’ll share is on short-termism, which we measure in investment using discount rates – the amount by which future money is worth less than money in the present. With the scale of our long-term problems, we desperately need to be thinking more long-term and so have lower discount rates, valuing the future more. But there’s a finding that in conditions of inequality – which obviously we are currently in – people have higher discount rates, they discount the future more and focus more on the present. There’s some logic to it, as inequality increases the risk that we may not be around to enjoy the future, and we may not have the funds to enjoy it. But the researchers argue that it’s more a psychological outcome than a logical one, and given that they’ve shown other psychological effects on discount rates (not least that men become much more short-term while in the presence of an attractive woman) it’s hard to argue with them.

So not only does unfairness exacerbate many of our future problems, it also constrains our ability – or at least how we perceive our ability – to deal with them.

So, in short, fairness matters to us as humans, deeply, viscerally. We miss something fundamental if we close our minds to it in our business and investment lives. Businesses need strong stakeholder relationships, all of which are stronger if mediated through fairness. Investment ignores fairness at its peril, risking the strength of customer (fiduciary) relationships, bringing systemic risks and limiting the ability to address them, getting timeframes wrong and too short-term, not least because of excess discounting. Yet we are human, and we shouldn’t allow the Wall Street game to have different fundamental rules to the rest of our lives, or be fooled by success within what we hope are meritocracies but really aren’t.

Fairness matters, and we will succeed more in business and for our investment clients, if we believe that and act more vigorously on it.

I’m happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog, and indeed Fairness in Business and Investment, are purely personal endeavours.

Fairness in Business and Investment, Paul Lee. Routledge, 2026

Baring the necessities

I fight shy of defining fairness. There’s a broad range of options that fulfil fairness for human beings – and different individuals will reach different judgements as to whether a particular circumstance falls within that range. There’s somewhat more clarity about unfairness. That concept animates us all so viscerally that we can more readily agree that something is unfair, even though there is much human judgement in that too.

This human and emotional side of fairness and unfairness is exactly why it is more rewarding to explore than the definable and measurable concepts of equality and inequality.

Such is the strength of my sense that I shouldn’t seek to define fairness that throughout my forthcoming book I provide no easy answers. Instead, I talk about ways in which businesspeople and investors can develop their own approach to finding a fair landing ground. I believe that the push and pull between people is so key to finding what is fair in any particular circumstance that making assertions in the absence of its particular details is all but impossible. It’s not by chance that the legal approach of equity is entirely based on reaching a fair outcome, setting aside any detailed legal rules: equity – fairness – can’t be defined in advance, successive courts have found, but only decided by judges considering the facts of the individual case. The same is true of fairness outside the court context: it must be subject to judgement based on the particular circumstances.

So I found myself baulking a little at those sections of Will Snell’s highly accessible new book The Fair Necessities that assert “Fairness is definable”. Indeed, for Snell, the CEO of the wonderful Fairness Foundation, the definition of fairness is based on his eponymous ‘fair necessities’ (which he and the Fairness Foundation first launched on the world in 2021). They are, exactly as he sets them out in the book:

Fair essentials: Everyone should have their basic needs met, but we need to go further to enable people to play a constructive role in society.
Fair opportunities: Everyone should be able to thrive, without having to overcome unreasonable barriers to opportunity or earn a huge salary.
Fair rewards: Everyone’s hard work should be rewarded, in line with their contribution to our society as well as to our economy.
Fair exchange: Everyone should contribute to society by paying their fair share in tax, and in return should be supported by society when they need it.
Fair treatment: Everyone should be treated with equal respect and should be able to exercise equal influence on decisions made in their name.

These seem to me a good articulation of key pillars of fairness, and key elements of what fairness might look like if delivered in practice. But a definition? Maybe not so much.

So I personally welcome the book’s later comments that fairness inevitably means different things to different people, and particularly comments acknowledging that really the fair necessities offer a framework for understanding fairness, and operationalising it in society – rather than a definition as such. Certainly, it was as such a framework that Snell spoke about the fair necessities at the book launch I had the pleasure of attending last month.

And it is really in that operationalisation of fairness that Snell’s book comes into its own, in a powerful and valuable way. Even as someone who has chatted with Snell over a number of years and closely followed the Fairness Foundation’s thoughtful work, I found much that was new in the book’s later chapters, especially the last substantive one, ‘Dismantling the barriers to fairness’. In particular, Snell discusses how to win the social and political argument about the need for greater fairness, and particularly highlights the need for an engaging and emotional discussion of fairness, not a purely technocratic one. Only occasionally does he fall into the trap of implying that the fairness agenda is favoured by people of one specific political persuasion; elsewhere he rightly notes that the concept works across the political spectrum.

Only deploying such an engaging and emotional discussion of fairness will, in Snell’s words, change the political wind, and help society acknowledge the scale of the risk that our current unfairnesses represent. I suspect his quote from economist Angus Deaton (from his 2024 Rethinking my Economics comments) will stay with me for some time: “Efficiency is important, but we valorise it over other ends … When efficiency comes with upward redistribution – frequently though not inevitably – our recommendations have become little more than a license for plunder.”

I’ve niggled about a small aspect of the book (though the posited definition is the frame within which its title is first explained) but really I would, very simply, highly commend The Fair Necessities to all. It’s accessible and challenging, and like this blog it is based on the clear understanding that our world needs, and deserves, more fairness. Do read it, do enjoy, and do think about how we collectively can more effectively operationalise fairness.

Environment in the balance

As I was researching for my (now very shortly) forthcoming book, I found less evidence for the benefits of fairness in relation to one of the traditional stakeholders of business than the others. This was the environment. In part, this was because of the strength of that evidence almost universally across the other key stakeholders. But perhaps more significant is the fact that the business relationship with the environment is not mediated by people. There is something built into how we interact with other humans, an ongoing push and pull of interests and mutual expectations, that leads to an arrival at a degree of fairness. Where humans are less immediately involved, there’s less of a gravitational pull to fairness, more scope for unfairness.

This left me focusing more in the environmental chapter on the need to strike a fair balance (incidentally, the importance of fair balances spurred the choice of cover image for the book). Inevitably, I also discuss the challenge of externalities and the risks that businesses take when they depend on the persistence of those externalities – they can mask unprofitability when the ability to externalise costs is removed, as it usually is, sooner or later. I also discuss the so-called tragedy of the commons, whereby shared resources can be over-exploited and destroyed, and the remarkable work of Elinor Ostrom in identifying how readily communities can manage such common resources and preserve them into perpetuity. Ostrom’s work provides powerful insights helping support the delivery of intergenerational fairness.

It’s therefore been a pleasure for me to discover more recently that this idea of the need for environmental balance has support from a source I wasn’t aware of. That support comes from Islam. Indeed, for a number of Islamic scholars, the concept of balance is the religion’s key framing of the human interaction with the environment. Take the following, for example:

“Islam looks at the environment from the standpoint of balance. It envisions the environmental balance as a part of the universal ‘grand balance’. The Quran describes the notion of environmental balance in various terms like ‘adl’, ‘qadar’ and ‘mouzoon’.
“The term ‘adl’ literally means acting justly, rightly, or equitably. While explaining the meaning of ‘adl’, one interpreter of the Quran has observed that the universe has been created in balanced form.”

This scholar goes on to argue that this requirement for balance implies constraints on the demands humans can make in terms of both what they extract from the environment and what they discharge into it by way of pollution.

Others have gone further in this analysis, and used the concept of balance to develop a wholesale approach to environmental matters. Al-Mizan apparently also means balance, and is the name for an approach developed alongside more than 300 Islamic institutions and international partners. Making clear that this concept of balance is intimately associated in Islam with equity, fairness and justice, the Al-Mizan Covenant for the Earth was finalised in 2024 and sets out a fair and just approach to environmental matters.

Among other things, the Covenant asserts:

“The economic values of our faith are embodied in frugal moderation while taking joy in the sources of life for humankind and other living beings, respecting their inherent limits by forsaking wasteful excess for just, equitable sharing of their fruits, and forsaking exploitation of the Earth and its inhabitants for charity and cultivation.”

Given that the wealth of a number of Islamic nations arises from their role as fossil fuel producers, it is particularly notable that the Al-Mizan Covenant makes a call not just for a transition away from the burning of fossil fuels but for a wholesale phasing out of fossil fuel production. It does so while noting the need for a just transition for affected workers and communities. The Covenant also seeks sustainable and ethical farming practices, railing at the imbalances brought by monocultural industrial farming practices.

The Covenant’s commitment on the issue of indigenous people’s rights is particularly strong: “To remind leaders and decision makers that it is essential that people of all social and ethnic groups, traditional societies and indigenous people be consulted without discrimination, and that the weakest be held as strongest until their rights are fully secured, and the strongest held as weakest until they comply fully with the law.” The paper’s articulation of what is required by way of truly fair and empowered consultation of those who might otherwise be powerless is particularly striking.

The Covenant also argues strongly for enhanced education on environmental matters and for more community-led approaches to addressing environmental challenges. Again, this appears to be about empowering those whose power might otherwise be limited, and ensuring that there is a readier balance of power and influence in the preservation of biodiversity and natural resources.

While these ideas are clearly grounded in a specific religious perspective and culture, the lessons they teach are more general. Seeking to balance the interests of current generations with those to come, to balance the interests of the wealthy with the disempowered, seeking a balance in the level of exploitation of natural resources, are steps that are in our own interests as well as those less empowered or yet-to-be-born, they are fair. Ostrom, among others, shows clearly that we don’t need a faith-based approach to see that such a balance is fair to ourselves and others. However, we are sadly some distance from striking such a fair balance at present.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

Fairness in Business and Investment, Paul Lee. Routledge, 2026

Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge University Press, 1990

Towards an Islamic Approach for Environmental Balance, Muhammed Ramzan Akhtar. Islamic Economic Studies, Vol 3 No 2, June 1996

Tafheem-ul-Quran [Towards Understanding the Quran], Syed Abu Al Ala Maududi

Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth. 2024

Squid Game ‘fairness’ II

This blogpost follows Squid Game series (season) 3 and while it doesn’t contain specific spoilers it does assume some knowledge of the programme [readers may gather that I’ve been slow to catch its denouement]

Fairness lies at the core of the concept of Squid Game, Netflix’s dark Korean drama. The players induced to enter the game feel they have no options in a highly unequal society, and have often been cheated out of what little money they did have, in legal or illegal ways, or been caught cheating others and now have debts to repay. They take every risk in order to gain the chance of walking away with enough money to change their lives. In contrast, the so-called ‘VIPs’ are bored by the extent of their wealth and need fresh expensive thrills to stay even partially engaged and interested. Both groups have been dehumanised by unfairness – it’s not by chance that the VIPs wear golden animal masks. The sole individual not dehumanised is the protagonist, Seong Gi-hun, who makes a particular point of insisting on his humanity as he departs from the scene.

However, as discussed in this blog’s original Squid Game ‘fairness’, the concept of fairness was considered only a little in the first series of Squid Game. Then, the organisers manipulated the idea of fairness as the basis to argue that it was right to punish those who had transgressed the rules of their own peculiar and dystopian world.

In the third series, the concept is deployed a little more overtly, particularly as part of a moving speech from the old lady, Jang Geum-ja (number 149) in the third episode, It’s not your fault. Jang deploys a cynicism about fairness that seems wholly appropriate to the cynicism of the programme overall:

“No matter how you look at it, life just is unfair. Bad people do bad things, but they blame others and go on to live in peace. Good people, on the other hand, beat themselves up about the smallest things.”

The organisers also again deploy the sense of fairness as a tool to justify their actions. In this case, they use it in praise of their own – again, peculiar and dystopian – version of democracy. Early in the first episode, the announcer asserts while the players view the rebellious dead from the end of series 2: “You are witnessing the fate of those who refused the democratic process of voting and instead attempted to stop the game using violent means. We will not tolerate any irrational behaviour which attempts to destroy the fair rules of this game, and such actions will be punished in accordance with our strict standards. We thank you again for your cooperation.”

The irony of complaining about the use of violent means to subvert democracy shouldn’t be lost on viewers: after all, there is an openness to, even a welcoming of, bullying and violence as part of and following the regular public ballots that deliver that ‘democracy’ (there’s a key moment when the organisers surprise us all by barring further violence between the players, at least outside the arena itself). The labelling of individuals by how they have voted fosters this scope for bullying and violence further: the series as a whole reminds us of the importance of the secret ballot to the effectiveness of democracy, to each voter being free to express their own opinion without unfair interference. In the absence of secret ballots, Squid Game’s democracy is a sham. As highlighted in Democracy – playing fair, fairness, equality and freedom are all necessary elements for true democracy to work. It’s clear to the viewer that the ‘democracy’ in Squid Game isn’t truly fair, in spite of the announcer’s words.

Fairness matters, deeply, in Squid Game; just not in the ways that the organisers claim.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

What’s fair pay for a bank?

It’s fair to say that generally banks aren’t well known for the fairness of their approach to pay. So it was interesting to note the emphasis that UBS, now by far Switzerland’s dominant bank following its 2023 rescue of the failing Credit Suisse, places on the issue of fair pay in its latest, recently issued annual report.

But the problem is that it seems to this reader at least that the bank may not necessarily be focusing on the right forms of fairness in pay.

For example, in the introductory section of the 43-page compensation report, the bank answers its own question, How does UBS support pay fairness?, as follows:

“We pay for performance, and we take pay equity seriously. Across all our locations, we apply the same fair pay standards, reinforced by annual reviews of our approach and policies in line with established equal pay methodologies. In 2025, our statistical pay gap analyses reaffirmed that pay differences between male and female employees in similar roles across our core financial hubs remained below 1%, a difference consistent with that for 2024. If we find any gaps not explained by business or by appropriate employee factors, such as role, responsibility, experience, performance or location, we look at the root causes and address them.”

UBS develops this analysis a little further in the Compensation philosophy and governance section, under the title Fair and equitable pay. Key elements of this discussion read:

“Pay equity and equal opportunity are fundamental to support our strategy. Being an employer of choice and inclusive of all experiences, perspectives and backgrounds is critical to our success. Factors such as gender, culture, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity, disability, family, veteran status, generations and part-time status should not impact opportunities available to our employees.

“Fair and consistent pay practices are designed to ensure that employees are appropriately rewarded for their contribution.”

It again emphasises that gender pay gap analysis shows gaps below 1% in pay for male and female employees “in similar roles across our core financial hubs”, an interesting geographical narrowing and also clearly ignoring the general experience that the issues in gender pay arise most often because of differential opportunities for men and women, which tend to lead to a skewing of roles away from strict ‘similarity’. And note that it has a marked gender skew overall in staff, given that only 41% are female.

If we set aside these limitations, this discussion of fairness seems fine as far as it goes, but it barely begins to address the promise of the titles given to it. This is not UBS ‘supporting pay fairness’; this is simply the bank not overtly discriminating in its treatment of different staff – which in many countries and cases will in any case be illegal. An actual discussion of the challenge of supporting pay fairness might acknowledge realities outside the bank, rather than this internal focus. The financialisation of our economies has helped fuel the broad inequalities that our world faces, as financial institutions, competing with each other for ‘talent’, bid up the pay of individuals well beyond what is affordable or realistic (even imaginable) for most businesses. The closest UBS comes to a proper understanding of what a broader mindset about fair pay, looking beyond the financial sector, might actually imply is this comment, which at least acknowledges some external benchmark:

“We also aim to ensure that all employees are paid at least a living wage. We regularly assess employees’ salaries against local living wages, using benchmarks defined by the Fair Wage Network. Our analysis in 2025 showed that employees’ salaries were at or above the respective benchmarks.”

A bank that was genuinely seeking to ‘support pay fairness’ might apply similar pay expectations – of that minimum living wage level pay – at all clients and counterparties. A bank that worked with its corporate customers to understand what local living wages might be in their countries of operation and how they might be achieved across relevant workforces while still delivering profitability would be a bank genuinely supporting this ambition.

A bank that was genuinely seeking to ‘support pay fairness’ might consider whether financialisation is leading to pay distortions between the financial sector and almost every other part of the economy.

These UBS does not do. As ever, the finance industry has a tendency to look inwards at itself and not outward at its role and influence in the real world. An article I reference a couple of times in my forthcoming book invites the industry to think about fairness ‘outside its cocoon’. Only if financial services starts to do that will it genuinely be supporting fairness.

Duncan Mavin, in his (highly recommended) book telling the sad history of UBS’s takeover target, Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse, identifies an unfair approach to pay as being part of the drivers of that bank’s failure: “The behaviour of the bank’s leaders hardly inspired other staff to be the best versions of themselves … Credit Suisse bankers got paid well, whatever happened. When the bank was making a profit, staff made a bundle, regardless of whether the results were driven by strong markets or great management. When the bank made a loss – because of misconduct, fines, bad behaviour or poor strategic decisions – the bonuses were good then too.”

Inward-looking financial institutions are more likely to fail than ones that look outward and measure fairness against external benchmarks. Instead, they need to look beyond their comfortable cocoon.

Annual Report 2025, UBS

Fairness Outside the Cocoon, Meir Statman, Financial Analysts Journal, Vol 60, No 6

Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse, Duncan Mavin, Pan Macmillan 2024

An archaeology of equality

Reading an old book can sometimes feel like an archaeological dig – you find fragmented artefacts of how people used to think and have to try to piece together an understanding of their world, and their world view. Very often it serves to illuminate our own.

That’s definitely my sense while reading a book called Equality by an old socialist and economic historian, RH (Richard Henry) Tawney. My edition dates from 1964 but the original book was published in 1931, based on lectures given in 1929. This version enjoys a 1964 introduction by founding father of social policy Richard Titmuss, and no fewer than two prefaces by Tawney himself, one from the 1951 revised edition and one from the ‘substantially revised’ 1938 edition. Reading through these in this order is like uncovering historic layers of English inequality, and repeated aspirations for greater equality. What’s more, the first chapter of the book, The Religion of Inequality, starts by referring to a lecture by Matthew Arnold from I think 1878, to which it attributes the coining of that phrase.

I find it impossible to read these archaeological artefacts and not reflect on our own age. This blogpost aims simply to capture a few sentiments from each of these layers of history. Readers will no doubt be conscious of the great ruptures and attempts towards greater equality that provided the context for the writing of each of these layers of commentary, from the heights of the Cold War, the challenges of the Second World War and the creation of the welfare state that followed it, the Great Depression and the rise of fascism – and even, back around the 1870s, the first steps to broad enfranchisement (and while the right to vote did not then extend to women, that decade did see them permitted for the first time to retain their own property rather than simply surrender it on marriage).

Titmuss in his 1964 introduction:

“We…delude ourselves if we think we can equalize the social distribution of life chances by expanding educational opportunities while millions of children live in slums without baths, decent lavatories, leisure facilities, room to explore and the space to dream. Nor do we achieve with any permanency a fairer distribution of rewards and a society less sharply divided by class and status by simply narrowing the differences in cash earnings among men during certain limited periods of their lives.”

“Long years of economic depression, a civilians’ war, rationing and ‘fair shares for all’, so-called ‘penal rates’ of taxation and estate duty, and ‘The Welfare State’ have made little impression on the holdings of great fortunes…Wealth still bestows power, more power than income, though it is probably exercised differently and with more respect for public opinion than in the nineteenth century.”

“These consequences of technology in an age of abundance are more likely to increase than to decrease differentials in income and wealth if no major corrective policies are set to work…Without a major shift in values, an impoverishment in social living for some groups can only result from this new wave of industrialism.”

Tawney in his 1951 preface:

“Like earlier wars of religion, the credal conflicts of our day will find varying issues in different regions; but, if Europe survives, societies convinced that liberty and justice are equally indispensable to civilization will survive as part of her. The experience of a people which regards these great abstractions, not as antagonists, but as allies, and which has endeavoured, during six not too easy years, to serve the cause of both, is not barren of lessons which may profitably be pondered.”

And he quotes The Times from 1 July 1940:

“If we speak of democracy, we do not mean the democracy which maintains the right to vote, but forgets the right to live and work. If we speak of freedom, we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organization and economic planning. If we speak of equality, we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction, we think less of maximum production…than of equitable distribution.”

Tawney in his 1938 preface:

“It is still sometimes suggested that what Professor Pigou, in his latest work, calls ‘the glaring inequalities of fortune and opportunity which deface our present civilization’ are beneficial, irremediable, or both together. Innocent laymen are disposed to believe that these monstrosities, though morally repulsive, are economically advantageous, and that, even were they not, the practical difficulties of abolishing them are too great to be overcome. Both opinions, it may be said with some confidence, are mere superstitions.”

“Institutions which enable a tiny class, amounting to less than two per cent of the population of Great Britain, to take year by year nearly one quarter of the nation’s annual output of wealth…are an economic liability of alarming dimensions. They involve…a perpetual misdirection of limited resources to the production or upkeep of costly futilities, when what the nation requires for its welfare is more and better food, more and better houses, more and better schools.”

“Today, when three-quarters or more of the nation leave less than £100 at death, and nearly two-thirds of the aggregate wealth is owned by about one per cent of it, inheritance is on the way to become little more than a device by which a small minority of rich men bequeath to their heirs a right to free quarters at the expense of their fellow-countrymen. The limitations imposed on that right during the past half-century were greeted, when first introduced, with the usual cries of alarm; and the alarm, as is not less usual, has been proved by experience to be mere hysteria. It is perfectly practicable, by extending those limitations and accelerating their application, to reduce the influence of inheritance – at present a strong poison – to negligible dimensions.”

“To make [democracy] a type of society requires an advance along two lines. It involves, in the first place, the resolute elimination of all forms of special privilege, which favour some groups and depress others, whether their source be differences of environment, of education, or of pecuniary income. It involves, in the second place, the conversion of economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant, into the servant of society, working within clearly defined limits, and accountable for its action to a public authority.”

Tawney reports that Matthew Arnold said, in c1878:

“Arnold observed that in England inequality is almost a religion. He remarked on the incompatibility of that attitude with the spirit of humanity, and sense of the dignity of man as man, which are the marks of a truly civilized society. ‘On the one side, in fact, inequality harms by pampering; on the other by vulgarizing and depressing. A system founded on it is against nature, and, in the long run, breaks down.’”

As LP Hartley says in another old book, one that deliberately plays with memory and history, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” But often ‘they’ worried about the same challenges we do, and sought similar solutions.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

RH Tawney, Equality, 1964, Unwin

Arthur Pigou, Socialism versus Capitalism, 1937

LP Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

Data and inequality

Long-term readers will know that I have my doubts about the value of the precise measurement of inequality known as the Gini coefficient. It’s one of the specific examples of my general cynicism about overly specific measurements. Things are usually a good deal more complicated.

Nonetheless it is fascinating to read John Burn-Murdoch’s piece for the Financial Times this weekend, Inequality hasn’t risen. Here’s why it feels like it has, which is grounded wholly in the Gini coefficient. Burn-Murdoch is the FT’s Mr Statistics, and he is always readable and interesting, so I’ll forgive the obsession with the use of single datapoints that will always be flawed if viewed in isolation (and I’ll acknowledge also that he recognises the limits of Gini: “Aggregate inequality statistics certainly have their place, but they can mask important nuances,” he writes).

The core of Burn-Murdoch’s article is the data shown in these charts:

He notes the increased attention to inequality over the past decade, even though the Gini numbers suggest it is in fact falling in both the UK and US, and he attributes this to a squeezing of the middle class between improved treatment of the poorest paid (which appears to be the driver of more than the total drop in the Gini measurement) and an increased stretching of the advantages of those best off in our society (which has increased inequality, but less than the reduction driven by the improvements for those least well off). While it’s known that the minimum wage in the UK and its bolstering over time has helped those least well off here, it is more surprising to find that some similar improvements have also been experienced by the poorest in the US also, despite the notorious stagnation of the national minimum wage there. This squeezing effect is reflected in the title given to the article in the paper copy of the newspaper: Why the middle class is right to feel squeezed.

This blog would naturally suggest that one reason why there is increased noise about inequality now, despite the falls in the Gini coefficient, is that the problem as humans see it is unfairness, not inequality, and the bluntness of Gini fails to capture the richness of human experience. In particular, it’s hard to believe that the improvement in the incomes of the poorest is genuinely felt to be an improvement in their life experience – perhaps especially as they have experienced greater inflation than wider society over recent times. The moves in Gini may be masking insight as much as they are revealing.

Burn-Murdoch is clearly right when he highlights the reductions in sense of opportunity available to many in society – opportunity both for themselves and for their children. But, for this blog at least, these are questions of fairness, not of inequality (measured by Gini or in some other way).

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

Inequality hasn’t risen. Here’s why it feels like it has, John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, 4 January 2025

Plague and planning: a long history of English unfairness

A historical meander through the countryside for the holidays

The quintessential vision of England is of a village set in rolling countryside. Depending on the topography, this may be hills cropped by sheep, or less frequently other farm animals, or flatter lands growing cereal. But whatever the countryside, the village is consistently there (whether or not, like former prime minister John Major, we include in our image cricket and warm beer and spinsters cycling across the village green). We imagine these villages as images of fairness and justice, representing the ordinary people of England, strong, independent and free.

But those villages have not always been there. And they do not always represent fairness, independence or freedom (even if we can set aside modern concerns about incomers pricing out locals). Any settlement and community is the creation of a set of decisions. Some of those decisions were by ordinary folk choosing to come together for their own reasons. But many times what are now viewed as symbols of peace and tranquillity were created by force at the whim of the local landlord, a feudal founding created to control the population and ensure that it was productive – to the benefit of the seigneur.

The bucolic beauty that we tend to take for granted was often an emblem of power and an assertion of unfairness. The same villages have also over centuries witnessed further episodes of the ebb and flow of power, and of fairness. We tend to imagine these places unchanged forever. They are not.

It used to be thought that there was a ‘village moment’ in England, when villages suddenly appeared in the landscape. My use of the term ‘seigneur’ was deliberate, for this ‘moment’ was for decades ascribed to the Norman invasion of 1066 and the following years, when newly created feudal lords established villages as power bases to control the population and its work effort. It is not just that the Domesday Book (which dates to 1086) provides us with the first consistent written record of the existence of English villages (though often it refers to individual farmsteads or small hamlets that later developed, or were developed, into villages).

This belief in a particular moment of village creation was reinforced by the archaeological digs of abandoned (or shrunken) mediaeval settlements, which “showed very little evidence for occupation earlier than the eleventh or twelfth century” as Carenza Lewis and colleagues explain in their key work Village, Hamlet and Field. But the belief eroded as further investigations, not least of settlements that continue to exist, tended to extend the moment to a rather broader period: they “seemed to push forward the origin of the large nucleated village to the period between about 850 and 1200”. It’s tempting to suggest that the disproportionate representation of the Norman-created villages among those that were subsequently abandoned is a sign that their artificial creation meant they were less sustainable than those created organically by a population choosing to move closer together, but I suspect that’s a little pat.

While landscape historians have pushed back the creation of many villages, it is undoubtedly true that many others were created soon after the Norman invasion, by those new feudal landlords: “lordly authority was clearly a key motor in the planning of settlements,” explains Oliver Creighton in his Designs Upon the Land. He further says: “The well attested phenomenon of seigneurial village planning, which in many cases extended to embrace field systems, can be taken as further evidence for the expression of lordly authority.”

These Saxon and mediaeval creations were of course not the first villages, though they were the first of a scale that we would recognise, and the first to include a village church (typically seen as the signifier of the distinction between village and hamlet). There were Neolithic villages – examples of these can still be seen at Scara Brae in Orkney, Carn Euny in Cornwall and Ty Mawr on Anglesey (preservation is better in remote places). But life generally remained scattered until towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period.

These were not the first villages, but these were the first that we might recognise today. And, whatever the timing of their creation, all were under tight command and control arrangement, “a tightly managed landscape” says Trevor Rowley in the classic Villages in the Landscape. “The manorial court was responsible for the regulation of internal field boundaries, the precise amount of grazing and rights of gathering on the common waste, and it also had responsibility for the trackways and streams. The manor courts collectively administered rules of husbandry, watched over local customs of tenure and inheritance and enforced local peace and order. By 1300 we would have looked on a landscape which was intensively used at a subsistence level.” This was not a fair landscape: most lived the hardest of subsistence existences while a small handful prospered.

As Rowley summarises: “the permanent nucleated village so familiar to us today was a factor not of ethnic or cultural change, but of economic and social forces. It was brought about by a complex combination of increasing population and increasing authoritarian control through the manorial system”.

And it wasn’t only the villages, but the landscape more broadly. Creighton takes a particular interest in parkland, land taken into private ownership as a venue for hunting. He points out that taking land out of agricultural production and creating parks was not an economic decision, but a social one driven by concerns of status. “The right to empark was a jealously guarded privilege and badge of lordly authority,” he writes. “The huge outlay involved in the creation of parks and the challenges of maintaining them, combined with the minimal financial returns that accrued, shows that they were not geared to maximise profit by cold, hard businesslike patrons.”

Ridge and furrow – a relic of mediaeval communal shared fields – within the private walled grounds of the National Trust’s Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire. An example of the historic privatisation of shared land

This contrasts of course with the much later enclosure movement when the wealthy took land out of common usage by the general population and asserted their direct ownership of it (often with the formal endorsement of acts of parliament – the law being used to enforce the demands of the powerful). Enclosure coincided with the agricultural revolution, making the productivity of the seized lands more than recompense the cost of the creation of the hedges, walls and fencing – and of the policing of the protests from the dispossessed population. Susanna Wade Martins in Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes reports that after enclosure, “Productivity could sometimes be doubled and rents went up by an equivalent amount.” That wasn’t the case with mediaeval seizures.

Parks in the mediaeval era were just as contested as the enclosed lands, though. As Creighton points out, “Many parks were recorded for the first time not when they were licenced or created, but when they were first broken into.” He suggests that poaching may have been just an assertion of continuing rights to seek food in emparked land.

Alongside this privatisation of land, from 1250, the elite turned more aloof, power and wealth enabling them to distance themselves from ordinary folk. Increasingly, the wealthy kept themselves apart, both in the siting of their own property and in the design of their buildings also. Creighton says: “an increasingly aloof aristocracy … was progressively increasing the social distance between the household and the world beyond the walls… This is part of a pan-European phenomenon evident at key lordship sites in France, Germany and Scandinavia and, in turn, part and parcel of a broader phenomenon of the increased privatisation of space, as manifested particularly clearly in the changing function of the hall and modes of domestic planning that enabled individuals to spend more time in individual rooms.” This period seems to coincide with a trend towards moated sites for elite dwellings – typically a symbolic separation rather than offering any degree of protection. This trend towards status symbols and separation was reflected in food also, for example it is at this period when the eating of more exotic birds becomes an activity for the elite, and the poor were excluded from certain foods.

This move is not to be taken lightly. In his The Archaeology of Power, John Steane discusses the ceremonial role of the lordship’s property, in particular the community role fulfilled by his hall, “the architectural expression of the household”. He quotes from William Langland, the 14th century supposed author of Piers Plowman, who criticises those lords whose halls have become a “sorry, deserted place” because “the rich nowadays have a habit of eating by themselves in private parlors”. The implications of the harm caused to community and society as a whole by this withdrawal are significant.

This was an age of remarkable unfairness. The majority toiled, a few did well – and increasingly turned their backs on the toilers, living very separate lives. It took a devastating event, or series of events, to reawaken fairness in our country. Those events were the repeated scourges of the Black Death (which first swept across Europe in the years either side of 1350), devastating the population and bringing enormous changes in its diseased wake.

I wrote in my last post about the impact of the Second World War in sweeping away some of our nation’s then ossified unfairness and injustice. And I noted that we must hope that it doesn’t take such an event to sweep aside the unfairness that has built up again in our society. The Black Death was a still more lethal and traumatic event that led to an even more remarkable reversal of inequalities. According to James Belich’s analysis in his remarkable and epic history of the consequences of the plague era, The World the Plague Made, around half of Europe’s population died from the initial outbreak of the plague (he spends a whole chapter justifying this conclusion, which is greater than the usually quoted one-third, a death toll that would have been remarkable enough).

As Belich explains, this halving of the population dramatically increased the value put on labour – meaning that the poorest suddenly began to be paid more. The poorest may have doubled their available spending capacity (even the smallest increment in pay for someone operating at subsistence levels will enable this), as well as giving them more leisure time; others fared better in absolute terms. The decrease in the availability of labour, and the increase in its cost, led to a productivity revolution – and with the same capital goods now shared between a halved population there was significant scope for such a productivity shift. This, together with increases in money available across the economy, led to a boom in demand for what had previously been luxuries available only to the few. Trade boomed, deploying the same shipping capacity for the benefit of the halved population. Many were freed from subsistence farming and agricultural patterns shifted to favour more specialisation.

Belich argues that it was the plague that led to Europe’s imperial dominance of the globe over subsequent centuries. One vehicle for this, he suggests, is that the fairness of the post-plague era lingered long enough in folk memories that it made ordinary people willing to risk everything to travel to far off lands in search of a better life, a life more like the less unequal era post-plague.

Those with Scottish and Irish heritage will no doubt baulk at this, pointing to the enforced movements caused by those great historic injustices the Clearances and the Great Hunger (the capital letters just a nod to their cultural significance) – and others will point to other causes in other lands. There’s truth that many travelled the world (and do so now as well as then) because their homeland no longer offered them a home, but both events came later than Belich intends. He is thinking about the start of the European imperial era, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the journey itself was extremely hazardous, with around 30% dying even before they reached their destination – let alone the challenges of the precarious imperial outposts that were created. Those of course are the odds of those who travelled freely as free people, not of those who were enslaved, nor those of the indigenous peoples whose lands were taken from them.

European people travelled in spite of these odds, Belich believes, because they remembered the freedom and fairness that followed the horrors of the Black Death. A small hope for fairness will inspire many to action.

As we walk the countryside, we should recognise how it offers insights into past unfairness, and not the simple bucolic beauty that is all we sometimes see.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Mediaeval Settlements in Central England, Carenza Lewis, Patrick Mitchell-Fox, Christopher Dyer, Windgather Press, 2001

Designs Upon the Land: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages, Oliver Creighton, Boydell Press, 2009

Villages in the Landscape, Trevor Rowley, Dent, 1978

Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes: Rural Britain 1720-1870, Susanna Wade Martins, Windgather Press, 2001

The Archaeology of Power, John Steane, Tempus Publishing, 2004

The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe, James Belich, Princeton University Press, 2022

Debilitating poverty

Being poor brings many disadvantages. A lack of money squeezes options and reduces opportunity. It hampers health and makes ambition harder. But the effects aren’t just direct and physical. They are psychological too. Researchers are beginning to uncover just how debilitating being poor is for effective thinking.

The answer to the question posed in the title Do Financial Concerns Make Workers Less Productive? was a resounding yes. Not only did poor workers whose money troubles were temporarily alleviated produce more, they also made fewer mistakes in production, despite operating more quickly. There is a clear business productivity benefit from this poverty alleviation; and in work that pays piece rates – where workers are paid for their useful output in numbers of products – this alleviation of worry also enabled them to earn more.

In a world of unfairness in which many are kept poor, these are significant findings. In a world seeking greater growth, where growth has been held back by stagnant productivity, they are still more important.

The increase in productivity shown was much greater than that brought about by an increase in the piece rate paid (which in a control experiment was done alongside a cut in base pay so that overall earnings were steady). There was a small increase in output following the piece rate increase, but it was less than a tenth of the change brought about by removing money worries – and there was no discernable increase in the quality of production, meaning this piece rate change delivered much less than a twentieth of the improvement in productivity that alleviating poverty did.

It’s worth noting that the researchers were able to discard alternative explanations of why these workers become more productive. In particular, they specifically discounted the possibility that improved nutrition of the poverty-relieved workers was the cause, because of the speed of the effect of the early payments and the lack of difference in nutritional intake in that short period. The effect is a psychological one: workers who don’t need to worry constantly about money are more productive.

This means that our economies are being held back by workers who are less productive than they could be, simply because they do worry about money on an ongoing basis. GDP growth is being artificially depressed and poverty alleviation could help it recover. This represents a business, investment and economic opportunity.

These findings are depressing. But it’s worse to find that growing up in poverty also has debilitating effects on children.

A recent study finds that poor students underperform their usual standard on maths tests that use real-world scenarios involving money, food or social interactions. It’s not a small effect, either: their performance is on average 18% lower than it is on questions overall – and, the researchers note, it would look even worse if they compared performance against just those questions that are more neutral.

These results were surprising to the researchers, who were expecting to see outperformance in these more practical questions, revealing hidden talent among poor students (they use the jargon low SES, socioeconomic status) that may be untapped by traditional education. That’s the reason why such questions have increasingly been used in modern testing: they are thought to be more accessible to all students. But the result of this study indicates that accessibility comes at the price of triggering distracting thoughts for poorer young people. As the chart shows, performance is worst with regard to questions that refer to money specifically.

Another recent study also found evidence of underperformance on money-linked questions by poor students. It puts this down to ‘attention capture’ as the researcher identified an effect not only on the specifically money-linked questions but also underperformance on more neutral questions asked subsequent to them. It seems as though the question reminds the students to worry about money, and they then can’t shake off the concerns.

These results amount to another example of apparent meritocracy in fact acting to limit the opportunity of those who start with less. As the Fictional Money, Real Costs paper states:

“Examinations are an efficient mechanism to benchmark and rank a population based on a specific set of skills. The notion that they are fair, however, has increasingly been questioned. A significant concern is that performance differences reflect inequities in the testing process itself, rather than differences in underlying skills, and thus may contribute to the intergenerational transmission of existing inequality.”

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

Do Financial Concerns Make Workers Less Productive?, Supreet Kaur, Sendhil Mullainathan, Suanna Oh, Frank Schilbach, National Bureau Of Economic Research Working Paper 28338, January 2021

Math items about real-world content lower test-scores of students from families with low socioeconomic status, Marjolein Muskens, Willem Frankenhuis, Lex Borghans, npj Science of Learning, vol 9, art 19 (2024)

Fictional Money, Real Costs: Impacts of Financial Salience on Disadvantaged Students, Claire Duquennois, American Economic Review 2022, 112(3): 798–826

Business and investment’s fairness challenge – and opportunity

“We need a major repair that is not going to be found in the traditional economic models that consider the social impact of our decisions as something to be fixed ex post through social policies and redistribution. It needs a major change in the economic narrative, that brings equality and sustainability objectives on an equal footing with productivity and growth when measuring success. And it needs to bring in the private and the financial sector to change the way they define and measure their objectives and actions ex ante.”

So said Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences of UNESCO, at the launch of the mouthful that is the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures, or TISFD – an organisation she will co-chair – at the end of September.

Ramos went on to express the hope that the TISFD disclosure framework “will encourage organisations to consider the broader impact of their operations in an ex ante manner and make the social implications of business models transparent … We need to integrate the private sector and the financial sector in the solution because with that we can drive meaningful change that aligns economic progress with positive social impact.”

One of her fellow co-chairs, Arunma Oteh, former World Bank Vice President and Treasurer, and former Director General of Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission, took the opportunity of the launch webinar to invite the investment and business communities to take part in the development of the TISFD standards: “By participating in this process businesses and financial institutions in my view will gain a deeper understanding of how social and inequality issues contribute to systemic risks that can affect financial markets and the global economy.”

Her aspiration is clear: “By standardising how organisations report on social-related issues we can also empower all stakeholders to hold businesses and financial institutions accountable for their social impact.”

These are not small ambitions. It’s clear that the new Taskforce will throw down a gauntlet for both business and the investment community, to think more deeply about the negative implications of business models and investment for society, and particularly the danger that the current approaches further foster inequality. In the language of this blog, the ambition is to instil a greater sense of fairness in business and investment.

Fortunately, there are a few voices from the world of business talking about these issues. Professor Scott Galloway, a successful tech entrepreneur – with an unusual humility for someone with that background – turned educator, is typically excoriating in a recent blog on the US minimum wage: “We have epidemics in the US — depression, anxiety, high blood pressure, homelessness, obesity, and poverty — among young people, particularly men. (Though it’s worth noting here that the majority of people making the minimum wage in the US are women.) The most powerful means of addressing these ills, and the ‘deaths of despair’ that follow, is a good job at a fair wage that acknowledges the nobility of work. In addition, a good job creates incentives and illuminates a path to wealth creation and economic security.” He is clearly referencing the work of economist Angus Deaton, and in doing so highlights the opportunity for investors: economies with fairer pay will prosper more. But Galloway is an unusual figure, in multiple different ways.

Peter Bakker, CEO of World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and former CEO of Dutch logistics firm TNT, talked about the creation of the TISFD arising out of earlier work of the Business Commission to Tackle Inequality: “One of the key conclusions out of that work is that the way that business makes decisions today, the way that businesses are managed, the way that capital markets look and value businesses, does not incorporate the social- and inequality-related risks, the dependencies and the impacts that business actually has on society and on people in it.”

This image from the Business Commission to Tackle Inequality’s flagship publication shows the breadth of what that group sought to encompass. If anything, the breadth of the challenges that TISFD is intending to cover is still greater. The inclusive – even eclectic – nature of the issues covered by the new group readily demonstrated by the failure (at least so far) to find a streamlined name for the Taskforce. It represents the combination of separate groups, one considering inequalities and the other social issues. Of course there are multiple cross-overs between these areas but clearly neither group felt able to compromise over the name.

As well as the spread of its ambitions, the inclusive nature of the TISFD is also shown by the breadth of the backgrounds of the co-chairs. The fourth co-chair is Sharan Burrow, the redoubtable former General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation. She noted that TISFD’s aim goes far beyond disclosure: “If we think about it as an end process which is just disclosure then we’re not actually considering what the recommendations must do, which is actually to put up front the sorts of issues that ought to be taken into the business model, the externalities, the risks that must be accounted for in planning.”

Bakker agreed: “Do not make the mistake that TISFD is about disclosures or reporting, because that’s the mistake that everybody always makes in the sustainability world. The reporting bit is the end of a process in which better decisions are made and that’s how you influence the social impacts towards a more positive outcome.”

Bakker went on, and laid down the crucial challenge particularly for the investment world:

“It is partly corporate decision making, partly corporate disclosures, but it’s also about how financial markets will then pick up this decision-useful information and provide incentives for a much fairer and more equal and inclusive world.”

We will see if investors are ready to rise to this challenge.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour

Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures

TISFD Launch Webinar, September 27 2024

Doing the Minimum, No Mercy/No Malice blog, Professor Scott Galloway, September 13 2024

Business Commission to Tackle Inequality

Tackling inequality: An agenda for business action, Business Commission to Tackle Inequality, May 2023