HOW time flies! Here we are at the start of the sixth Scottish Parliament, still with plenty to do. In fact, to judge by the persistent priorities of the Scottish people, we have hardly started on the one they place at the top of their list when polled, the levelling of inequality.

At Holyrood this last weekend, our inequality got a perhaps slightly lukewarm reproof from the Queen as she read out the government’s legislative programme. It has been, however, much more firmly censured by the greatest living Scotsman, the Nobel prizewinner in economics Sir Angus Deaton.

He has spent the heights of his career at Princeton University in the US, but for the final phase he is returning more regularly to his homeland on a project of special interest to him and its people. Its aim is to look at the causes, consequences and remedies for inequality.

During his mellow old age, Sir Angus has often voiced homage to the Scotland of his childhood and youth. By his own account, his schooling still owed much to the legacy of the Enlightenment. With regard to economics, there had been in the Scotland of the 18th century an intellectual movement that always paid heed to the impact on essentially sociable and benevolent human beings of impersonal processes beyond their control.

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When Sir Angus was born in Edinburgh in 1945, Scotland and the UK were emerging victorious from a world war that had all the same proved financially ruinous. Not that their social memories of an older period were any better, after long periods of mass unemployment and poverty. But the subsequent progress during our modern peacetime has been stupendous, even if you would hardly think so from the rhetoric of some commentators.

In these very pages, for example, my columnist colleague Kevin McKenna regularly paints us pictures of a nation still mired in bottomless poverty, degraded and humiliated by a capitalist minority grinding their faces.

It might be scarcely believable, but actually the members of this underclass enjoy the right to a vote that over a century they have cast in regular General Elections. Their forefathers believed adult suffrage was the key to political liberty and struggled for it till they got it. Why don’t we just update the historic process of reform and show our oppressors the electoral door?

Because, hisses Kevin, we have been duped by Labour. Nowadays, the one way to save the people would be at the hands of a radical socialist SNP. But this has so far proved hardly a winning project either. In the past year or two, it has instead been suffering defeats as the party leadership adopts an unprincipled practical agenda focused on conquering coronavirus. Still, our Kevin will fight on.

Other forces may have been at play, however. In Scotland, consider the inertia of the class structure. The official statistics of our own government show our society is in fact not in the oppressive shape of a pyramid, with a huge rabble at the bottom and a smug elite at the top.

No, its form is irregular, the broadest segment being service workers, in between a smaller professional cadre above them and a smaller layer of manual workers below them. Kevin’s favourite, the underclass right at the bottom of the pile, is also the smallest of the classes. It stays that way because it remains alien to the disdainful other classes.

I’m glad to tell Kevin that Sir Angus can illuminate the very latest stage in the evolution of this obscure structure of society. He has published a paper on Inequalities and the Covid-19 Crisis, which can be read on the website of the Royal Economic Society.

The link is formed because catastrophic pandemics can exert powerful economic effects long after the infection itself has died away or been eradicated. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death brought an end to the feudal system and marked the start of the open, trading societies in early capitalism. As this evolved into the Industrial Revolution, the terrible sufferings of the workers led to the creation of the modern welfare state needed to deal with them.

WHAT interests Deaton is that these countermeasures are never, in any final sense, the same for everybody, however benign the intentions.

In the real world, one class tends to do better out of them, at the expense of other groups. How is it likely to be in the case of coronavirus?

The news is bad for a country with a government, like Scotland’s, aiming to cure coronavirus while pursuing a long-term aim of greater equality. On the contrary, the pandemic is causing greater inequality. It kills more poor people than rich people. It kills more men than women. It kills more citizens of Glasgow than of Edinburgh. Its most lethal effects are among ethnic minorities. Mostly we see the differences only when we try to control the outbreak, or once the death toll falls. They are not usually obvious from the start, so cannot be planned for.

For Scotland as a whole we can identify even more far-reaching, and startling, trends. The labour market is being rapidly reshaped. The artistic and hospitality sectors do not appear to have much of a future because they need customers to gather together in spaces where they might infect one another. At the same time, a vast expansion of all kinds of e-commerce is to be expected just to avoid that risk.

Our politics will similarly be redirected to the management of risk. This will soon loom larger than more familiar official policies such as the redistribution of income and wealth. When citizens need to worry about personal survival, and re-organise their lives in order to be sure of that, they are less likely to bother with the rat race and outcompeting their rivals in the ownership of material goods. Save yourself, all will cry.

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We will likely then move to greater inequality. But this inequality will be dictated by a virus and its biological evolution rather than by any laws that ideologues pass.

It is not a pleasant prospect, then, but how does Deaton think we should respond to it? He started from a position that was, in economists’ terms, fairly left-wing, in favour of social welfare but also of free trade. The steady dismantling of barriers among the nations seemed to offer the perfect scenario for the optimal distribution of resources propounded by classical theory. The only problem was that the whole structure crashed in 2008, and the economics profession still has not found the way up and out.

Deaton was little impressed by the most militant, neo-classical critics of the old orthodoxy, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. It is not that Deaton has ever rejected the capitalist system as they represent it: there is no socialism in the professor from Princeton.

For him, capitalism is just the way the world works, and must always work, and it is not the theory that counts but the choices of individual people. Their choices make them poor, or could one day make them rich. And capitalism gives the widest range of choice.